Epitaph for the Ash: In Search of Recovery and Renewal

It is the third week in May 2013 when I drive up the steep track from the Ribblesdale road to the Ingleborough National Nature Reserve with my friend Graham Mort, the poet. I doubt I would have found it if he hadn’t known where to go. I knock on the door of the warden’s barn, an enormous stone structure in a sea of meadow grasses. It is a dry and breezy day, good weather for looking round the wood, Colin Newlands tells me. He is the senior manager at Ingleborough National Nature Reserve so he knows a thing or two about Colt Park. The wood and the adjacent meadows and pastures, including Park Fell, are owned by Natural England. On wet days it is too dangerous to go into the woods because it is too slippery, Colin says. I walk through the meadows, which are dotted with the bright yellow heads of field buttercup and celandine, in sharp contrast to the grey trees. I follow the line of the fence until it stops at a wall where some rough steps, overarched with ashes, lead us down between two arms of the wood.

At the end of the path a flock of sheep scatters downhill. A bracelet of limestone embraces the terrace of wood, a cliff that in places reaches a height of four metres. In the rest of Yorkshire the ash has been in leaf for at least a week but, here, no leaves are in sight: the only green is on the occasional rowan sprouting from the rocks. One grows at a right angle out of the shallow rock face, its trunk as thick as a human thigh.

There is no entrance to the wood, as such, but there are a few places where you can gain a foothold and lever yourself up to the trees. Gaining access to it is not easy for people or animals, because when the Nature Conservancy, a predecessor of Natural England, took it over in 1962, it fenced the wood to preserve it as a sanctuary for rare flora and fauna. Colt Park Wood is shielded from sheep by the natural cliff face on the eastern boundary and dry-stone walls to the west where it joins the meadows and pastures.

I hoist myself up the rocks and crouch at the top to take in my surroundings. Lime-coloured lichen glows on every surface, giving the undergrowth an unnatural brightness. I stroke its lustrous coat, which has the texture of seaweed. It has spread its thick fronds over tree roots and rocks alike, muffling sound and disguising grikes, or fissures, which can be as much as three metres deep. Time seems suspended. Lambs bleat, admonished by the deeper voices of their parent ewes, but they seem far away.

The older trees are quite well spaced so plenty of light filters through the gaps and the rich flora can flourish. There are clusters of yellow primroses on the woodland floor, and galaxies of star-like white wood anemones. New ferns are curled tight, ready to open; the relatively rare limestone Polypody Fern grows here, its fine fronds waving above the rocks. When I lie on my belly and look down a grike, it is dark and fusty: the air of a tomb. There is humidity in the undergrowth: moisture retained in the earth beneath the stone.

Sheltered by the soft hump of Park Fell, the ashwood is a marvel of survival: its many common ashes are stunted like bonsai. Elsewhere, the common ash grows fast but on this open escarpment it does battle against the elements every day. Ashes often thrive on alkaline soil but, when measured, the trees show slow growth in girth and height in comparison with most ash trees. Average wind speed at ten metres from the ground is approximately 11 m.p.h. here, and a gale-force wind blows through on around ten days of the year. Consequently, the trees have worked hard to stay upright and grow. Their roots are sunk into the gaps between the rocks, hidden from view until you draw close enough to peer into the underground cavern beneath the limestone that supports the wood. Severe environmental conditions may have a detrimental effect on the trees’ survival: the Colt Park tree survey, completed in 1989, shows that over thirty years, thirty trees had died. Such change within any woodland is normal, where storms, localized cankers and other bacteria can cause death in the occasional tree, but the arrival of Ash Dieback will devastate this ancient woodland.

The odd hazel or alder adds variety. It is known that the ash trees in Colt Park have a shorter life than common ash elsewhere in the UK, probably due to the adverse conditions of their habitat. Also, the life span of ashes in other areas is often extended by coppicing and pollarding. Like coppicing, pollarding is a pruning technique, but it is carried out higher up the tree, while coppicing occurs close to the ground.

Some of the trees are bent away from the wind, branches outstretched, as if to balance themselves. I step from stone to stone until, suddenly, my left leg slips down a grike. If I had twisted at the same time, I would almost certainly have broken it. This is no place for children or dogs, and you shouldn’t venture here without telling someone: they can send out a search party if you don’t return. Fortunately, I’m with my friend. Pausing to recover, I find myself at eye level with an Early Purple Orchid; at first glance I might take it for a bluebell but it is paler pink and each flower has delicate flaps of petals and a pointed spur. Its long leaves are covered with characteristic dark blotches. It is a rare flower that clearly thrives under the light canopy of ash.

