A GOOD WALK SLIGHTLY SPOILED

The idea of the woods is an attractive one. When it comes to the stretching of the legs and the inhalation of relatively fresher air at the weekend, a consensus has been settled upon by the three members of my little family: the woods are the best. A woody walk: that's what we call an afternoon stroll among trees, along muddy paths, over little brooks, crunching over a thick carpet of fragrantly decaying leaves. This all happens just barely outside the M25. So even the biggest of these woods is tiny, really - a little slice of dampened footfalls, of birdsong, of bramble-tangle, of toadstool, of hollybush. The rounding of a corner or a change in the direction of the breeze and, yes, you can hear the swish of traffic on some not-far-off stretch of motorway. People and their houses and their out-of-town business parks and their bigbox furniture stores: close by, really. How long ago was it, then, that to be in the woods in England truly meant to be somewhere unpeopled and unmanaged? Before the industrial revolution, surely. Some time before that, most likely. Weren't our ancestors cutting swathes through old wood so we could build ships and rules waves? Didn't our ancestors' masters take big bites out of ancient oak, hazel and birch so they could enclose land and own it and own the people set to work on it? Something like that. Anyway, however we got here, here we are: tiny green wedges among the tidy homes and the efficient agriculture and the corrugated sides of giant logistics sites. Of these little wooded places, we have a reliable favourite for our Sunday strolls: colour-coded signs marking out circular walks of varying length. The yellow walk, I think, is the longest (and therefore best): X number of miles in a leafy loop back to the car park. It works. And for a while, it worked especially well, marred-yet-improved by the fat trunk of a fallen tree right across the path at the top of a stretch of gently rising land. 3/4 of the way around the circuit, this obstacle lay there for months. Climbing over it became the highlight of the leg-stretching, the muddy palms brandished like proof of having achieved something. No way to get over it without laying hands on its footprint-smothered bulk, you see. It's gone now. And while we still like that walk, it feels like something important is missing as we climb into the final quarter of the circuit, minds turning to "home learning", work deadlines and the cramped, wired, electrified England crowding in on us just beyond the edge of that minuscule remnant of the old forest.