As she walks by the River Don, Coco Lone Neal ponders the symbols left on the ground and carved into trees.
Skirting around a private sign, into the snow-topped forest beyond, my walking companion explains he has been coming here for over twenty years. Nobody, “except perhaps the landowners”, he admits, knows this area better than him.
Wharncliffe Woods is, in parts, an ancient woodland covered in beech trees, which is what drew Tim here in the first place, searching for carvings in trees with a fellow archaeologist.
“Beech trees”, he tells me, “are closely associated with writing. People have been etching symbols and dates into their bark for centuries. Even the word itself, beech, is derived from the German boka, which gave books their name”.
A book forest, script wood, storyline.
We walk into a clearing with two tall dark sinuous trunks at its centre, twirling twinned up into the sky. On closer inspection they are heavily scarred. “This one”, he says, patting a deep-set love heart larger than his head, “is what led me here”.
He ducks beneath one of the low-hanging branches and walks off into the woods. The beeches are joined by equally strangled oaks and wide-eyed birches. There is something strange about the trees here, they are neither graceful dancers nor wise elders, and instead stand askance, other, completely disinterested and completely their own.
As if reading my mind, he walks into a monster of a tree, more like the giant corpse of a spider.
“This is a chestnut tree, at least 400 years old”. He points to the trunks growing up and out from the centre: “these are the suckers, do you see? Each is vying for the light, and so they fall back, splitting and growing, over and over again.”
I follow him through a gap in a dry stone wall into an area we know as Cob Castle.
“What is wrong with the trees here?”
He walks up to an edge and stops beside an algae-ridden stone dome of sorts. Joining him, I am hit by a wall of wind. He grins, gold tooth blinking in the pale light.
“Because of the wind”, he answers with a wave of his arms.
“I believe this area was once used for lead smelting and the draught kept the temperatures of the fires up. These are the ovens, though a farmer once told me they were beacons”.
I gasp. The edge is dotted with dark stone turrets — some over six feet tall — and to imagine them lit is exhilarating.
“They could have been used for both, of course”, he continues, and kicks the bottom of one, bending down to brush away snow and leaf litter, and pointing to a deep engraving which reads ‘1830’.
“This could be from when the ovens were built, or when the beacons were first lit — or it could be a joke: that is always possible.”
If you say Cob Castle to someone, even in the local area, nobody would know what you were talking about. Tim found the name poring over a map from the late 19th Century. His theory is the cartographer bumped into a farmer, who, upon being approached by this posh interloper, replied ‘Cod Castle’, as a joke, and it was misspelled as Cob on the map.
“Cod”, he says, “means fake, like kidding comes from codding”.
A fake castle. All these years, and I never knew that.
We stop beside one particularly large and magnificent beech, and he leans on a branch almost as thick as the trunk, already enfolding the letter R into its bark. Rob was one of Tim’s closest friends, larger than life with an earthquake voice. Music was their mycelium.
“The first of the fallen”, he says, and walks off.
Tim cuts a lone figure, striding ahead in a coat the colour of fallen leaves. A working-class boy from East Ham, London, born to a Welsh Greenway mother and Blitz survivor father, though you would never have known. His Cambridge-educated voice functions like a mask, which he passed down to me, my second-hand cod accent.
I half-fall down the steep edge trying to keep up with him, snow steadily piling into my boots. Should have worn gaiters, he did warn me.
We trail the bottom of the slope, past captured springs, along a waterlogged track, until an opening in the trees reveals exposed moorland. The path is barely visible and the softly falling snow is now a vertical onslaught. I cannot look up so watch his feet instead, his strides still longer than mine, and I am jumping into his footsteps like a child.
He tracks off the path, I follow, tripping across heather and bracken, into freezing rivulets, and there is no such thing as waterproof, or warm.
“I have never shown anyone this before!” He shouts over the sound of the whistling wind, “Look!”
Turning slowly, I realise we are standing in a circle of broad blinking-black stones. No, not a circle — a rectangular outline which ends in a dry stone wall.
“It becomes visible when weighted down with snow”, he continues, “I believe this was once an Iron Age hilltop settlement, though there are no records in existence to say this is true!”
He shows me how the newer wall was puzzled onto the older one, 3000 years bridged in a gap. We peer over the edge to a narrow winding path which drops vertically down to the River Don. I allow myself to briefly wander the terrain – a 9000-year-old roundhouse, thousands of flint awls, grindstones, a goddess, the dragon, a well I will never find – and stop myself, sick with time.
“Archaeology is familiarity”, he explains later.
We have been walking for over three hours now and it is as if I’ve been for a cold-water swim and caught unawares. Trying and failing to open a thermos of hot coffee, we are in fits of laughter, and I wonder — not for the first time — whether this particular brand of harrowing hilarity is something you are born with or if it is taught.
He has been dragging me out in search of flints since he could carry me on his back, mushrooms as soon as I could sharpen a stick, and old songs in echoing caves when I befriended the dark. I grew up on the other side of the water, but summers were ours, and the memories that embedded the deepest were those which involved great heights, greater falls, missing supplies, night skies, long walks, longer stories, and far too many goodbyes.
“Are you scared of dying, daddy?”
“If you are curious about life”, he says, “I don’t see why death should be any different.”
We circle and clamber in and around two tentacular beeches. They have been pollarded and the fluted trunks look more like the many channels of a braided river. Sometimes there are prayers, bits of bright cloth tied to branches, twigs and sticks laid out in patterns amongst thick entangled roots. A ritual place.
The day’s palette is blurring into a molten mess of colour, white flecked with gold and spice, like we have stepped into an illuminated manuscript.
A tawny owl swoops low to the ground on the path ahead, like a leaf blown in on the wind. We stand, quiet, side by side, waiting for our eyes to adjust, trying to spot her movements in the canopy.
Just a few years ago, not a stone’s throw from here, we found an owlet, all feathers and huff, ridiculous beautiful hope packed onto a branch. I was a newborn mother, in the eye of lockdowns, bringing her daughter to the woods for the first time.
Today’s owl is older, speckled and silent, all bark and beak and kin.
“It’s the same one”, he whispers.
“No it isn’t”, I say, “just another tawny”. But there is no such thing as just and he knows I know and so we just keep walking.
“This became my Dordogne”, he says suddenly, “I was searching for the Dordogne, and the mushrooms led me here.”
The Dordogne is where I was born, in the forests above the caves of Lascaux, where he and my mother loved each other for a while, before the wild signs got restless.
Bastard, I think, and then, and here I am, still trailing behind him, forever a child following tracks.
*
Coco Lone Neal is a mother, rambler and writer. She recently completed an internship with Hachette Publishing and is now an associate at the Writers Workshop in Sheffield. When she isn’t dragging her children and dog up hills in the rain, Coco is working on a book stitched together with river-blue thread.
Follow Coco on Instagram here.