Wild in the Country

On my way home at dusk, recently, I was driving up the curving incline of the road between Little Iwood and Great Iwood, just outside Rushlake Green. As I came around the bend, something large was in the road up ahead of me but the brief sweep of my headlights failed to reveal its true form. As I got nearer and slowed to a halt, I realised it was a buck, an adult male fallow deer, and it was showing no intention of getting out of my way.

Not for nothing have my children nicknamed this stretch of road, Deer Country. Since I left London over ten years ago, I have seen more deer on the roads in my part of East Sussex than I have seen foxes. I was given some early advice by a neighbour on the matter: if a deer runs across the road in front of your car, stop and wait; others will be sure to follow. It has turned out to be good advice: many times, I have stopped at the sight of a running deer only to see two or three follow in its wake. Stories of fatal accidents – both to driver and deer - are legion in this area.

The closest I have come to a deer-related accident was when I used to travel to work on a motor scooter. It was dark, and I thought I had seen something whizz across the road in the distance. I slowed, stopped and waited - but nothing happened. Then, just as I was about to pull away, there was what can only be described as a stampede of deer – some, adult males - across my path. Had I not stopped, I would surely have been trampled underfoot.

Deer roam wild in the countryside of East Sussex, particularly in large and sparsely populated areas; but they are also found close to towns and villages. They are overwhelmingly fallow deer, although there are some roe deer living in Ashdown Forest. The fallow deer population has increased dramatically in the last thirty years due to milder winters, falling demand for venison and the changing attitudes of landowners: more farmers are prepared to tolerate grazing deer in woods and fallow fields.

Back at my most recent encounter, the deer was snuffling at something on the road surface. He did not seem to be alarmed by the glare of my headlights or the idling of my engine. Just as I was wondering what to do next, he lazily looked up and stared in my direction. Illuminated in the bright light, with his stately posture and towering antlers, he looked magnificent. After a few more seconds of stand-off, he then sauntered away into the wood. I waited a few moments, and then drove away slowly, happy to have shared the road with such a beautiful creature.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

It would be churlish in the extreme to complain about the hot summer weather that has finally arrived now the Gulf Stream has buggered off to where it belongs. Its perfect timing in coinciding with the start of the school holidays has meant that the fear of having a houseful of demob happy children, rained in with nowhere to go, has not been realised. But it is bloomin’ hot; and when 8 a.m. starts, a full paddling pool and plenty of ice cream are still not enough to keep the kids cool, there is only one place to go: the woods.

Sussex abounds with woodland and, in stifling heat at the height of summer, the dense canopy of trees never allows the air to warm up. Enter a forest and its benign earthiness will calm the most fevered brow. Even if sprogs and dogs insist on tearing about, nature will provide shade and still, cool air to stop them overheating.

According to the latest figures, 13% of Britain’s landscape is forest and woodland. After years of decline, this is the highest it has been since the 1930s and is despite the best efforts of the coalition government and their plans to privatise the public forests of England and Wales. This policy succeeded in uniting the forces of Conservatism – the Daily Telegraph and members of genteel charities such as the National Trust and the RSPB – with more traditionally radical campaigners like the Socialist Workers Party and the Ramblers. Its hasty scrapping last year was precipitated by how many Conservatives opposed this idiot idea; but the Tories in the government had every right to be caught out by the strength of feeling from its own supporters for there has long been a contradiction in Conservatism that did not prevent the erosion of the fabric of Britain last time they were in power.

The fundamental dichotomy at the heart of Conservatism – the free market and tradition – is something that has puzzled me for a long time. Slavery to the free market and deregulation means that the look of Britain has been transformed in the last thirty years: gone are the traditional liveries of our national and local public services and in their stead are the logos of a thousand faceless contractors. The free market idea that the cheapest price is best, with no regard for quality or aesthetics, delivers a world where the appearance of ‘phone boxes and buses is no longer consistent, the postman doesn’t deliver twice and water and electricity is supplied by the French (a situation, I would have thought, that fills your average Tory Europhobe with horror). If the consistency of public services has been lost, the opposite has occurred in private sector services.

Business is now dominated by a limited number of huge global concerns that have ensured the virtual end of the independent sector. This has changed the face of the High Street from the variety and range of retailers thirty years ago, to the proliferation of multiples such as McDonalds and Starbucks that we have today. In her book ‘Eating Air’, Pauline Melville notes that “all the things that people feared from communism: bland uniformity, cloned cities and omnipresent surveillance have been brought about by capitalism and nobody recognises it”. It was the policies of Thatcher, Major and Blair that sacrificed the service landscape of Britain in the name of competition but perhaps the prospect of being greeted by the words “This forest is managed by Capita and sponsored by Coca Cola” has finally woken Conservatives up to their duty to conserve.

Whether it is Ashdown Forest or Abbots Wood, Friston Forest or Darwell Wood, or any of the hundred smaller woods, there are plenty of dark, shady havens to choose from. There was a time when there was a lot more forest and woodland in Sussex. 1500 years ago, before clearance for agriculture and settlement, the huge wild wood forest of Anderida covered an area greater than what remains of it now, Ashdown Forest. This woodland is often cited as the reason that Sussex was the last county in England to convert to Christianity – it was cut off from the rest of England by its expanse and density. I like to think that this reluctance to give up Paganism was more down to the ‘we wunt be druv’ nature of the Sussex spirit, in existence even then; but if it’s not, shame there were not more trees.