Beechwoods

Beech tree, Coombes Moor, October 2007

I always thought that if I ever came into a huge amount of money I would buy or create a beech wood. Beech woods more than any othr type of tree seem to have been a recurrent element in my love of woods and forests. South Liverpool's derelict and overgrown big estates, turned into parks or 1930s housing estates, leaving patches - copses, spinneys, even plantations - of beeches behind; giant beech trees in 1930s gardens, the remains of careful landscape planting a century and a half ago - Menlove Avenue's giant beeches, smooth grey stems and branches thirty feet above the ground. Childwall Woods, with its overgrown Georgian planting schemes and wild rhododendron forests, dotted with very tall, graceful beeches. Woolton had patches of beeches left - the junction with the short dual carriageway going up to Reynold's Park and the carriageway itself; 1970s NHS buildings in Victorian parklands left to run riot. Camp Hill, gnarled beech roots and packed soil. The lost sandstone war memorial bench. Black Woods, that I used to walk through to see Auntie Gwynneth, shuffling piles of gold and brown-to-rotting leaves, the clarity of the forest floor compared to Childwall Woods' brambles and rhododendrons; the beeches in BW seemed calm and elegant, woodland as meditative space.

Very tall beech trees along Woolton Road, the border of the large park-space surounding the old Childwall CE school and kept when the land was used for new houses; beeches in Calderstones Park, another south Liverpool estate saved for parkland, and all the way over to the golf course in Woolton; narrow beech-muddy lanes, a place I went alone to be alone, a long thoughtful walk from Cromptons Lane to Woolton pubs in the dusk and the bus home - beeches on the golf course, almost a badge of an old Victorian semi-urban/sub-urban estate; perhaps the classical estates had beech trees and the Gothic had yews and holly. Giant beeches in Allerton Manor, the spring of moss-grass underfoot, distant views of Wales. The trees almost hiding the tall sandstone column which marked seven miles from Exchange, a column erected by an earlier estate; overlapping parks and history.

More abandoned/recycled Victorian estates and neglected parkland near Chris and Rob's in Cressington, giant beech trees, their ground above the level of the road behind a low sandstone wall; sandstone and beeches, the defining symbols of south Liverpool. The edge of the wood and the shaved grass of the Prom, that peculiar autumnal memory/visual trick of golden leaves dropping onto carefully mown football pitches. The woods are overgrown and trailed by children and dog-walkers hunting for wild space in the city; the lane to the prom has an ancient gloom at dusk that I love.