The wood for the trees: the long view of nature from a small wood (EPub edition.)

An astonishing biography of a wood - combining natural history and the ancient history of the countryside to tell the organic history of the most common British landscape.

This is the story of a small piece of the Chiltern Hills - four acres of delightful beech-and-bluebell woodland, buried deeply in the larger plot of Ancient Woodland - Lambridge Woods, near Henley on Thames.

From the iron age, to the exploitation of woodland for beech furniture and charcoal, from sawpits used by the 'bodgers' that once processed the green wood, to the current uses of the wood as timber, and furniture to house the treasures recovered from woodland, Richard Fortey shows a landscape forever in transition, for all that we think it permanent. A lateral-thinking natural history, this meditation on the influence of geology on British history, flora, architecture and industry is nature writing refracting back into poetry: an unearthing of the mysteries held in the everyday.