John Pearson ventures into a piece of Old England – Balaam’s Wood.
Let us travel again, this time back some 800 years or more, our time machine a small wood just outside Birmingham. ‘Ancient Woodland’, of which there are some 52,000 such areas in the UK, dates from 1600 or earlier. Balaam’s Wood, Frankley, is a small plot of around six acres whose earliest recorded mention is in the 13th Century. The Visitor Board, proclaiming this a Local Nature Reserve, suggests it could even be a direct descendant of the Wildwoods which covered much of Britain after the Ice Age, home once to Elk and Brown Bear (latterly, to ‘Ratty’, ‘Mole’, ‘Badger’ and the Stoats?). As we walk through it now, not just along the manicured, log-bordered pathways of hardcore, but going ‘off piste’, pushing through brambles and the branches of trees which have fallen, we follow in the footsteps of those who have tended it for centuries.
Broad-leaved woodlands such as this were (and still are) coppiced, a practice recognised since medieval times. Traditionally each year on a 6-10 year cycle, a new section of the ‘underwood’ was cut to the ground or ‘coppiced’, providing a constantly renewable source of wood, as well as allowing the trees space to grow. Twigs and small branches were collected for kindling.
The terrain is uneven, particularly off the beaten track; in some places shallow valleys, muddy sided, have been carved by small streams, their beds dried up at present. Rough bridges have been laid across where rain water must flow when in full spate. The southern edge of the Wood is deeply cut through by the River Rea, its banks falling away in some places, taking with them trees whose roots were once embedded there. Here and there, as in nearly every such wood I have visited, a fallen tree forms a natural bridge. The river itself, now slow and shallow, once powered a string of Mills, approximately one per mile between here and Spaghetti Junction, some 10 miles away on foot. The closest to here is thought to have been Frog Mill (probably sited in the area between Frogmill Road, Rubery Lane and Balaam’s Wood). There is no record of this since 1403, although it doubtless had a working life for many years after that.
As befits both the Wildwoods and the Ancient Woodland which followed them, Balaam’s Wood sports everything from the mighty oak, alder and hazel to bluebells, when in season. Brambles abound, their berries just ripe now as I write. Sprigs of holly sprout from the base of some of the trees. The Visitor Board offers the hope that one might see or hear a great spotted woodpecker, down by the River Rea perhaps. Instead I was treated to the gentle conversation between a pair of Wood Pigeons somewhere in the gloomy distance.
The present wood is small. However those who engineered the urban sprawl (sorry, the tasteful out-of-town estates which have largely swallowed up the countryside here) left at least something behind. One can almost imagine the animals who inhabited these parts fleeing in panic from advancing bulldozers, as did the inhabitants of Watership Down. Who knows now how far this woodland once extended? Perhaps some of the larger trees found alongside the new estates are lonely survivors of a greater whole. I do not know what visitor numbers are like; how many families picnic on its flat open spaces; how many couples ‘plight their troth’ strolling through the trees on warm summer evenings. How many locals know the history of this small treasure in their midst? Do the occupants of the nearby otherwise fairly nondescript Frogmill Walk understand its origins I wonder?
As you read this it will be Winter; visitors to the woods will be fewer in number – it is getting a bit cold for outdoor troth-plighting; snow may cap the tree stumps, carpet the piles of branches and the brambles, rest atop the Visitor Board. Hardy animals, birds and insects shiver in the woods if they have stayed here, or are fast asleep. Only that holly will be in its element perhaps? Flora and fauna all await the Spring and the beginning of another year. Hopefully all this will live on, for 800 more.