Out in the sun the goldfinch flits
Along the thistle-tops, flits and twits
Above the hollow wood
Where birds swim like fish -
Fish that laugh and shriek -
To and fro, far below
In the pale hollow wood.
Lichen, ivy, and moss
Keep evergreen the trees
That stand half-flayed and dying,
And the dead trees on their knees
In dog’s-mercury and moss:
And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops
Down there as he flits on his thistle-tops.
The Hollow Wood is a strange unsettling poem. Yet it describes a landscape that was very familiar to Edward Thomas, a wilderness on his doorstep. He would pass the wood on his walks in the hangers or when taking a longer route from home to his study than the road walk.
The poem was written on the last day of 1914, probably in his study The study sat on top of the Hangers above Steep, some 120 metres high from base to top. Below him the hangers, stretching from east to west, curved round into the hollow of Ludcombe Bottom, enclosed on all sides by Stoner Hill, Ashford Hanger and Ashford Hill (which the study topped). It was only open at the eastern side where Ludcombe stream (now known as Ashford Stream) flowed out from its source.
Thomas could see over the lip of the hanger from his study to the top woods of Stoner Hill and Ashford Hanger on the other side of the coombe. He had already written a poem, After Rain, a few days before about the copse on his side of the hill, just below his study and the next door house and workshop of his friend Geoffrey Lupton.
In The Hollow Wood he was thinking of the woods on the other side of the coombe, Ashford Hanger, which sticks out like a buttress from Stoner Hill into Ludcombe and rises from its right hand bank and curving round above the fields, which in his day, were the park land, of Ashford Lodge. Nowadays the whole stretch of chalk and hanging wood escarpment stretching from Ashford Hill in the west to Wheatham Hill in the east is known as Ashford Hangers. In Thomas’s day the name of each hanger was well known locally and he used their names specifically.
Ashford Hanger is mentioned only on a few occasions in his notebooks, although he would have walked on the hanger many times on his way up and down Stoner Hill Road (“New Stoner”) from home to study and back. In his notes when describing “Ashford Hanger” he was probably referring to its lower point where it borders the Ludcombe stream. One of his first notes about the hanger, he wrote in the winter of 1907:
“On a very misty still day the woods of Ashford Hanger as I climb among them are luminous with the green leaves of wood sanicle & Mercury & moss and harts tongue fern shot up”.
The following December in 1908 he noted:
“Roof of beech woods is gone & the columns bear nothing up but sky - still light in Ashford Hanger in rain - upon - green moss, dogs mercury, ferns, a lemon ivy leaf & wood sanicle green & everything open to the diamond shafts of rain under a still luminous grey sky.”
This combination of dog’s mercury, moss, and ivy, which appear in the poem, are unique to his descriptions of Ashford Hanger in the thousands of pages of his field notes.
In later notes he delineated the wood in more detail.and its hollowness and evergreenness becomes more apparent.
In January 1909 he wrote “All old butts of beech in Ashford woods covered over with fine Ivy. The black eye of the Robin bright in twilight. Ivy under beech - moss under ash - in Ashford Hanger - moss, liverwort, strawberry, woodruff polypody, harts tongue lady fern”.
He wrote the note that points to the original inspiration for The Hollow Wood a few days earlier on 7th January
“Ivy climbs up spindly beeches almost leafless till it spreads in plume at top - graceful straight climb/clump? of ivy.
Birds flitting in bright quiet air above pool by Logan’s -(Ashford Lodge)
Chalk pit full of brambles, spots of travellers joy.
The quiet mossy ivy woods after storm has strewn dead trees etc.”
The birds, which unusually he did not identify, may well have been goldfinches, who behave in exactly this way in winter. The pool by Logan’s is Lutcombe pond on the track leading up from Ashford Lodge (now Ashford Manor), where the Logan family lived, to the hangers. In those days there was a field, cottage (Ludcombe Cottage which was also known as Old Cottage) and garden beyond the pond under the hangers (all now wooded), with the wood on Ashford Hanger stretching down to the edge of the track that passed by the pond and went up Lutcombe stream on its left hand side.
