Climbing
While my daughter and the group set off with their leaders for their planned walk, their poles flashing confidently and regularly, I had two hours to wander by myself, with nothing to do but be in this lovely place, a breath of fresh air from the city below. Once upon a time, this whole place would have been out of bounds to the plebs. An enterprising Tudor merchant named John Smyth made the most of the land grab following the dissolution of the monasteries and purchased the estate in 1545. Plenty of murky money in that history, the first Smyth was said to have made half his money from illicit deals, and later his descendants in the 1700s used profits from other people’s misery to remodel their massive family home. The estate covers 850 acres and features the large mansion house (now in a state of extreme disrepair), one of the oldest deer parks in the country, plus immense historic oaks.
The last time I was here, earlier in the summer, I heard skylarks, on a patch of grassland left to grow long by the golf course. Other treasures benefitted from this wildlife friendly approach, delicate orchids nestling amongst the feathery grasses. The grass is cut now, yellow and crisped like everywhere else, the skylarks are gone but I spot a few darting blue and white flashes of swallows. I suddenly realise that I haven’t heard the screaming of swifts for weeks, more seasonal shifts. All around me are groups and families, the people of Bristol enjoying this landscape that was purchased for them by the local authority from the last remnants of the Smyth family in 1959, at a cost of £130,000. Back of an envelope calculations suggest this would be around £2.7m in today’s money. Hard to think of any local council making such an investment in the current climate, and in fact the crumbling mansion at the heart of the estate has recently been passed into the care of a new charitable trust: Bristol Historic Buildings Trust (BHBT). I wish them well, but indoors doesn't really do if for me, it’s the trees I’m really interested in.
At the bottom of the lawn facing the mansion I spot a Cedar, one branch swooping invitingly low, worn smooth with years of climbing. As I approach I see a family, two children, a mother, grandparents. The mother is chivvying the youngest child, a boy, who looks to be about six. “Come on” she urges “climb up, I’ll help”. She lifts him and his body is limp, he shows no enthusiasm, refusing to “just hold on there, put your foot here”. After some exertion she manages to wrestle him briefly onto the smooth branch, before he demands to be lifted down. Her daughter, a few years older and heading into preteen ennui, declines to repeat her brother’s experience. “I climbed that tree when I was young” protests the mother, and the grandmother joins in to back her up. The children appear unmoved. “It would have made a good photo” the mother complains as they walk off “the two of you up there in the tree”.
Raised on a rich diet of golden age children’s literature, tree climbing was presented to me as a natural part of childhood, and I enthusiastically experimented. I lived for the first ten years of my life in Walthamstow in East London, but was lucky enough to live within a short walk of the edge of Epping Forest, and weekend afternoons were often spent there. Then when we moved out of London to Hertfordshire, the ultimate joy, a huge garden home to mature fruit trees. I would climb the greengage tree with a cushion and wedge myself in the fork and sit and read for hours. Back at Ashton Court, as the family moved off I found myself with an irresistible urge to climb up onto the branch that the boy had rejected, to try and find my way back to that childhood self. One of the good things about aging is being less afraid of what people might think, and caring less about seeming ridiculous. One of the less appealing things is the way that your body starts to revolt against you, making hauling yourself up into the branches of a tree much more challenging than you ever remember it being. But with a little huffing and puffing I achieved my aim and sat on that branch, a leg dangling either side as if I was riding a horse, or sitting astride a bowsprit at the front of a sailing ship. I was reminded that climbing like everything else takes practice, and an early start as a toddler balancing along a fallen log really helps you on the way. It’s why I love what I do at Forest School, providing those opportunities.
However, being alone in my thoughts is not always a comfortable place to be these days, and after a while I needed to move on. I took the obligatory photo of the view from my perch and slithered inelegantly down out of the tree, skinning my elbow in the process. I headed for a circular walk through the woods, enjoying the rhythm of my boots on the ground, the dappled light through still green leaves. I tried (mostly successfully) to consciously take a pause from the things that worried me, thinking of the life all around me, the roots deep underground, the regular perpendiculars of tree trunks stretching to the blue sky. These are the good things.
This week I have been reading two book group choices. One is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which I am really enjoying as an audiobook, it is an epistolary novel with different actors for each of the characters. The other is Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk which I'm reading in paperback. More information about BHBT and the plans for community stewardship of Ashton Court Mansion is here ashtoncourtmansion.org
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