It was 15 years since we’d seen each other, and Bryan made the chance happen on a stop over from Germany to Boston. We had 24 hours. I needed to find a place near Heathrow. Shunning places in towns, I found the Blackwood arms, which had a sizable carpark amid google earth green, and they’d let the campervan stay in exchange for an evening meal.
The address was Common Lane, Littleworth Common. A Ukranian grandmother (playing with her grandchild) told me about the Burnham Beaches – ‘Go down that footpath, you will come to it.’ So I did. I have a feeling I’d been once before, a long time ago, perhaps with Bob, but before I’d found a fascination with trees. Before I looked at them like I do now. Like Baobabs, they were. Twisted, like dancers, acrobats, elephants. Fused limbs, roots.
Owned by the Corporation of London, set up to give relaxing opportunity for those suffering the smogs in London to clear their lungs, it is today a SSSI of 370 hectars. Cut in the past for wood fuel for local use, the site’s pollarded trees were abandoned approximately 200 years ago, resulting in very heavy branches on fragile stems. Many of the estimated 3,000 original trees have been lost as they have fallen over or fallen apart so now only around 420 remain. The City of London is working to re-establish the ancient techniques and restoring the old, lapsed pollards, as well as finding out new methods to create new pollards to help bridge the gap with the veterans.
Mainly beech, but also oak pollarded. Their age, and the amount of deadwood in and around them, means that the woodland is rich in wildlife. We meandered around one of the old hill forts, now earth works, rich in heather, bracken, campion, and many other wild flowers and fungi. A mixture of ancient woodland, wood pasture, pollards, coppice, ponds and streams, grassland, mire and heathland.
We found the well known Druids Oak. The girth of the tree, measured at a height of 1.50 m, is 8.89 m
The close proximity of Pinwood, Shepperton Studios and the outstanding natural beauty of the Beeches have made it a desirable filming location. Filming is limited to 20 days in the year and all money goes towards the woods upkeep.
Kaliwood 