Visit Kerry’s Twitter information-page on the campaign against the abomination of HS2 at: @GradyKerry to get a lot more about her campaign against the tree-killing swine. Here’s the memoir:
Where the Robin Sings
Kerry O’Grady
My father encouraged my fascination with the natural world, trees in particular. One midwinter afternoon we put five acorns into pots and the following spring we proudly planted what we hoped would one day become an oak grove. He told me that the oak was the sacred tree of the druids and that a fairy’s favourite home was a grove of oaks.
I never forgot the image and though I should know better I still like to imagine that there are fairies hiding in the trees. Dad is long dead now but he’s there by my side whenever I see an oak. He told me, in a very serious voice, that the fairies would curse a person who destroyed their home. Of course, I believed him because as a small child I believed everything he said to me.
My dad hails from County Clare which is an oddly treeless place, partly thanks to the likes of Queen Elizabeth 1st who denuded Ireland of its great oaks for building ships to fight the Armada - but that’s another story. I’ve ended up living in the heart of England where the landscape is blessed by the presence of oak trees. Most fields and roadside hedges are graced with them. I find deep joy looking up through the canopy to spot woodpecker and jay by day, or hear owl and bat by night. An ancient oak can support four hundred species of life if you include the lichens and ferns. Every day a new surprise. These trees really are nature’s great events and I know my father would have understood the sorrow I now feel.
Everybody around here had heard about HS2, the new highspeed rail link between London and Birmingham but it was only recently we realised that the thing will be wider than a motorway and will cut through much of our ancient woodland, where land is cheap and wildlife apparently worthless. The HS2 workers are repeatedly taking trees and hedgerows that don’t feature on their plans. They are stealing our oaks and profitting from the wood.
One by one the hedges are cleared and then the oaks are taken. The landscape is filled with diggers and choppers and shredders and chippers. Outrage follows outrage as another copse, another meadow, another ancient tree, is torn up and efficiently butchered into piles of woodchip and huge stacks of valuable timber. The army of contractors is so vast it is hard to tell where they will spring up next.
The HS2 foundations have ripped the heart and lungs from the middle of England. I am part of a growing resistance that is highlighting this authorised destruction. The problem is that although people up and down the proposed rail-line are incensed, the project is a hundred miles long and it’s impossible to be everywhere at once.
One morning in early May I was driving out to a job on a farm when I noticed a buzzard sitting on a telegraph pole. In the weeks leading up to that day I had seen its nest in a young oak there. I say young - it was probably around eighty, part of a grove of oaks, many older and the eldest, a four-hundred-year old beauty, was mother of them all.
Behind the telegraph pole was a chipper and the branches of the young tree were being fed through it. I shouted at them to stop and a man in orange ran over and threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave. ‘Call them,’ I said. ‘There’s a crime being committed.’
‘I need to move you for your own safety,’ he replied.
‘It’s the nesting season,’ I said. ‘What about the safety of the birds, the bats, the trees and our children and the air they breathe.’
‘You people,’ he said. ‘Why do you get so upset over trees?’
I asked him how he will feel as the last great tree crashes to the ground.
He shrugged. ‘It’s a job,’ He said. ‘I need money for my children.’
‘But that copse is not on the HS2 map.’
‘Just doing what we’re told,’ he said.
The landowner was furious. The copse was a favourite part of her small farm. ‘I haven’t even been paid for the land’ she told me. ‘It was outside their remit and it’s not as if they can put the trees back.’
The following week the mother oak was gone. All that was left was a stump with three traffic cones marking its ample girth. I lay on the stump, as in a grave, and on that perfect late spring day skylarks sang above my head as I mourned the great oak’s passing.
The bats were gone, clutches of songbird chicks, the insects, the spiders and their daily dramas, all gone. A nuthatch nest-hole with attending parents I had so happily spotted the week before. How could these vibrant things be gone? Where are they now? I looked at the men just doing their jobs and wondered which one had glanced over and said; ‘We’ve to take that out while we’re here.’
My father loved his country and its wild-lands. He particularly loved the ancient peat bog that covered his corner of West Clare. He delighted in pointing out the beauty of the magic place where frogs croaked, pipits sang and thrumming snipe erupted from the mosses. I remember dragonflies darting over the tufty white heads of bog cotton the day he showed me strange carnivorous plants he’d discovered in small pools within the soggy landscape.
He mourned the loss of this unique habitat when The Forestry came and cut ditches to drain the bog for the cultivation of a ‘commercial’ pine forest. He mourned again when the loggers came and left great black scars over the hillsides. I imagine him with me now, witnessing the desecration of these druid’s groves. He’d be shaking his head in sorrow and disbelief.
