There’s a carpenter’s-workshop fragrance of freshly splintered timber in the air. Last night the first high winds of autumn brought down an ash tree, now lying across the footpath. The Weardale Way is narrow here, between woodland and river, so we are forced to skirt around the obstacle by climbing the steep escarpment. The ground underfoot is soft, cushioned by decades of ankle-deep leaf mould releasing its rich aroma of fungal decay.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, goes the old saying, never more apt than when applied to fallen timber that’s left to rot, to be colonised by host of opportunist organisms. The newly stricken ash is about to begin its afterlife, in a cycle of decay as a succession of fungi moves in, secreting enzymes, softening, digesting. An old section of fallen trunk that carried a crop of stump puffballs last year is now covered with serried ranks of sheath woodtuft, taking their turn to feed on the fallen. Some casualties from previous gales are so old and rotten that they are merely cylindrical, moss-carpeted hummocks that crumble to the touch.
The narrow band of living sapwood between bark and heartwood quickly succumbs to fungi, leaving a gap that becomes home to a host of woodland invertebrates. When I lift a section of loosened bark on an ash that toppled a decade ago, dozens of woodlice scurry away as daylight floods into their home. A rolled-up pill millipede, clad like a medieval knight in overlapping plates of black armour, uncoils slowly and glides away on a magic carpet of 18 pairs of legs.
Last to leave is a tiny spindle-shaped door snail, a denizen of ancient woodland that probably spent last night grazing algae from tree trunks before seeking sanctuary here at dawn. A pair of wary eyes on long antennae appear from beneath its finely grooved spiral shell, then it extends a muscular foot that flows over the rough bark at a leisurely pace. Life lived in the slow lane, in harmony with a woodland cycle of growth and decay. A decade hence, descendants of all of them may find shelter under the fungus-loosened bark of today’s fallen ash.
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