Bore Da as they say in Wales. Good morning

Some of us honour our roots, our predecessors and their construction of the Judeo-Christian culture in which we live. It expresses itself in many ways and yesterday I went on one of my favourite memory walks through a copse. This small strip of woodland, almost a mile long by ten trees wide is not far from here and is where my partner’s ancestors are buried. Her roots in this area go back to the Norman invaders and though she has ancestors buried in various churches across Sussex the little wood behind a church is where we scattered the ashes of her father, so it holds a special place in the hearts of both of us and where we honour our roots.

I drove myself there, alone because my partner is on a jaunt up to the big city.  I enjoyed the drive on a day which was surprisingly warm and sunny having started very frosty. I wanted to see the progress of autumn in the trees and fields away from the coast. I parked up next to the church wall and walked through the graveyard, pausing to bow my head at the graveside of my partner’s ancestors. Behind the graves is the gate to the overgrown pathway leading through into the heavily wooded copse, a place to commune with nature and ghosts of a past.

It’s a different world when you go into woodland. Alone with the only sound coming from the alarm call of a Wren or the noisy barracking by a woodpecker who resents your intrusion into his realm. Looking for change, colour and beauty in quiet contemplation of time passing. The trees are still heavily leafed as yet, although recent storms have knocked pieces down, but there are signs of their beginning to turn. Most of the leaf litter on the floor of the wood is the colour of autumn, although much of it is from the autumn of 2023, some new overlying, compressing, building into a rich compost as the bodies in the graveyard do. The trees themselves were unmoving in the days still warm air; no wind stirred their branches as they arched over the footpath like the roof of an early cathedral, a cathedral with dramatic lighting and the organic music of nature.

The sun was bright and low, streaking through the gaps in the foliage, lighting the trunks with dramatic pools of light and shade, throwing long shadows across the path. The path was surprisingly dry despite all the recent heavy rain we’ve had. At the far end I could see the path became a muddy track almost a stream that when truly wet weather held sway becoming the stream that ran down the side of the wood for a large part and which is crossed on a footbridge at its beginning. There was birdsong and movement amongst the leaves, but most sound was that of my own muffled footsteps as I ambled along, camera in hand.

I drank in the colour of pink berries, of oak apples and acorns, bright orange leaves backlit by the gold of sunlight amidst a myriad of greens. Bars and beams of light coming through the leaves sometimes shining through to turn a dark green leaf into a bright paler green. Greens shifting to and fro around the colour circle as tiny gusts moved them in and out of the sunlight, Greys and browns of the trunks of the trees lit sharply in sun plunging them into alternate darkness and light, a bright green mossy edge lit as if by a stage light.

I looked up into the sun and saw a silver bowl of sun on the top of a trunk that went straight up whilst crossing it boughs of green grew to make a crucifix. Maybe because I’m getting old I am becoming sensitive to the symbols of mortality, maybe it’s the Druid influence from my Welsh genetic inheritance that also comes through. We tend to forget we are a Christian nation, our laws and morality biblical at base, even if we are not churchgoers, which is why so many of the incomers to the country bringing their Muslim religion with them seem so alien to us, bending to different laws.

I had come to the copse for a look at the way the oaks were changing colour because they usually last in a progression into autumn that starts early in August with the chestnuts. Much of the copse is oak although much of course is beech. It is an English copse hundreds of years old. Looking out of the side of the wood across the fields, other oaks stand large and proud on their own in hedgerows where they would have been planted centuries ago to provide shelter for livestock from summer heat and winter cold. I clamber across to the small bank that lines the edge of the copse to take a photograph across the field and put my foot straight into a hidden rabbit hole or maybe as it was larger hole created by a badger. I was nearly face planted into a bunch of nettles which would rather have woken up myself from my romantic reverie.

At the time it didn’t hurt myself, so I climbed the shallow bank. took the photos and wandered back onto the track towards the end where at the light was reflected off the puddles that are remains of the stream. It was only later that afternoon when I was trying to process the photos and put something together to write this piece then I felt the pain from the twist I had imposed on my hip – damn, old age is not something to be welcomed.

I am bowled over, mentally as well as it seem physically, enjoying the drama of the light and dark. Not as intense as in a German forest, a gentler drama, but started thinking maybe it was time to go back to this in my paintings. I think the rust has run its path and maybe the greenery is a new pathway for me, the woodland working its magic restoring my creative mind. Musing about the next steps with my artwork in the quiet, I felt something almost magical move across me. I thought I heard gentle voices, almost singing, but although I looked around and stood waiting, there was no-one else. Maybe I heard just the musical notes of a woman and the deeper tones of a man, or maybe just tinnitus, or imagination, or magic. Whatever it was, it added to the richness of the experience, made my skin tingle.

I came here to honour ancestors to see the beauty of the copse once more to recharge my own emotional soul perhaps, but the voices and seeing the crucifix formed by the trees, made this far more of a druidic or religious experience then I expected it. The wood spoke to me. I love this world my partner introduced it to me too when we first moved down here. She had an uncle who was a curate at the church nearby, and her family endowed money on the church to help in its maintenance. With her relatives buried here she has much more reason to feel the emotional and religious pull of this place than I, but Sussex has it own magic.

I, whose childhood meandering through the countryside of England, Cyprus, the Yemen and so on was rootless, have formed a total emotional attachment to this part of Sussex. Partly it’s been my work looking at the decay of the sea defences which is taking me over and over again along the coast and up the Cuckmere looking at the results of the neglect by the Environment Agency and expressing it through my painting. Partly it is an emotional link to my own past playing alone in Surrey woodlands as a boy or walking a hilltop fort in the Wiltshire hills.  But Sussex has taken me or maybe I have taken Sussex into my heart. Maybe I was away with the fairies on this walk that’s why I heard their voices. But as a painter I believe art puts you in touch with profound parts of yourself.

This wood feeds my artists soul, and I am grateful both are still there.