The above image of a wind-blown beech wood, part of Savernake Forest near Marlborough, was taken some years before the Great Storm of October 16th 1987 which cut a devastating swathe across southern England. Although living in Market Lavington at the time we were largely sheltered by the northern escarpment of Salisbury Plain and only saw the scale of the devastation on a trip across Sussex a week later when the roads had been partly cleared and reopened.

The figure given for fallen trees was staggering with something like 15 million in the UK... although that pales slightly, although not into insignificance, at the estimated 90 million which were toppled in a similar storm here in France on December 26th 1999... thankfully not on the eve of the Millennium when the loss of life could would have been much greater than the 44 who did perish.

The French do make good use of wood though with many people in the country and smaller towns, like us, burning it for heating and cooking. Here the wood is priced by the cubic metre, or stère.. although a stère of wood cut to 33 cms length for the kitchen stove is smaller than a stère cut to 50 cms length for the open fire because of "settlement when stacking" (that's the rough translation from the French explanation I'm given for the differential)... whereas in Wales it was costed by the amount which could be cut before a chain-saw's tankful of petrol ran-out! Maybe we got the same amount for our money... but who knows? Only the Welsh woodcutter "Jones the Wood" and the French bûcheron!

Many years ago when I used to drive home to Wiltshire after a day's work in London... and when there was plenty of daylight left plus some time to spare, I used to turn off the M4 motorway at the Berkshire - Wiltshire border to take the parallel and slower but much more pleasant and quieter A4 route of the old London to Bath coach-road. The reason for this was to take a detour through Savernake Forest, one of the largest areas of private woodland in the country and, if suitably inspired on a lovely summer evening, take some pictures.

From pre-Norman times Savernake was a Royal Forest found suitable for the "Sport of Kings"... but in 1547 it passed into private hands, being the only ancient forest to do so. In the early eighteenth century Thomas Lord Bruce, the Earl of Ailesbury, encouraged agriculture and commercial forestry within its boundaries... and although the Forestry Commission took over the running of the remaining 4,000 acres in 1939 (today that has shrunk to around 2,000 acres) problems are becoming apparent as many of the old trees are falling or have to be felled.

At the moment the most notable features of Savernake are the five kilometre long Grand Avenue... and half way down it the Eight Walks which radiate to all eight main points of the compass. These are lined with beeches reputedly planted under the direction of Capability Brown some two centuries ago. The problem now is that these trees are nearing the end of their lives. The continuation of their effect, replacement planting, should have been started a century ago so as not to leave future generations without a reminder of such a beautiful part of the English heritage.

There is plenty of new planting throughout the forest though and it is worth visiting at any time of the year. Our native Beech Fagus Sylvatica is majestic whether as a bare skeleton, when there will always be a few leaves rustling on some branches... or in April when the first buds, often on the same branch year after year, break into soft emerald-coloured leaves covered in fine hairs as protection against late frosts... to autumn when the leaves turn copper.

Only a short way up the hill from Marlborough, Savernake has no doubt been visited by many a couple scribing their initials into a Beech tree's bark to perpetuate their love. I like the words of Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) who at the age of twenty-two wrote in the British classic "The Pleasures of Hope"...

As the "mother of the forest" grows so do the wounds on her bark... until they are eventually hidden inside the tree's heart long after those of the lovers have ceased to beat. Savernake is like that... it will be there long after us... if it is cared for.