This wood with trees covered in ivy and moss, with dead trees strewn around, was evidently the hollow wood ET was seeing on that last day of 1914 in his study up above it. Interestingly a note immediately preceding the one he had written six years before, when he saw the birds flitting, described the preceding night and points towards another meaning of hollow.
“A windy midnight - sky dark like a deep bleak river, not blue but the black of water - over it go quick floes of white cloud with big spaces through which seem to race the bright birdlike soaring planet & the bright full moon at zenith - while the clear dark wooded hills roar with a continuous hollow sound not like trees at all but like one continuous dynamite explosion in quarry.”
So the hollow wood which, as Edna Longley has described could mean both a wood in a shaded hollow and a hollow wood full of dead and dying trees, would have also had an additional meaning to Thomas, a wood that sounded hollow in a gust, high wind or storm, something he often noted of Ludcombe and the hangers. (On a cold sunny February day with the hangers covered in snow he had written that: "the yew trees smoke furiously in the sudden hollow gusts thro the hangers.")
Goldfinches twitting were also occasional visitors to ET’s notebooks. As well as those he was probably describing in January 1909, he had written a wonderful description of their song on a later trip to Wales:
“4 goldfinches arrive on one tree & presently twitter sweet like little green blades of song appearing cool out of earth, or flickering tongues of cool sweet fire when all hustle together.”
He had written on an earlier journey of a goldfinch cock “singing low & meditatively, very sweet, sitting still in hazel, & sometimes just cheeping while hen quested in twigs.”
The Hollow Wood is the first time in his poems that he used the image of birds swimming like fish. It was a development of an image of himself as an observer from low down in a high wood, as if in a stream looking up, which he was to use in his poem The Lofty Sky (written 11 days later), This image seems to have originated when ET visited Savernake Forest, near Marlborough in the spring of 1907. He had been admiring the size and shapes of the beech and oak trees there and the “heroic look of forest ahead with nothing but tall muscular beeches.” He had observed moss at the base of old oaks “as if a tide had risen so high & left the green sign.”
He then wrote: “Looking up at tall swaying beeches with interlacing upper branches & sky in stormy/strong wind makes one feel [like a] fish when deep down among weeds.”
In March of the following year he noted a similar perception in the hangers:
“Charming crookedness of many birches on hillside. Oak & beech on ridge, their dark bushy tops high above road waving they seem to brush lightly the grey uniform snowy sky like willows a stream.”
He was to develop these images in his notebooks later, when writing about birds in the Ashford hangers. The hangers have encouraged watery metaphors since William Cobbett rode to the top of nearby Wheatham Hill and saw “an inland sea”. ET described being at the bottom of the hangers on a hot June day thus: “Such a lofty clear hot day that one feels buried down in the low country in woods & pastures, like a fish in bottom weeds.”
He was to expand on this image in The Lofty Sky, contrasting being “Down on the wealden clay” with being on the heights of the Downs with only the sky above.”..where the lilies are,”
Similarly the birds that “swim like fish” in The Hollow Wood also have precursors in his notebooks.
On the day after Boxing Day in 1908 he wrote
“Light snow grizzling the ash boles bough (also wych elm) & making some ivy leaves all white & also clinging to bent yellow sedge over the black brook. High rooks overhead above trees as in a stream like fish, between the boughs.”
One autumn five years later on the way up Stoner Hill road, looking upwards, he noted “magpie (crossed out jackdaw) moving with a call is like a fish seen deep in the narrow road-stream against the blue and white.”
In the poem the perspective is reversed, the poet observer looking down, more conventionally, rather than up, at the birds that swim in the depths below.
The laughter in the poem was normally how he described the call of the woodpecker, common in the hangers then and now, while the shriek could be a magpie, blackbird, thrush or other bird. In several notes a goldfinch or goldfinches twit, twitter and say “whit” as they move feeding through the hangers.
The goldfinches and other birds may take centre stage in the poem but dog’s mercury stands out among the plants of the hollow wood. It was one he had a peculiar affection for as is apparent in his notebooks. Shortly after their arrival in Hampshire, early one morning, he noted the clear & brown line of a footpath through dog’s mercury in the hangers.
