The drive to Little Woodcote Wood is only short and the temperature has hardly risen by more than a degree, even less in the shade. Luckily, a good day’s work awaits, thinning the abundant sycamore, and it doesn’t take too much physical activity before the fleece is discarded. There is also a roaring fire to fend off the morning chill, the smoke from which rises straight up with not a breath of a breeze to disturb it. Shafts of sunlight cut through the trees, illuminating the smoke in a mesmerising display.
The interior of the wood is very gloomy, even on a sunny day like today. It is overgrown, neglected and generally uninviting, not the sort of place that you would be encouraged to explore. Numerous storm-blown trees, mostly sycamore, litter the ground, some probably dating back to the Great Storm of ‘87. However, most of them are not dead and retain enough of a link with the earth to have thrown up a thick wall of fresh stems along their horizontal trunks, making sections of the wood impassable and casting a dense, far-reaching shade across the woodland floor.
Despite not deliberately setting out to create a glade, the over-abundance of sycamore has meant that, by clearing it, we have done just that. Whether any woodland flowers will return to this area remains to be seen; possibly it has been shaded out for far too long.
Two days is not much time to have a major impact upon a wood this much neglected but ironically it is exactly because of that neglect that we are able to provide such a contrast between the area cleared and the surrounding woodland. And right in the centre of the clearing is a spindly wayfaring tree that has somehow managed to avoid the eager saws. Hopefully, it now has the space to grow to fulfil its potential, just as this wood, with a bit more tlc, will be able to fulfil its potential to become a small gem of a woodland site.