I drove past the buzzard pole the other day. Where the vibrant copse had stood there were stumps and mud and the wind howling through an empty landscape. The shock is how quickly it happens. One day you’re making your way down a road, delighting in the exquisite warbling of a blackcap, the trilling of a wren and the humming of busy pollen collectors. One day there’s all that life and then there’s the droning and screeching of machinery and the mew of a buzzard as it floats on a thermal, looking down on what used to be its home.
Spring turned to summer and the devastation was unspeakable. Hundreds of oaks stolen from the landscape in the name of progress. We gathered support, talked to the press and mounted banners. Politicians, lawyers and QCs joined our cause. Nobody met a single person who thought it was a good thing.
‘Somebody’s getting rich,’ they said. ‘The government have given jobs to their friends.’
‘Invest in the trains we already have. And are we not all working from home these days anyway?’
‘This is not about a railway.’
One golden, autumn afternoon I walked a bit further than usual, to a bluebell wood that I hadn’t visited since early summer. Imagine my horror when I saw the by now familiar HS2-Heras fencing and the signs saying: Keep Out HS2 Works in Progress. There was nobody there and so I squeezed through the fence and walked through the glades counting one hundred and twenty-seven mature oaks with the characteristic orange dot painted onto the trunks. The understory of hazel, holly and thorns wasn’t marked but it would be taken too. I phoned the council and the press as I stood in disbelief thinking that surely there had a been a mistake. This was nowhere near the proposed trainline.
I later found out that the high-speed railway company were taking the woodland to build a temporary road for their machinery to get through. Imagine. I found one of their ‘ecologists’ mounting bat boxes onto a tree just outside the fencing. He said that HS2 was committed to preserving nature but then admitted himself that it was tragic and that the bats would desert the area rather than move into the paltry boxes he’d provided. The badger sett had been blocked and netted, to save badgers from being harmed. ‘But where will they go?’ I asked. ‘Badgers are territorial, it’s not as if they can move in with relatives down the lane.’
He shrugged. ‘Like I said, tragic, but we do what we can.’
The men were working at the far end of the wood. I could see their orange jackets and hear them talking. I crouched silently under a tree above the badger sett. Suddenly chainsaws powered up, filling the woodland with monstrous noise.
When the first limb was severed I swear I felt the woodland fizzing with urgent news as networks of micorrhizal fungi spread chemical messages through the soil, from root to root. One of them was in deep trouble. The alarm was taken seriously but no tree knew that in the morning the orange-clad men would be back with much bigger machinery and that their neighbour’s trunk would be lying in the litter. Within hours they would follow. I knew because I’d seen it so often before.
The trees couldn’t escape. Their only defence being to fill their cells with bitter poison. The toxin would stop voracious animals from eating their leaves but it couldn’t protect them from this danger.
It was a mast year. The ground cover was thick with acorns as though the trees knew it was their last hurrah. For hundreds of years the oaks had grown up together, sharing the trials of winters and summers. The understory was a rich larder of berries, hips and haws. A crucial food store for our woodland birds and visiting winter thrushes, who would never get to eat them.
Thinking of my father I began collecting acorns, stuffing them into my bag. I needed to plant a woodland. A memorial to the stolen trees. A place to grieve for what is lost.
The season was progressing. The oaks had already pulled back their green allowing autumn’s palette to emerge. The threat of uprooting winds and burrowing animals would soon be over as they shut their pores for winter. There should be safety in closing down to stillness. Instead there was to be death.
At dusk the chainsaws stopped and the men went home. The pipistrelles came out to forage in the gloaming and a fox trotted past. Chattering starlings settled into night roosts above my head and it pained me to know that the dog rose and blackthorn would soon be gone. The winter bedrooms of hedgehog and dormouse, bat and bug and nymph would have been pushed through the chipper. The great trunks would be lying on their sides, a row of fallen elder oaks along the ancient way.
The trees on high alert made their futile last stand against what was to come. I knelt down at their feet holding vigil for their final night on earth.
Autumn turned to winter and a week before Christmas a farmer told me of a great oak on his land that had been marked with a dot. The land had been compulsorily purchased, very much against his will, but HS2 had promised to leave the iconic tree as it was not in their way. When questioned, the workers said that the tree had no leaves and so must be dead. ‘It’s winter,’ the farmer said. Their ignorance is shocking.
