I knew there would be a
great view, the map told me that. And I didn’t need to study the woodland’s
situation or the surrounding contours - the name ‘Beacon Hill’ and the ‘trig
point’ symbol were enough.
Leaving Newton, Martin
thought he knew the way: ‘Used to cycle out this way as a boy, mate!’ I kept
the map open all the same. Then he was off, onto the supposed mystical history
of Denbury.
But I, as a relic of another
age (I have no car or mobile phone - and only started using a computer eighteen
months ago, after a gap of twenty years) am dependent on others when I’m up
against the limits of public transport.
Having made it to the
Beacon car park (sx801 678) we followed paths created by tractor tracks, and my
mind slipped back twenty-five years to a time when, in some trepidation, I used
to take ancient vineyard tractors along scary slopes in the Gironde, thinking
if I tip this, its primitive role bar will be of no use at all! And then a
summit becomes visible - with a picnic table silhouetted on the horizon.
The view looks south and
west - from Totnes and the Dart valley below, to a horizon dominated by the
Moor. The occasional sound of a steam whistle from the South Devon Railway
adding to the feeling that it is quite possible to reclaim value from the past;
as a child I was fascinated by railways, as a teenage I walked most of
Dartmoor, and as a young adult lived and worked on the land for a while.
The table provided a
convenient place to lay-out the map and orientate myself to what I already knew
to be true - from the web site, Google Earth and of course Verity herself.
We met in early 2007, when
she witnessed me telling something of ‘my story‘ from the past twenty years, to
a group of mental health workers - me trying to explain the nature of mental
disorder from the inside, and how it should and should not be treated. Later,
during a series of meetings, in which Verity needed all her charm to help a
group of us put together a booklet on how patients from across the whole of
health and social care could become more involved in their own care, she
mentioned how her family owned a woodland which might just become the location
for a ‘social enterprise’ - somewhere of practical use to people with all kinds
of disability.
And now, because just
Martin and I were there, and we’d been quite enough for long enough, my ears
began to hear real sounds, and I thought again of a book I’d recently reread,
first encountered when it was read aloud to us at school. A ‘green’ fable,
before there was a Green movement. A story of a man who visits a place many
times over fifty years, and witnesses another’s success in transforming a
landscape.
‘But now all was changed, even the air. Instead of
the rough and arid gusts that I had met with before, there was a soft and
scented breeze. A sound like water drifted down from the heights: it was the
wind in the forests.’ From Jean Giono’s, The Man Who Planted Trees.
(Photos from Flickr: The Broadhempston Community Woodland)
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