A Walk in the Woods

We’ve given names to the paths we walk regularly, purely for the purpose of describing routes taken and planned, the locations of certain things and events. There’s nothing romantic or poetic about these names. They map the woods prosaically: the Brambly Path, the Pine Needle Path, the Beech Leaf Path, the Fox Poo Path, the Escaped Cow Path, the Amanita Path, the Badger Sett Path, the Muntjac Path. More whimsical is the Baba Yaga Path, so called because it tunnels through mostly dead trees and looks very much as if it might lead to a fence of skulls and bones and a weird hut that stands on huge chicken feet.

The Baba Yaga Path

At this time of year, everything changes very quickly and there’s always something new: an intact pheasant egg, oddly placed atop a tree stump; a muntjac doe with a fawn in tow; a blue mist of forget-me-nots edging a forest of nettles; an orange-tip butterfly;. the fresh living greenness all around.

New growth birch leaves

One of the things I love most about photography, or any sort of seeking, is that it slows you down, obliges you to take in what’s around you. The swathes of random green weeds (long grass, nettles… stuff!) that we usually pay no attention to as we stride past suddenly come into focus – silverweed as pale as moonlight, delicate wildflowers, a flake of bark that’s actually a subtly beautiful spider, a beetle with a carapace that shimmers like oil on water, tiny ferns, perfect little toadstools as bright as embers.

Sulphur tuft

And in this close-up world, there are miniature landscapes – alien forests of moss and lichen, tiny mountains, hills and valleys, scattered with a gigantic detritus of leaf, catkin, twig. My photographs of these aren’t particularly popular but I like them because something about the scale makes me marvel at them. Perhaps I should Photoshop in a few teeny hobbits on a perilous quest… But for now, you’ll just have to imagine them.