Another great theft was occurring. Of course, we all protested and called the local paper and spoke to the men in orange. Some brave people climbed the fencing and were beaten back. We were powerless to stop them and they did not stop until darkness came and half the branches lay at the foot of the trunk, each branch, the size of a tree, was bursting with leaf-buds, ready for a spring that wasn’t to come.
The low sun lit the remnants of another ancient, a hawthorn hedge. The bright berries had outlasted the leaves and a flock of fieldfares picked them off one by one, filling their speckled crops with the bounty. Long tailed tits flitted through a string of bryony, the garland of luscious solstice colour was matched by the resident robin and by redwings who pierced the air with wistful cries.
The elderly farmer had played under the tree as a boy, his father too. Looking ancient to some, the oak was in its prime. At three hundred years old, it could live another three hundred, more after that. The tree had history as all our elders do.
In times of trouble my father was fond of saying: ‘Ah, let the world take a few more turns. It’ll all work out. It always does.’ That might have been true when he was young. It’s a good thing he isn’t here today because it is not the case anymore. I am glad he has been spared the troublesome thoughts about what life will be like for his great grandchildren. I wish they had known him because they would have loved him. A man who was admired by children and dogs and who’d spent his life planting trees. What wasn’t to love?
I didn’t see it happen. The men working on that cold day must have started early and by the time I got there they had severed the last of the massive branches and left them lying on the earth in haphazard piles, a battlefield strewn with body parts. A horror to behold. I had not witnessed how quickly the trunk must have been sawn through and how it had toppled towards its own broken limbs. The diameter of the severed trunk was wider than I’m tall. I stood with my back to it, astonished. The life, grown so slowly and for so many years, surviving snow and wind, peacetime and war, had been extinguished in less than a day.
I once saw a fin whale washed up on a beach. Eighty feet of cetacean, so lithe and fast in the sea was all wrong in this new biome, the land. Its own weight had crushed the life from its lungs. It died estranged from what it knew and who it knew. The people who clustered around its fading eye were strangers from another element. The benign giant looking so very much bigger on land than in water had starved. Its stomach was full of plastic.
The oak and the whale were the same. The tree that had spent its life reaching for the sky was now in pieces, a butchered leviathan, out of its element and beyond help. The hugeness of our megafauna and megaflora belies their vulnerability. They may not survive our modern world. There I stood, helpless, beside the great body of yet another marvellous being. Another light gone out in my life.
I couldn’t help Dad either. He was fit and healthy when a cancer stole into his lungs and killed him as stealthily and surely as a honey fungus fells a great tree. By the time the creeping thing was detected it was too late for treatment.
Now that death was discovered I stroked the oak stump, hoping the ghost of the tree could see how much I cared. The robin piped up, as if to say: Much good that’ll do. Looking at me momentarily before resuming a hunt for food in between now redundant roots that still clung so powerfully to the earth. Life went on for the opportunistic bird but there was another hole in the skyline.
For Dad’s last Christmas I’d gone home to Ireland and when I saw him I knew I’d been right to come. ‘I’m not long for this world,’ he said with a chuckle. He liked to make us laugh. ‘I’ve had my three score and ten,’ he added. And then he became serious. ‘I’m happy enough, I’ve had a grand life but I’m worried about leaving your mother. We’ll make this Christmas the best,’ he said. ‘Could you walk up to the old village and get some holly with berries. There’s a tree behind the barn that’s covered in them. Your mother will be only delighted to have a few sprigs.’
Then he said: ‘I would come with you but I need to lie down. I’m always so very tired these days.’
Slaghbooly was a deserted hamlet in the middle of the forestry. Once upon a time there’d been a farm and the people there made violins too. It must have been a happy place back in the day with a few cattle in the barn and chickens in the yard and the sound of fiddle music playing by the turf fire in the big farmhouse.
I walked up the hill with his dogs thinking over what he’d said. The landscape was still marked by his footsteps and it was strange to be there alone. My happiest memories of Dad are us walking and him pointing things out to me. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say when he saw the evening sun light up the gorse or a puddle full of tadpoles or the bees filling their sacks in the heather. He was now too tired to walk. The cancer had spread to his liver and I knew that meant he had weeks or months but even though he was dying I hadn’t accepted that the dad I knew wouldn’t be there anymore.
I lost my bearings because he wasn’t there to show me the way and the larch plantation had grown taller. The damp air soaked through my coat and my feet were wet but I didn’t care because I was on a mission. I’d find some holly with berries to cheer us all up and we could go on pretending that we were having the best Christmas.