The oldest trees are twisted, their long boughs, like winding tentacles, hovering protectively over the skinny saplings. Variegated mosses of mustard and lime hug the paving, softening the grikes and masking the deep clefts and sharp edges. From the corner of my eye, I fancy I see a holy man in a flowing robe bending to pick herbs. He bears a striking resemblance to Odin, with a long beard and unkempt hair. Odin, or Woden as the Anglo-Saxons knew him, had a habit of appearing among trees. In his book Odin: The Origins, History and Evolution of the Norse God, Jesse Harasta claims: ‘He was a wanderer who appeared when least expected, bringing triumph or doom.’

The deep clefts between the rocks would be almost as effective as quicksand in killing unsuspecting walkers. Colin Newlands tells me that once at Scar Close, a nearby wood, he saw a red head lying at an odd angle on the woodland floor. For a moment he thought it was human but as he drew closer he discovered that a roe deer had fallen between the rocks and died.

Nearby I notice a makeshift wall of large limestone slabs. It would have been built centuries ago to keep livestock out of danger. Some slabs have fallen away and the rest have slipped into a zigzag pattern, each layer at an angle to the one below, so that they form a line of marching stone gnomes. The militaristic stance of the stone soldiers reminds me of the many armies that must have passed through or near to the wood: the Viking army, which overwintered near here during the late tenth century, the Scots raiders, during the Scottish Wars of Independence from 1286 to 1328, and Henry VIII’s army, sent to destroy Furness Abbey during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1537.

Colt Park Wood would have made the perfect trap for disabling the warring Scots who came to plunder Yorkshire villages and farmsteads. There are tales of Dalesmen building rows of cairns to ward off the invaders, but the ashwood would have provided the invaders with shelter. Perhaps some wouldn’t have come out alive, though, thereby buying time for villagers to pack up and flee.

In 1950 the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food had classed Colt Park as an area of good grazing for a variety of livestock, so the animals were free to roam, and until 1962 the southern end of the wood was a working part of the Colt Park Estate. Sheep have many reasons to be grateful to the ash, were they capable of gratitude. They huddle under the limestone bracelet when the wind is wuthering, because they know the top end of the field is warmer near the trees. The trees provided shelter from rain, ice and snow, protecting them from blizzards and extremes of temperature; in summer they offered relief from the sun’s heat. The middle of the wood was finally closed to sheep in 1964, to preserve delicate and rare flora. The margins were mown for hay, which might explain why the mosses give way here to tough grasses. Generations of sheep from the same flock are shown their own grazing ground by their mothers and always return to the same spots. The grikes are not as frequent or as wide here, and there are fewer trees, probably because the sheep chewed them to the level of the pavement.

A large slab sits upright on the edge of the wood. It has an oval top in the shape of a rough-hewn headstone and to me it is a memorial to all the human and animal lives that may have been lost in the treacherous stone traps. I sit on a rock nearby to contemplate what might be found if the ash trees of Colt Park die. The fetid space beneath the suspended pavements contains thousands of years of forgotten history: an ancient natural graveyard, perhaps, containing the bones of unsuspecting Scots clansmen who fell to their deaths all those years ago, and of the sheep, cattle, deer, pigs and rabbits, which foraged here. There may even be evidence of occupation by the aurochs, an ancestor of cattle, extinct since the seventeenth century.

In the huge barn where the wardens work, they have a small study centre with tables and chairs for school groups and carefully stored exhibits in plastic containers. Here, Colin unpacks the femur bones of an aurochs, which were found in one of the area’s many pot holes. On the lid of the box a diagram illustrates the size of an aurochs next to a human male: it stood six feet tall, like the man, while today’s cow reaches the man’s shoulder. Scoured with chemicals and light to hold, it is hard to imagine this bone supporting such a large beast. It would have taken courage to approach an animal of that size, yet the early Neolithic settlers domesticated some of them. They also hunted them, probably with spears made of ash, and may have built hurdles from ash to fence in those they kept for work. They would have harnessed the aurochs, like oxen, to cultivate the ground, using a simple plough made of ash. In 2011 scientists in Denmark collected DNA from samples such as this femur bone, then mixed it with some genes the aurochs shared with modern cattle, such as the Highland breed, attempting to resurrect the ancient beast.

On a damp day, I return to Colt Park with my family. We slip and slide down the wet stones on the green path to the bottom field. The dog and I skirt the limestone cliff while the rest of the family scramble up into the woods with their cameras, ignoring my warnings. The trees are taller, their fine fronded leaves resplendent in green. Last time I saw them the trees were grey and bare. Sheep are grazing, and one fat lamb appears to be chewing a twig, probably an ash windfall. The ash may have kept the sheep round here healthy for hundreds of years because the bark contains quinine.

