Let There Be Light

Gladdened by the lengthening days and the arrival of a newborn Red Poll calf, John Lewis-Stempel welcomes the advent of spring on a mild March morning

- John Lewis-Stempel

DOWN through the druid’s grove of alder. Over the stile, struggling with the sack of cattle cake on my left shoulder, into the wood. The sack weighs me down, so I walk lurched over, like a farmboy Quasimodo. From the far top of the wood comes the trumpeting of a cow, repeated and insistent. I could have driven round to the cows, as I did this morning, but who doesn't want the excuse to walk through a wood on an early March evening? When the unbearable heaviness of winter has lifted. When the days are getting lighter, longer.

There is an old farming adage: ‘March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.’ It’s a truth my grandfather taught me. Today,out of the wind, in the shelter of the trees, you can actually feel a new, baby tenderness in the air. Spring is here and there’s a spring in my step as I follow the pale clay path through the trees.

A wood is different to a forest. A wood is wild, but not so wild that it’s frightening. You can’t get physically lost in a wood, only spiritually and imaginatively absorbed. For me, for you, every step along this woodland path is yard-stoned by the mild English culture of arboreality: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Animals of Farthing Wood, The Chronicles of Narnia and, of course, Brendon Chase.