‘The spirit of devotion for the woods, which breathes through the simple expression of the poet, is akin to “that hereditary spell of forests,” which Robert Louis Stevenson describes as acting ” on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.” Such a refuge once was London. Indeed she makes her first claim on history as a mere stockade in the woods — the Llyndin of the ancient Britons. Her wood and fen and heath, with the sweet country which once surrounded her, have disappeared, while a part only of the Essex Forest remains to recall the once great forest of the East Saxon Kingdom, which had Lundentune for its port and ecclesiastical centre. The forest, however, has maintained its connection with the metropolis; it is essentially London’s forest to-day, and will ever be an integral part of her future, holding as it does a unique place among the forests of England and of the Empire.’
So opens, London’s Forest by Percival J.S. Perceval published in 1909. I read this page sat on a log somewhere between Bury Wood and Woodman’s Glade. It was a freezing cold day back at the beginning of December. Puddles were frozen solid. Ice clung to leaves and bracken. As I moved away from Chingford Plain deeper into the woods through Round Thicket to Hill Wood there were no people around. I’d entertained fanciful notions of walking through the forest to the Christmas market at Epping but that idea faded after reading the passages from Perceval. Maybe I’d dwelt too long in the Radical Landscapes exhibition at the Visitor Centre at Chingford beguiled by tales of Black Mutton pasties.
Then I became seduced by this nameless brook that babbled down from Hill Wood and seems to flow into Connaught Water, raising the question of whether this is the true source of the River Ching.
There seemed a certain inevitability in this forest stroll ending in the dark, as so many of my Epping Forest walks have done during the winter months in the past. And in truth I love navigating those final miles in the pitch black.