On Boxing Day, deep in the tangled woods above Grindleford, the metal button fastening my trousers pinged off. Sifting the leaf litter, I stowed the button in my jacket pocket, where it promptly escaped again, through a hole I’d forgotten was there. The loss nagged me, so in the new year back I went. I know these woods well and was sure to recognise the distinctive tree I’d been standing under when nature took its course.
Yet this was not the same place of 10 days earlier. It was much colder, the sky pregnant with snow, leaf litter glittering with frost. The tip of my walking stick shattered the icy skin of a hollow in the earth, its fragments rattling into the void beneath. These new woods seemed full of lost or fractured things. Every fourth tree seemed broken in some way, or else fallen. Long ago, this hillside was pasture, whose failing walls still thread the forest. A stone fingerpost offered guidance for long-dead generations who walked this path for business, not pleasure. Now it was surrounded by a knot of red deer that ducked away downhill, a youngster stopping briefly to gaze at me, lowering its neck to peer through some branches as its exhalations steamed in the frigid air.
I spotted my button tree. Or at least, I thought so. When I got there, it somehow wasn’t right. The ground behind it wasn’t open, as I remembered, but filled with a thick birch, lying on its side that tapered and curved upwards towards its crown. The trunk was studded along its length with dozens of nuggetty fungi that emerged from the bark like nightmarish toenails. These were hoof or tinder fungi, named for their useful ability to catch fire easily. Fragments of this fungus were found on Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old body discovered in a glacier high in the Alps. I traced my finger along one, something new in the museum of lost and found.
Ed Douglas
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
