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Woodman's Wagon is an unusual, hand-crafted tree house with views through the tree tops and out to sea. It has been loving built by woodsman, Matt Bate, and is set in its own 8 acre woodland. Imagine the freedom of a wild and wonderful woodland experience. This is probably my first non-fiction book of the year. I’m not a huge fan of non-fiction and this one was largely a cover buy, although the fact that it had to do with a British Wood made it intriguing. Latvia’s tourism board is fully behind this shift. It wants to encourage visitors away from Riga, which is popular with both rowdy British stag-dos and city breakers enticed by the medieval old town and art nouveau architecture. It wants tourists to use Riga as a launch pad for trips into Latvia’s green lands for bird-watching, forest hiking and bog walks.
My own foray into these immense woodlands was a four-day tour of the Vidzeme region, which covers central and northern Latvia. Despite being home to the capital, Riga, Vidzeme is characterised by forest, rolling hills (including Mount Gaiziņš, Latvia’s highest point at 311 metres), morainal lakes, the cliff-lined Gauja River and historic towns with medieval castles. It is a proud region, known as the “cradle of Latvian culture” for its rich artistic heritage. On the whole it’s a pretty good observational piece, somewhat disjointed at times, but the poetry is good and there are lots of interesting pieces of information.This is a book you can read again and again - not only because the writing is beautiful, but also because it contains far too much information to take in on one reading, especially if your knowledge about the countryside is on the sketchy side. Lewis-Stempel, a very busy farmer, always took time out to sit in a cheap plastic picnic chair by the pond in the woods and allow himself to become immersed in his surroundings. A wood is always in the past tense. There was a slight breeze through the tracery of the silver birch. This, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted, is the most beautiful of trees, ‘the Lady of the Woods’, but it’s tough. It was the first tree to colonise Britain after the last Ice Age, so the sound of the wind in the birch’s naked branches was the sound of England’s February 10,000 years ago.” Being a fast bowler like myself is up there with the toughest of all sporting pursuits, like being Tyson Fury’s punchbag or working behind the bar during the darts at Ally Pally. Occasionally there were lines that were beyond my comprehension. I had no idea what the author was speaking of. Were I British, I perhaps might have. The book can be recommended to all who value nature, but it is best suited to the British public.
The book is a wonderful mixture of keen observation, history, poetry, meditations and even some recipes from the wood's products. First impression from the cover, the man himself with that expression and raised eyebrow, this is going to an amusing quirky book. On this score I was not disappointed. Returning home from a holiday or business trip, the first thing he does is enter the wood to note the changes and to let it work its usual magic on him. Lewis-Stempel is a truly wonderful writer. I was going to call him a nature writer, but that's a term he baulks at. In his words he's a countryside writer -Had I been better acquainted with British names of flora and fauna, I would have enjoyed the book even more. I was sometimes not able to envision the animal or flower spoken of; I would guess and wonder which flower, plant, shrub or animal was referred to. Even in one language, terminology is not the same from country to country. Latvia is one of Europe’s greenest nations. Forest covers about half of the country (in the UK, it’s 13%). And this vast swathe of trees – over three million hectares of conifer, birch, white alder and aspen – has more than doubled in size since the 1920s.
Time on their hands (there is a whole section on how to kill time) still leads to a bit of mischief which you can read about, and it also breeds superstition. This explains why someone would be sat on top of a washing machine in the laundry room during a World Cup final.
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The Travel Editor of The Independent described The Wood Life as 'very close to the perfect camping holiday'. The book starts in December when the days are at their shortest but even now when the trees are dormant there is still life in John’s working wood. The sheer beauty of this book is how John brings the history, poetry and even recipes (some of which I will be trying through the course of the year) There are recipes ranging from Acorn Coffee, Chestnut Soup and Elderflower Champagne.
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