Later in July 1907 he noted: “The dark dogs mercury in the dark wood is starred with the fallen elder flowers.” In May the following year he wrote of “Dog’s mercury leaves (in rain) tinged with lemon so as to give a delicious cool restful line”. That July he saw “Beautiful plash & quiver as raindrops fall from beeches to dogs mercury leaves - beautifully unexpected in the shade - making the leaf like a bird that hops from place to place.” A couple of years later in spring he was appreciating its smell: “green dogs mercury flower…like cowslip but greener & wintrier.”
During the intense period of writing poetry in the winter of 1914/15, Thomas found his notebooks an invaluable resource and inspiration of his poetry. Almost all of his poems during this period drew on his notebooks - sometimes from many years before. Some of the poems and the notes that stood behind them, would have suggested other ideas for poems. As we have seen The Lofty Sky, a few days later, was to use similar riverine imagery to The Hollow Wood but on the Downs rather than the hangers. Earlier in December he had written After Rain and Interval (see separate posts), both about the woods on Ashford Hill immediately surrounding his study. The day before he wrote The Hollow Wood, he had written The Combe about Berryfield Coombe and Hanger opposite his old home at Berryfield Cottage, remembering the badger that had been killed there in 1909. Looking down from his study on that last day of 1914 he was remembering an earlier incident in that year, as well as layers of other memories, in Ashford Hanger, another area of woodland, just below the high woods of Ashford Hill and a few hundred yards west from Berryfield along the hangers. His mind was clearly travelling around the locality, selecting scenes for poems based on memories from his notebooks as well as more current observations (eg Bird Nests).
When he injured himself a few days later, Thomas was to delve even deeper into his notebooks, as he sat unable to move in his home at Steep for several weeks. The notebook habit that he had on occasions decried had become essential to the development of his poetry. It was to remain so throughout his poetry writing.
A walk
The best walk for the Hollow Wood is to park opposite Ashford Manor, previously Ashford Lodge, on Ashford Lane. Follow the track up to Ludcombe pond and keep straight on along the left bank of the stream. The Hollow Wood would have been the wood on the slopes above. The valley bottom in Thomas’s day would have been the field and garden of Ludcombe Cottage or Old Cottage. To get more of a sense of what the woods would have been like in Thomas’s day you can either negotiate the old paths that contour round Ashford Hanger further up the slope and/or follow the valley bottom round to the left into Ludcombe Bottom where Ashford/Ludcombe stream rises. This wilderness, tucked below Stoner Hill road which rises up the hangers on the slopes above, is largely unchanged from ET’s day.
The woods around the base of the hangers are still green even in deepest winter with moss, ivy, lichen and fern. Their hollowness has increased as more ashes have fallen over, weakened by ash die back. Looking through the trees up the steep wooded flanks of the hangers rising high above to the sky, you can see why ET would have lighted on the image of being at the bottom of a stream looking up at the birds like fish above him. This sense of being underwater among weeds, is most intense at the bottom, looking up, between the flanks of the hangers between Lutcombe pond and Lutcombe Bottom, where the stream rises. This even more so now that Lutcombe cottage (Steep Old Cottage - see below), its garden and fields, have all reverted to woodland. As a result views of the Hollow Wood on the side of Ashford Hangers are now mainly obscured by the trees that have grown round Lutcombe stream since Thomas's day.
A zigzag walk up the side of Ashford Hill takes you to the top of Stoner Hill Road and provide some glimpses of the tops of Stoner Hill and Ashford Hanger. You can also walk through the hollow wood of Ashford Hanger above the left hand side of Lutcombe stream on paths at different levels which ET would have done, when not climbing or walking off the beaten track!
Acknowledgements
Edward Thomas Field Note Books copyright Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York.
Transcriptions of the Edward Thomas Field Note Books quoted in the post are available at the Edward Thomas Centre at the Petersfield Museum.
I have also drawn on Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems of Edward Thomas.
Photograph of Old Cottage with thanks from the late father of Sue Inglis and copyright Steep History Group 2021.
My thanks as ever to Benedict Mackay for editorial support.
Comentários