Richard Williamson Nature Trails October 21

Apparently they were driven out of the weald woods by the iron industry during Tudor times.

That had never occurred to me. But when you think about it, you can see how such sensitive and delicate creatures would be unable to exist with vast destructive forces.

One hundred and thirteen furnaces each requiring three square miles of trees to fuel them destroyed Anderida, their ancestral home.

Even the navy were troubled, as the oaks for Britain’s ‘wooden walls’ went as ‘maidens’ (half-grown) into the blast furnaces.

This week’s walk passes one of the best remaining relics of these momentous times in our history.

I also went to the open day of the Fernhurst Furnace Trust who with Lottery Funding and donations are desperately trying to maintain the dam to the hammer pond and all the network of sluices which channelled water to drive the gigantic bellows and hammers.

I watched displays of charcoal burning, flint knapping, ancient blacksmithing, spinning, long-bow practice and musket and cannon firing. Centuries of Sussex history came suddenly alive.

They hold this event each year so to find out about this and the rich history of
the site log on to www.fernhurstfurnace.co.uk

So we are left with a hundred hammer ponds, but what of the woods? They have all grown back again.

Many have been planted with New World pines, firs and spruce trees, though large areas of the old hazel and chestnut coppice that served the industry struggle on uncut.

And what about the fairies? For me they have returned in the shape of birds, flowers, butterflies, moths and beetles. After all, those are the forms Shakespeare was thinking of in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Perhaps those were the forms Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton was thinking of in Poly Olbion.

He’s the bloke who wrote Fair stood the wind for France, perhaps his most famous line in Agincourt.

He was shocked by forest destruction in 1600 and mourned the flight of the fairies: “...when with the anvils’ weight and hammers’ dreadful sounds rent the hollow woods and shook the queachy ground, so the trembling nymphs oppressed through ghastly fear ran madding to the downs with loose dishevelled hair. These Sylvans that about the neighbouring woods did dwell both in the tufty frith and in the mossy fell, forsook their gloomy bowers and wandered far abroad...”

I look for them every single day, catching glimpses on my wandering way.