The Memory of Trees

Can a place be contaminated by evil? Can a particular location be corrupted by the terrible things done there years ago? That’s a theme I have grappled with often in my fiction, probably because I believe the answer is yes.
I’ve been to locations haunted by their own past. Last year I spent six months living close enough to Stonehenge to have a good long look at the site. Just this last weekend I toured Arundel Castle. The oldest part of the castle was built 900 years ago and is as forbidding a rampart against attack now as it was when constructed. The stone circle on Salisbury Plain is so ancient you walk around it awed that anything could endure for that long. These are not evil places, though. They just seem alive, somehow, with events lost in time and particular to them.
So back to that original question and the take on it that has inspired the novel I’m working on now.
Imagine a vast, dense forest cleared long ago and so transformed over the centuries into a benign and featureless wilderness. It’s just grassland now, stretching to cliffs at the edge of the sea. It wouldn’t scare a rabbit or hurt a fly.
What would happen if someone deliberately restored it to how it was in the time of its own malevolent, woodland myths? Would the mischief return? I think it just might. After all, they weren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing, were they? Forests can be peculiar places. And if the worst happens and the mischief does return, it might have some catching up to do…
I had the idea for this one eleven years ago, which is a good five years before I wrote my debut paranormal thriller. It’s waited patiently in the queue for its turn. No complaints, foot-stamping or tantrums. Now, finally, its moment has come.