15 October 2009 – Back in the Woods

It was almost 7 years ago that we loaded up our small car and trailer and headed off in the winter mists to Novi Sad on the Danube. Living in Serbia has been an unintentionally long adventure but this Summer we finally came home to where we belong. But where do any of us belong? Western cities are a babble of tongues. Some of them are tourists but most are economic migrants of one sort or another. We have the privilege of being able to return, but part of us has been left behind. We have a house in a Hungarian village in Vojvodina where we shall return as often as we can, and our friends there feel like an extended family whom we miss. This blog began a few years ago in Serbia and Vojvodina, it will continue from its new home in Britain, but whenever possible it will return to our village on the stubble plains of Vojvodina with occasional excursions to the Dinaric mountains of Serbia and the Balkans.

Alas, the downside is that I can no longer live the life of energetic early retirement doing whatever my hand finds to do, dreaming up “escapades” to Serbia's wilder corners, plumbing the subterranean chambers of cross-cultural living, coping with alienation, rejoicing as guests in a country we have grown to love. In short, the bad news is that I have a job and must turn up to work every morning and be shackled to a laptop for at least 8 hours, or sent up a mountain to worry about trees. Can that really be work? Well, yes! If you are easy to please then being a Chartered Forester might be a sufficiently interesting job to keep one from complaining. So the upside is that I am getting to know a new corner of Britain and enjoying getting mud on my boots as I climb up through dark murmuring spruce plantations on Welsh mountains or stalk through the oaks in a Herefordshire wood. But the reality of “applied ecology”, which in theory is very close to my heart, is that one is sunk in a morass of paper, lost in a virtual jungle. You really have to fight to see the wood for the paper.

We have only been occasional visitors to Wales in the past, but now we live in the Marches in the tiny town of Kington where the Old Red Sandstone of fertile oak filled Herefordshire meets the golden bracken flanked hills of the harsh Silurian rock of Radnorshire. It really is the border between 2 different countries, although the Welsh flow naturally over into the milder green wooded hills of the Marches and English “settlers” seeking cheap land and more sustainable life styles have planted themselves in the valleys of central Wales.

We shall put down our roots at last, God willing, in the wooded and orcharded red green landscape of Herefordshire, but I work more over the border in the steeper uplands of Wales. There nature wages an endless war on farmer and forester. Just look at the landscape. Down in the valleys there is “in-bye” land enclosed by fences and hedges with grazed oak woodland all dedicated to the raising of sheep and beef cattle. On the steeper or wetter slopes where improved pasture gives way to moorland grass, heather, bogs and thin woodland of birch and Rowan the sheep graze in the Summer. Even higher up, at last, the land was once cheap enough for the farmer to relinquish his subsidized grip and for foresters to establish plantations of Sitka spruce. If your roof is made of timber, don't complain! Timber, and that means spruce, is the only sustainable home grown material for building a roof over your head. The land speaks to us; the woods and hills sing a primordial song. The forester and farmer no less than the environmental campaigner must listen to it.