Re yesterday's post, I am always amazed at how places are changed beyond recognition either by people, or nature taking over where people left off.
It occurred to me last night that those vast, open fields where the Roman villa used to be were almost certainly part of an even vaster area of mature woodland. The nearby town of Melksham was a forest where the dastardly King John would hunt before the signing of the Magna Carta, and now it has a Lidl, an an Aldi, a Waitrose and an ASDA to name but four, but hardly any trees.
Even nearer, there are huge, open stone quarries from which Bath was built 280 years ago, and since they were abandoned in the 1940s, trees have grown amongst the cracks which are now 100 years old.
A few years ago I went mushrooming on the Longleat/Stourhead estate and found a very productive hill which was approached by entering the woods from the long sward of grass leading up to Alfred's Tower. I went back a couple of years later and could not find it, even though I knew where it was - or where it was when I last looked.
Hidden amongst the undergrowth in our compact but adorable city apartment, there is a large slice of tree which was part of a forest on the Dorset coast 180 million years ago. I did once have a whole lower section of another tree - including the root bowl - from the same forest, but that now lives at the villa of Jacob Rothschild on the Greek island of Corfu.
They sound like fancy holiday digs.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure they are.
Delete'The whole lower section of another tree.' Okay. That sounds enormous. How? Why?
ReplyDeleteAbout a ton. I bought it and sold it.
DeleteIt's really interesting always how the past touches the places where we live, I live near the valley where David and Goliath fought and tourists always come here and collect some stone as if it was the stone with which David struck Goliath. (I haven't seen tourists here in a long time of course).
ReplyDeleteWhere you live, things dropped on the ground stay on the surface. Where I live, they sink into the earth. Someone must have picked up David's stone years ago! I wonder where it is now.
DeleteThe cheese plant will soon be as old as the lump of wood .
ReplyDeleteIt's over 50 already.
DeleteWe look the same
DeleteThe cheese plants a baby compared with the age of the tree. We have some sections of it lying around also, pity it is not as colourfull as many of the others we have.
ReplyDeleteThe Arizona stuff is very colourful. The British stuff is grey.
DeleteWe found a few pieces of coloured wood near Lyme Regis, but not as dense as the Arizona wood, vuts more easily but more difficult to get a good finish,
DeleteI share your amazement at how we 'overwrite'the landscape. I have often stood or parked high on the hill we live on, look across the valley and wondered what it was like when the patchwork of fields below me were a forest, which it almost certainly was at one time.
ReplyDeleteObliterate in some cases.
DeleteIs this fossilised wood? Or did I misunderstand you? So the Rothschilds are now only 2 degrees of separation away from your readers!
ReplyDeleteYes, a slice of fossilised tree trunk. I don't think Lord Rothschild would be too keen on that idea.
DeleteThe evolution of a region always tells an interesting story. That fossilised tree trunk is beautiful. Why not frame it, enclose it in glass and give it a place of glory.
ReplyDelete