I found the deserted village, where a family had made its life. The glass was gone from the windows but old curtains, once bright with yellow roses, still graced the wooden frames. A few broken crocks told of days when the dresser had shone with flowered plates and porcelain cups. A hook hung over the old fire place and I could imagine the pot bubbling and feel warmth from the amber fire jumping in the grate.
Layers of paint exposed the historical tastes of the residents. Mustard yellow, cerulean blue and jade green had graced these rooms. The house, once loved and decorated, still had walls and stood proud; unlike its neighbours whose roofs had collapsed and all but the gable ends had crumbled back into the landscape. The main thing betraying its demise was an ash tree growing from the middle of the floor and bursting up through the ceiling.
That made me smile. Nature always comes back. The kitchen garden; once planted with potatoes and cabbages was decked with honeysuckle and roses gone wild. The winter skeletons of angelica now gave home to a myriad of life. Spiders and solitary bees had made homes of the stems and seed heads.
I found the holly, complete with festive singing robin. The huge tree had been bursting with berries had I but come a week earlier. Some passing flock of starlings or jackdaws had stripped it bare.
The bird watched as I searched through the prickly foliage for just one sprig of berries. But as the soft day turned drizzle to a deluge I said goodbye and called the dogs to go home.
Christmas was a berryless affair and though we tried to make it jolly, it was hard to see the power fading from my own personal superhero. On Stephen’s Day he took me out to his land and showed me the oaks we’d planted from acorns. The shallow soil and the prevailing winds had stunted the trees but there they were and hopefully the bonsai grove will outlive me and mine.
I think of these things as I sit on the stump of the oak, leaning into the prostrate trunk that supports my crumpled body like the strong arms of a steadfast parent. I could weep but I am numb now; to the losses. Each tree, each hedgerow, each broken landscape, feels like the end. Dad’s gone and the children are growing older. In the normal course of events he was right; life goes on. Ever optimistic I, like him, get on with things hoping for the best, trusting that rightness will prevail. But this, this is wrong.
I stand and stretch when it’s too dark and cold to stay. An owl hoots into the night and is answered by another. Part of the owl’s hunting strategy is a tremendous memory of the landscape. I wonder what they think as they bear witness; watch the oaks and their understories being shredded and splintered, severed and uprooted. Do they see the bats depart and the spirits flee and the fairies beneath the oak roots cursing the men as they proceed through the landscape until not one tree is left standing?
One summer, not long before he died, we had a rare family gathering. All of us siblings were visiting home at the same time. We listened to music and cleared the table while Mum whipped cream for our pudding. We’d already had plenty of food and wine and were in great form. Dad was telling us he’d seen shooting stars the night before and tried to get us all to come and have a look. Only I followed him outside and we stood for a while, ignoring the midges, and straining our eyes in hope of seeing a meteor shower.
We didn’t see the stars but we heard something. An eerie churring sound was coming from the dark bog and we shushed each other. It continued and I looked at him in questioning silence.
‘I’ve not heard that since I was a boy,’ he said. ‘It’s a nightjar.’
I researched it later and sure enough. The nightjar, a rare bird, is making a comeback in the remnants of clear-cut commercial forests. They apparently favour heaths and young woodland. The next morning, he and I walked over the scarred landscape and found life amongst the stumps of the felled pine forest. Tiny birch and rowan saplings had sprouted. Wildflowers and whitethorns were making homes in amongst them and somewhere, perhaps, a nightjar had laid its eggs.
I’m not sure that saplings will make up for the losses of oaks that were planted in centuries past and I’m not sure that anything would build its home where high-speed trains and concrete substations dominate the terrain. But I have to keep hoping.
I’ve always marvelled at how nature bounces back - but I’m afraid for the vulnerability of our fellow beings. It’s a miracle to me that a helpless baby bird in the nest survives to become a powerful buzzard or a secretive wren. How does a blue whale calf survive the perilous oceans to become the largest creature ever to have lived? How vulnerable the whale and how fragile the druid’s tree, driving its strong roots eighty foot down into the soil, sending mighty arms reaching for the sky, confidently following the wisdom of the seasons. How fragile we all are.
I think of mountains being broken up for mines, and emaciated elephants searching for water holes, and polar bears fading into extinction as the ice melts around them. The ocean is full of plastic and fires consume the forests and my head bows under the weight of it all as I scoop handfuls of soil into pots.
A robin hops onto the garden table and watches for worms. He begins to sing and as I plant my acorns I can almost see my green-fingered father standing next to me saying: ‘Let the world take a few more turns and God willing you’ll live to see them grow.’