An astonishing biography of a wood – combining natural history and the ancient history of the countryside to tell the organic history of the most common British landscape.This is the story of a small piece of the Chiltern Hills – four acres of delightful beech-and-bluebell woodland, buried deeply in the larger plot of Ancient Woodland – Lambridge Woods, near Henley on Thames.From the iron age, to the exploitation of woodland for beech furniture and charcoal, from sawpits used by the `bodgers’ that once processed the green wood, to the current uses of the wood as timber, and furniture to house the treasures recovered from woodland, Richard Fortey shows a landscape forever in transition, for all that we think it permanent. A lateral-thinking natural history, this meditation on the influence of geology on British history, flora, architecture and industry is nature writing refracting back into poetry: an unearthing of the mysteries held in the everyday.
