Delamere Forest Midwinter

By David Lewis:

When I was a child in 1970s Liverpool we sometimes bought our Christmas tree from Delamere Forest, a commercial woodland in Cheshire and the remnant of a vast medieval hunting forest, a place of dense woods, open water, fens and bogs.  

I was a bookish child.  My reading was enriched by my experiences of landscape and my awareness of landscape was informed by my reading.  Delamere took me to a European forest-land of giants and ogres and child-eating witches, and on the maps the darkness was visible – Black Lake, Hunger Hill, Dead Lake.  I did not feel that other people took a pleasure in these connections.  

The Delamere visit was a day for heavy coats and wellington boots, because the forest car park was a muddy field and the sales area was just a clearing in the trees, ringed by coloured lights.  The frozen ground had been trampled to icy mush, and pine branches had been laid down to make the paths safer.  Chalk-red and powder-green huts, decked with pine branches and fir cones, were built in the trees for Father Christmas and the sale of trees, hot food and drinks.  Chestnuts roasted on a brazier, slightly-burned-sausage smoke drifted through the trees.   Shivery elves took donations for local good causes, and the Salvation Army brass band played carols from a wooden stage.    

And yet the visit to the Forest was a very different Christmas activity from the school Nativity play or the carol service.  The felled trees were arranged in flopped, loose rows on the ground, rough finger-jabbing, resin-scented spikes, sharp, unfriendly, essentially defeated, and the heavy twinkle of gaudy lights moving in the thin wind was unable to hold back the Forest’s innate gloom.  I half-knew that there was nothing Christian about visiting Delamere at midwinter, that it was a cold pagan celebration of muddy folk tales and encroaching darkness.

Northern England in December is grey if rarely bitterly cold, but one year, in the countryside outside the city, about two centimetres of snow fell.  Drained of colour, the Cheshire hills and fields were sharpened to blacks and whites and snow-greys.  Once we had bought the tree we chose to go for a walk, away from the lights into the sighing trees and crisp wind.  Here the year was dying, silently and without warmth or light - the gloom of mid-afternoon was shadowing the dusk, and it would be dark early.  And I loved it.  I loved the sharp wind on my face, the snowy tree-fields receding into the early dusk.  I loved the silence after the brash tinny music, the grey light after the gaudy bulbs, loved the fact that nobody had walked the paths since the snow had fallen overnight.  

There are moments in childhood when we catch a glimpse of those things which will enrich our adult lives.  The forest paths were deserted on that late afternoon because most people take no pleasure in cold and snow and darkness, but for the first time I realised that I did not share this opinion.   And more importantly at that time I began to realise that I had every right to think differently, about this and about many other things.  I was right to love the cold, right to connect storytelling with landscape, right to love maps and place-names.  My feelings about the forest walk on that long-ago afternoon were a step to creative adulthood, and ultimately a step towards my shadow-life as a writer.  

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David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter