
Durleston wood is the setting for my novel “In Durleston Wood”. It’s where I grew up. I changed its name to protect it from visitor numbers, should the novel ever become a bestseller. Well, stranger things have happened. It didn’t, but Durleston, like many of our green spaces, is suffering anyway. I’ve written about this before.
In the book, there’s a beech tree, overlooking a bend in the river. It’s hundreds of years old. The protagonist sits under it, talks to imaginary people, and contemplates things. Like him, I’ve known that tree since childhood, and treasured the idea that it would be there forever. However, over the decade since I wrote the story I’ve had intimations of its mortality. A few years ago it lost a substantial proportion of its branches in winter storms. The more optimistic side of me hoped the rest of it would recover, other branches filling the void, plus I thought, it’s been there so long, it seemed unlikely it would fall down on my brief watch on earth. But fall, it has.
I’ve been away from Durleston throughout the pandemic. It’s an attractive bit of countryside, and social media did what my novel didn’t: it put Durleston on the map. Throughout the furlough periods, more and more people have been coming to what I once thought of as a secret domain, largely unknown outside the local area. The paths became clogged and churned to slime with processions of shuffling, noisome people, sometimes literally by the coach-load. So I’ve stayed away.
Now the pubs and shops are open, things have calmed down, midweek at least, and I returned today to find all that remained of the beech tree was a stump. Now, I can hardly blame this on the pandemic. It actually looked pretty rotten inside, like it’s been dying for a long time. It lies crashed to earth, scattered as habitat for bugs and fungi, all part of the natural cycle of the woodlands. Still, it was a shock, the loss of its sheltering canopy transforming the light in this corner of the woods into something eerie and unfamiliar. But more, I can’t help the feeling, that it should have fallen on my watch, is darkly auspicious of events in the wider world.
There have been other changes here in the year of my absence. The path along the river was bordered in places by lush, rolling grassland. It’s been used for livestock grazing – cattle and sheep – for as long as I can remember. But now the green is silver, the meadows covered in plastic, hundreds of acres of it. I’m not well up on farming practice and I don’t know what the crop is here, but the change is sudden, and it’s all the same – has the feel of a kind of all-eggs-in-one basket desperation to it, tearing up and rendering the picturesque landscape as something industrial and horrific, and then what do we do with all that plastic? Do we send it to Turkey, to be burned, along with all the rest? Dare I hope the stuff is in some way bio-degradable?

Then, other meadows that border Durleston are to be built upon. There is a long running battle with a national house-builder who is looking to put up two hundred houses on the greenbelt. This has been ongoing for a while, and though rejected by the planning department years ago, the council is losing the fight, ground down through one doggedly vexatious appeal after the other. The intent is clear, and so far as I’m concerned, the land is lost. I wonder why this bothers me, since I don’t actually live around here any more.
When a man we know grows old and dies, it’s a time for sadness, but we recognize it’s unnatural we should go on forever. We mourn, we pause in reflection, and in celebration of the man’s life, and we accept that he is gone. Why can we not treat our memories of places like Durelston in the same way?
I did not think I would be having to deal with this in my lifetime, the actual death of Durleston. It had seemed such an unchanging place when I was a boy. But now the beech tree has gone, the buffer zones of green meadow are covered in plastic sheeting, and the houses are coming down to the edge of the wood, which will transform it into little more than a dog’s toilet.
In town, if a coffee shop is changed into a charity shop, or vice versa, there is no personal sense of loss. Indeed, I couldn’t care less. Town is town; it is a literal representation of itself. But in a landscape the representations are fluid. A meadow at dusk is also a canvas on which to let play the imagination. The starry heads of the allium in the shady deep of the wood speak of something fey, until the mind trips over the vulgar beer-can, and then they do not speak at all.
I don’t live around here any more, but travel back when I can, because in many ways this place nurtured me. I like to pay homage to it, and have taken comfort down the decades from what, for so long, had been its unchanging nature. But I’m going to have to find a way of turning my back, and letting go, as I have similarly let go the lives of friends and family who have passed away. Of course, Durleston is still here. It still has a physical presence, a scrap of ancient woodland on a bend in the river, but in a deeper sense, it’s finished.
There is a story taking shape here, and it’s not the same as the one I wrote “In Durleston Wood”. And it’s not about nostalgia either, nor corporate greed, nor political corruption writ large. Such things are so obvious now they’re barely worth a mention. It’s about looking at the land and seeing more than what is physically there, and whether that’s important or not. And if we say it’s not then the world moves off in a particular direction, one that is uninteresting to me. But if we say it is, then that’s a thing worth exploring, indeed one of the few noble things left to us, but places like Durleston are vanishing fast in England. The towns are all merging into one another as houses are thrown up on greenbelt, and none but the rentier class can afford them. So it’s already looking like a lost cause.
I look at my broken tree-stump and I do indeed read it as auspicious, that it should have fallen on my watch. The future isn’t a road to the sunlit uplands, certainly not looking at it from the perspective of the north of England, and based on the direction of travel so far. But then we’ve known that since the eighties. Still, it’s looking like I may get another story out of it. Let’s call it: “Leaving Durleston”, or how about: “Letting go”? Or more simply: “A Lone Tree Falls”.
