Field Volume I · Hollowfen Wood & the Little Run
kept 2024–25 · in pencil & sepia ink
one year of forests, fungi, streams, birds & small wonders — recorded before they moved on
This is a working notebook, not a book. It has a creased spine, a corner of ink where the pen slipped in March, and a pressed bracken leaf that will outlive me. What follows is a year in one wood, drawn slowly and argued with. The drawings are honest; the memories are a little less so. Nothing here was taken. Everything here was noticed.
December — February
Blackthorn in flower while the ground is still iron. The run is a thread of dark water; I counted every crow and found the wood is mostly silence with a few opinions in it.
March — May
March came in like rain and left like mud. The hazel dropped catkins before the leaves dared; the hawthorn took its time and paid for it in eggs. By May the ferns had uncurled enough to hide a person.
June — August
The run is barely a thread now, and the ants have a highway where it used to be. The light runs past nine and the notebook gets kept open until my shadow is a blue smear. Everything grows so loudly you stop hearing the wren.
September — November
September kept the sun; October took the trees. The ground underfoot went soft and honest — brackets glowing after rain, toadstools in processions, the oak laying out its galls like a tax. The wood smells of wet wool and something sweet.
drawn from memory & eleven walks — the wood has moved since; that's the point of a wood.
Cap the colour of a barn door's sign. Gills crowded, free, honest. Smells of nothing — which is how you know it means something. Left it standing. It outwants me.
One bar long, found under the birch where the robin argues. Rust exactly the colour of October at four o'clock. Barbs like a comb that has forgiven itself.
Uncoiled in three days; I watched one pinna do a full revolution. The frond is a ladder to somewhere the rain goes. The wood floor, in short, has a second floor.
Dressed for a funeral and a parade. Moved four centimetres in ten minutes — a serious distance, I was told. I was not told; I measured. It was, in fact, walking with great dignity.
One of fourteen, the best of them. Shell a pale keel, seams like a river chart. Trail of slime glistening — the wood's own handwriting, one word long. See field study, p. 14, for the whole morning.
Closed tight against the damp, scales like small shutters. Smells of a whole summer it will not name. Held it; it did not open. We did not argue.
The web caught the dew and then the light; for a moment the fence was holding a small constellation. The spider sat in the exact middle of it, as if hired.
The next one is still out there, doing its thing. Bring the 10×. Bring the bread.
I came to the run that morning to count the wrens, because the wrens are the wood's metronome and I have been counting them for eleven years. I met a snail instead — or rather, a snail met me on the second step of the bank, and the snail, I will not insult you by pretending, took over the morning.
It was a grove snail, one of the striped kind, its shell a pale keel with seams like a river chart, and it was working the wet ground with the seriousness of an archaeologist. Its trail of slime caught the drizzle and glistened, which is to say: the snail was carrying a small river behind it, and neither of us said anything about it.
I sat down. This is the part I have to be honest about. I came with a pencil, a pocket of crumbs, and a plan for one hour; I left with a pencil, an empty pocket, and no plan. The snail had moved four inches. I have never watched anything move four inches so convincingly.
Patience, I am beginning to suspect, is just another word for paying attention longer than the moment lasts.
There is a taxonomy of wet I am assembling, and the snail is its first serious subject: drizzle, which the wood drinks; mist, which the wood wears; dew, which the wood keeps on the fern tips like a promise; and then this — ground-water wet, the wet that lives below the soil and only surfaces in snail-trail and mushroom-cap and the shine of the bank at 08:12. All of them the same water, I am told. I believe the water. I am not sure the categories survive the morning.
I counted fourteen snails on the bank in the end, no two of them alike, each one a small argument against my schedule. The wrens, to their credit, kept the count going whether I listened or not. I left before the snail finished what it was doing. That is the rule of the notebook: you take nothing, and you are left, slowly, with everything.
twelve months of the Little Run's moods · extremes are stamped, because someone had to
| Month | Sky | Wind (from) | Rain days | Temperature | Field note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | NNW · 5 | the run ran brown; jackdaws argued all week coldest | |||
| February | E · 3 | the wren, brief as a coin, before the light | |||
| March | SW · 4 | the snail study — soil like coffee wettest | |||
| April | W · 2 | catkins before the leaves; everything arguing to grow | |||
| May | SE · 2 | three eggs, in a hawthorn huddle | |||
| June | S · 1 | the run a thread; the ants have the highway | |||
| July | SW · 4 | drew until the ferns closed, 21:40 | |||
| August | calm | heat so still the bees flew in a line warmest | |||
| September | W · 3 | oak galls like green coins; the spider constellation | |||
| October | SW · 5 | brackets glowing; the wood smells of rain | |||
| November | N · 4 | acorn tithe; the wood is a pantry | |||
| December | NE · 3 | hoarfrost; the ink froze once (sorry) |
One small engine of a song, impossibly loud for its chest; the wood goes still in rows, like listeners.
A sentence the run repeats to itself, changing one word each time. I have not once understood it; I have never wanted to.
The whole canopy leaning, and then letting go — a long grey sigh with leaves in it.
A parliament of static; the sky briefly rearranged, then filed under again.
Ten thousand small taps, all different sizes — a drum that tunes itself and never asks if you're listening.
The crickets start their metronome; a bat's applause; then the owl — one low line — and silence with edges.
↑ tick things as you pack — it works, I promise
M. Aldercott has been keeping this notebook for eleven years, from the same stile, in the same wood, with the same pencil broken in the same place. I am not a scientist — or I was once, before once was allowed. I am a person who counts. What I count is not the important thing. What I draw is the important thing. The wood corrects me; I have learned to take the corrections in pencil.
By day I repair things for a living; by dusk I am usually somewhere between the stile and the run, drawing whatever has been holding its ground. The notebook is the only house I have ever kept tidy.