Philobiblon

I’ve been reading The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane, and learning a lot.

Some words:

Holloway (from the Anglo-Saxon hola-wed, a sunken road. Always at least 300 years old, worn down by the traffic of centuries, some dating back to the early Iron Age. Many were drove roads – paths to market, some pilgrimage paths. Mostly found in the soft stone counties of southern England, the chalks of Kent, Wiltshire and East Anglia, the yellow sandstone of Dorset and Somerset, the greensand of Surrey and the malmstone of Hampshire and Sussex. Some 20 feet deep.

Turlough – a temporary lake that forms in limestone country after heavy rain, the water rising from beneath the rock. Also in limestone country flat pavements – e.g. on the Yorkshire moors, divided into clints, the glacially polished horizontals, and grykes, the fissures worn by water that divide the clints.

About animals…
Intelligent squirrels – “His phone line had gone crackly, then dead.. the engineers had found that squirrels had been nibbling the phone line. Apparently, Roger explained, this was becoming quite a common occurrence. Squirrels are highly intelligent, agile enough to tightrope-walk along telephone wires, and poor conductors of electricity. Somehow they have realised that by biting through to the bare wires and short-circuiting the 50 volts that run through them into their own bodies, they can heat themselves up. In this way, Roger said, each squirrel becomes a sort of low-voltage electric blanket – and will sit up on the wires with a stoned smile for hours.” Any telephone engineers out there that can confirm that?

About plants
“The devastation of the elm, when it came, seemed to some a prophecy fulfilled. For the elm had long been associated with death… It was ascribed maliciousness; if you loitered beneath it, branches would drop on you from the canopy. The tree’s habit of throwing out one strong side branch also made it a popular gallows tree. Elmwood was for a long time the staple wood of the coffin-maker.”

“Conifers were recklessly planted over the peatbogs of Sutherland and Caithness during the 1980s, by landowners keen to profit quickly from the tax-breaks that the Conservative government had given such forestry projects. The peatbogs, known as the Flows, cover hundreds of square miles of the far borth of Scotland. They sit on a bedrock of old red sandstone, a mire atop a desert. Like other peatlands, they are astonishing landscapes; their protection status is now equivalent to that accorded the Serengeti… Many of Britain and Ireland’s peatlands have vanished. The vast Bog of Allen, thousands of years in the making, was turfed into power stations and burnt almost out of existence within two decades. The Lancashire Mosses were drained off and farmed.” The Flows has now been expensively bought back the trees felled.

About history…
“On 18 April, 1430, John Reve, a glover from the village of Beccles in Suffolk, was summoned to the bishop’s palace in Norwich to account for his heretical belief in the rightness of burial in wild places. …’I have held, believed and affirmed.’ he declared courageously to the tribunal, ‘that it is great merit, reward and profit to all Christ’s people to be buried in middens, measonws, or in the wild fields as it is to be buried in churches or churchyards.’ (Frustratingly we’re not told what happened to Reve – anyone know?)

And a quote…
WH Auden wrote in 1953 – “A culture is no better than its woods.”