I climb part way up the cliff and lean into the woods as far as I can: the delicate fragrance of white meadowsweet drifts up to me. Once sprinkled on stone or earth floors to scent houses, it was also a sweet flavouring in mead or wine. I am startled by movement in the undergrowth: something disturbs the grass and ripples a bush of the sweet wild raspberries that gleam like jewels. There are many clusters of the plants, heavy with fruit, ripe for the table.

We are climbing up a slope stretching down to the Ingleton road, which cuts through the valley. Beyond the road many gentle humps rise like sand dunes. They are glacial landforms called drumlins. Their names reveal much about local concerns: Hunter Hill, Goat Close Hill, Swinesett Hill and, higher up, Deer Bank. The original forest would have covered this field and the road, but was cleared before the 1600s, when Furness Abbey used the area for grazing and parkland. That was how it came by its present name: Colt Park. Colt Park Lodge was a stud farm belonging to Furness Abbey, which managed its land by dividing it into lodges or farmsteads. A high ground limestone pasture, such as this, contains more calcium in the soil than low-lying fields and would have made the perfect grazing area for young horses. It would also help to prevent them developing laminitis, an unpleasant disease that swells their hooves and leaves them lame.

We retrace our steps across the meadow, passing the barn and the farmhouse. Sheep graze on rough grass above Ribblehead Viaduct and a curlew calls from Park Fell above us. We are walking downhill, past the northern end of the wood, which I am sure would once have extended much further towards Gauber High Pasture, where we are heading. Above the quarry, a few piles of rubble are hidden among the grassy hillocks and sheep droppings. I climb up and walk around them, trying to make out the shape of the former structure.

As I stand facing Park Fell, the remains of the building are barely discernible, just tufts of grass and stones poking out of the uneven slope of the fell. When initial excavations of the site took place in the last century, it was thought that the structure resembled a Norse farmstead, and three Viking coins from the ninth century seemed to confirm this. The reason there are hardly any ruins left to study is not that archaeologists have taken them away: extraction of stone for sale became a lucrative business from the 1870s, reaching a peak in the 1930s, when a number of ‘rockery merchants’ sprang up in the area.

Whoever built here on Gauber High Pasture would have been well aware of the protection the trees would afford their families, livestock and crops in this unforgiving landscape. The trees create and maintain warmth, a serious consideration on a windswept hillside. It is likely that the wood stretched across the pasture, and that some of the trees were cut back for crops to be planted. The ashwood would have protected homes from heavy rain and strong wind and helped to keep the occupants warm, providing wood for fuel.

The Coucher Book of Furness Abbey, published in 1916, includes a reference to a hermitage near a wood on the land owned by William de Mowbray, who appears to have ceded certain land rights to Lord Adam de Staveley: ‘and the hermitage will remain waste on condition that there will be none there except with the permission of William de Mowbrai save for the woods, meadow and pasture for Adam and his heirs’. Arthur Batty and Noel Crack, members of the Ingleborough Archaeological Group, developed a theory that the ruins of the building might be the hermitage, while the woods de Mowbray’s document refers to are Colt Park ashwood and the pasture is Gauber. They reached this conclusion after spending many years searching the landscape and the literature relating to the area’s religious houses; they located this spot on Gauber High Pasture following directions from The Coucher Book.

In 1974 when Alan King unearthed certain artefacts from the ruins of the larger section of the dwelling, he found a complete rotary quern for grinding cereals, a lath-turned spindle whorl for turning wool into yarn and a small bell. Batty and Crack concluded that these items, along with a sword beater of iron with a wooden handle, indicate that the inhabitants were highly skilled and self-sufficient. The presence of the ashwood supports their theory: it would have supplied wood for tool handles, herbs, some fruit and other flavourings for food.

It is possible to imagine a life for the hermits or monks, who would have walked daily up to the ashwood to forage, wearing their homespun robes. They would probably have had a sturdy loom made from ash. They would have grown their own crops, ground their grain with the quern and baked it into bread. These utilitarian objects have survived many hundreds of years to tell us about their simple daily lives. In Ireland, Wales, northern England and Scotland, there were many such small monastic outposts on hillsides, beside lakes and rivers in uplands and isolated valleys in the early centuries of Christianity. The monks sought a life of solitude and prayer and were usually highly skilled in crafts, with a good knowledge of agriculture and herbs. Colt Park Wood would have provided for all their needs.