would lie waiting to be used again. Clay will hold water naturally if it is ‘puddled’. Puddling involves working the clay layer with one’s feet until it becomes smooth and creamy, creating a seal across the surface of the clay. Pigs are often used, as they naturally puddle clay with their rooting and mud-creating habits. I didn’t have a pig to do the puddling, but the excellent Wealden clay puddled up with the help of a little rain and a good amount of working between my feet. Puddling is quite labour-intensive but can be a fun social event if you pick a warm day, choose the right music and arrange a puddling party. Twenty or thirty people dancing Irish jigs in the mud at the bottom of a pond is a lot more fun than spreading out a butyl pond liner. Slowly, over the coming months, the pond began to refill until one day I noticed water lapping over the large stone I had placed in the overflow outlet. The water then flows into a network of streams until it finds the River Lod, flows on into the River Rother, then on into the River Arun and eventually out to sea at Littlehampton. With the pond naturally filled, it did not take long for the biodiversity to increase and the pond to become the haven for wildlife that it is today.
Storing water has to be one of the most practical ways we can improve and help our local environment. I am astonished how much rainwater it is possible to catch, even off a modest-sized roof. When I lived for a couple of years in a 30- by 10-foot caravan, I collected the rainwater off the roof in four 50-gallon rainwater butts that were all linked together. The butts were raised up and I drew the water off the end butt through the caravan wall and out through a tap into the sink. These butts supplied all the water I needed for washing up and to run a shower throughout the whole year. Even when they began to run low in summer, it took just one big thunderstorm and they were all filled up again.
If you measure the area of the roof of your house and multiply it by the average local rainfall for your area (available from your local meteorological office) you will be able to estimate the average volume of rainwater you could be collecting from your roof. I have two buried 10,000-litre tanks that irrigate all the vegetable gardens and that are often overflowing. You will most likely be surprised to find how much water you could be harvesting from your roof.
It is easy to become complacent in England about water, as often we have lots of it. But droughts are not uncommon, and as our climate seems unpredictable and unsettled it would make sense for every home to be maximising their water-storage options. It should be compulsory for every new home to have water storage as part of the design.
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My first year at Prickly Nut Wood was one of observation. Of course, I cut wood, built myself a basic shelter and drew water from an old catchment well within the woods, but beyond that I came to observe.
It was the late 1980s and I had been travelling in South America, predominantly searching for solutions to the leaflets that kept appearing through the letterbox telling me an area of the Amazon rainforest the size of Belgium was being destroyed every day. Such a scale of destruction of rainforest was hard to contemplate. I felt inadequate in Sussex discussing the fate of our planet amongst friends and wanted to do something to help. The irony, of course, being that my travels made it clear to me that I needed to focus my work locally. And so I ended up at Prickly Nut Wood, just a couple of miles from the letterbox where the leaflets had arrived, the ones that sent me, young and headstrong, to the other side of the world. The story of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho describes a similar realisation.
What my travels abroad showed me was a pattern. The pattern of the forest dweller. In the Amazon rainforest, and later in Papua New Guinea, I spent time with people who were children of generations of families who had dwelled within the forest. I met people to whom the forest was an extended map of provisions. They knew where to find medicinal plants to treat their ailments, they knew where migratory species would arrive and when, they lined their pathways with fruit-producing trees to eat from and harvest whilst on their journeys to visit friends or neighbours, and they built their houses from timber growing around them. These forests were rich in biodiversity, and the knowledge and lore of the forest had been passed on by its human inhabitants. Children grew up learning the different uses of plants, and where to find and harvest fruit-growing trees without realising they had learnt it. Education came through being brought up in one place, knowing that landscape, and being fully integrated into a way of life that was simple, although, of course, this life was not without its hardships. This tradition of the forest dweller being a natural form of woodland management seemed to be missing from the way forests were managed in England.
At Prickly Nut Wood, I wanted to live as a forest dweller, but I had not grown up as one and had no one to show me the lore of the land. I had to learn it through experience and observation, and I also had to transfer the pattern observed in diverse tropical rainforests to the woodlands of the south of England.
During my year of observation, I expanded my knowledge of the locality by regularly walking the generous collection of footpaths that weave through the parish. In doing so, I began to build up a map of surrounding foraging sites to which I could seasonally return over the coming years.
If I strike east from Prickly Nut Wood, I pass through an ancient wooded common, which has not been grazed for many years. Large, outstretched, pollarded oaks cast dappled shade over what were once pastures, now patches of wood sedge and bracken. Dark pools surrounded by thickets of blackthorn make this enchanted woodland a fine source of sloes. Whether for wine or gin, these ‘dry your mouth’ plums are worth collecting as the flavour when fermented or steeped in a spirit brings laughter to most who partake in their pleasure. The blackthorn itself can be the most impenetrable of trees, with sharp thorns that tend to poison the skin when pricked. Many a time have I noticed what seemed a scratch from blackthorn inflame in to a septic wound. This tree deserves respect. I remember reading how a 14-foot-wide hedge of blackthorn was once planted around Farnham Castle for protection. In the days when a septic wound could be life-threatening, the use of blackthorn would have led any potential invaders to have second thoughts.
The common is bisected by the road and it is here my life nearly ended some years ago in a car crash. I mention this as I ended up in a hedge and a spike of blackthorn pierced my eye. In protecting itself my eye formed a cataract and I had to have the lens replaced, so I am fortunate still to have good vision. I returned to the site a few months after the accident and cut myself a blackthorn stick from the broken bush near where I’d had my collision. It has made a good walking stick and is a good reminder to me of the fragility of all life. Blackthorn makes excellent walking sticks but it is a challenge to cut – a good pair of gauntlets is recommended. As part of my winter work involves laying hedges, I have some very heavy-duty leather hedging gloves that enable me to grasp the stem of blackthorn others might shy away from.
Hedge laying has begun to see a renaissance over the past 20 years. Stewardship grants have led farmers and landowners to consider the wisdom of starting their tractors and spending the day ‘flail cutting’ the top and sides of the hedge, and using much diesel to destroy the biomass that has grown within the hedgerow. Laying a hedge involves ‘pleaching’ (partially cutting through) the upright stem, in order to bend the stem over and lay it at an angle so that it forms a woven barrier and all knits together. The top (in the style of the hedge laying I carry out) is woven with hazel binders around upright posts of sweet chestnut about 1 foot apart. The resulting hedge not only looks attractive and uniform but forms a strong, long-lasting and stock-proof barrier, removing the need to use steel fencing altogether. It can then be left to grow on for about fifteen years and the next time it is laid, there will be a firewood crop yielded from the hedge row as well as some interesting elbow shaped pieces of timber formed from the re-growth from the
