On the hottest day England has known, I try to follow one of the springs to its source in the woods, thinking the shade and cool water will be soothing.
I’m wrong. The humidity under the canopy is almost unbearable, the saturated ground sucky, the vegetation impenetrable. We spend so much of our lives in spaces designed for humans, it’s instructive to be reminded now and then how easily nature can keep us out, turn us back. Despite our felling and our fences, our concrete and cultivation, despite parcels of data relayed to our pockets by satellite, we’re not really in charge. I squirm and scramble and sweat, am scratched, stung, mired. I lose my sunglasses, am lucky to find them again. The wood swallows me effortlessly.
My feet find trails made by non-human strides. Along a deer passage, through spires of hedge woundwort, willowherb and figwort, I reach for a handful of raspberries, but hesitate when I find the canes are interwoven with woody nightshades. In an area where ailing ash trees have been clear-felled, dogs mercury – an ancient woodland indicator – is wilting badly. Looking spring-fresh, though, are dense stands of horsetail, those living fossils with far more archaic ideas of green. What year is it again?
The deer trail leads to a badger track lined with more toxic bonbons – the luscious-looking berries of lords and ladies. I have to duck and weave and climb to negotiate the low branches that badgers barrel under with ease, but it’s still easier than forging my own path, so I go where it leads: to a disused sett, surrounded by half a tennis court of packed earth. It would make a good camp, and I wonder how many human settlements owe their location to the simple fact that badgers chose them first.
I reach a break of the slope from which I can look down on my house – it’s only 100 metres away, but looks small and distant, like a cottage in a fairytale or a horror story, with wildwood pressing in on every side. And despite the heat, I feel a chill premonition of how easily we will be forgotten by this generous, implacable wild, as the walls crumble, engineered angles soften to curves and green comes again where for a short while there was grey.
• Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
