I had such a great plan, or so I thought. It wasn’t a complicated piece of inspiration; more of a “wouldn’t this look great in autumn colours” sort of an idea as I examined the composition on the back of my screen. It was a scene we’d walked through so many times recently on our daily exercise during what to me was then still the all too fleeting lunch break. Each day in those months of working from home we’d follow the same circuit, sometimes clockwise, sometimes in the other direction, often sloshing through enormous puddles and swathes of soupy brown mud in our wellies. For a while, this was the limit of our lives, the world beyond out of bounds as the pandemic turned us all into strangers and we learned what Zoom and Microsoft Teams were for. On one outing we happened across two elderly farmers, fixing a new gate in place along the lane where hardly anybody ever goes. “To stop the cows getting out,” we were told. Not that either of us had ever been held up by a herd of delinquent cattle during our walks. I don’t think we saw anyone else that afternoon as we took our two miles of daily constitutional. Not unless you count an online meeting to discuss the audit committee agenda anyway. I’ll bet that last sentence alone tells you why I moved heaven and earth to get out as early as possible doesn’t it? Audit committee – even more boring than it sounds, I can promise you. I might be living on beans on toast for the rest of my life, but at least I’ll never have to attend another audit committee. I still shudder in my sleep sometimes. I always called it "Snoredit Committee."
A few months later I wandered along here with the camera one Saturday afternoon, just to try out a few possibilities I thought I’d noticed among the corkscrew branches of the row of creepy hazel trees along the lane – a composition I’ve still failed to make any sense of whatsoever. An amble further into Unity Woods, the forest of a thousand hidden mineshafts, in a fruitless search for wild garlic found me retracing my steps back to the lane and through that gate we’d seen being installed during the winter. And here I focused on the gate itself, surrounded by the lush vibrant greens of the new season in a woodland space dotted with remnant Bluebells, Campion, Stitchwort and Forget-me-nots. I took the shot with the intention of putting it somewhere to remind me to return in the autumn. “It’ll be great in the autumn” I told myself as I imagined the scene dressed in the oranges, russets and golds that would surely be here in about five months’ time. “That’s when I’ll get a shot here,” I thought to myself as I walked back towards the path through the woods that took me home. And apart from making that mental note to come back in November, I forgot all about it and returned to preparing the briefing papers for my last ever audit committee. Hooray!
I did return in the autumn, now very happily free of the restrictions of lunch hours and unfathomably dull meetings. Suddenly every hour of the day could be the lunch hour, as long as I didn’t just sit around eating sandwiches all day that was. On what I thought was a suitable afternoon I strolled along the lane, no more than half a mile from home, hoping that the vision of a glowing glade of vibrant seasonal hues would be lying in wait. Hope, it seemed was about as good as it was going to get though. The trouble is it only takes a couple of gales before November arrives and the trees are stripped virtually bare before the colours really change. Cornwall and Autumn don’t always mix that well, because the season arrives late here you see. So, while there was only a hint of red among the trees around me, there were plenty of brown branches with hardly any foliage left at all. And of course, the light was completely in the wrong place – I really hadn’t paid enough attention to where the sun might be as my enthusiasm took over on that late spring afternoon earlier in the year. Autumn, it seemed, wouldn’t be happening here. My great plan had turned out to be a bit of a turkey.
But later it struck me that the bright green growth of early June, with the dappled sunlight appearing in all the right spots was worthy of its own place in the annals. It’s so easy to think of woodland only being worthwhile under a carpet of blue and white or sheltered by the autumn colours we all wait for so eagerly. So I decided to revisit that image taken on a quiet Saturday afternoon when I thought I was just making plans for later in the year, and returned to that dreamy late spring scene when the fresh greens sang out loudly and announced that summer was almost upon us. Here, in a secret corner so close to home was a little gem that it’s possible nobody had ever stopped to photograph before – not since those septuagenarian farmers had put the gate up at any rate. There are so many places here that we all rush to with our cameras, me included of course, but it’s rather lovely to find our own little worlds within walking distance of the front door. This isn’t some epic landscape or seascape panorama known to all – just a quiet woodland lane, no more special than any other. You’ll have places like this of your own of course – I hope yours’ look better in autumn than mine, but if they don’t then perhaps another season might bring out the best in them. You never know!
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