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I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wisdom Sits In Places
It’s cold, it’s dark and I’m stood within a tangled mass of branches. Although I can’t see them clearly, I can hear them tap and creak as gusts of wind blow through the woods. Upwards to my right there’s the hoot of an owl; below me to my left I can see a faint glimmer reflected in a lodge that draws its water from the Cheesden brook.
Feeling uprooted and unsettled, I’ve come out into the woods at Chesham to seek a bit of magic – to watch the sun rise to the east and capture the joy of the trees silhouetted against the sky.
Whilst I wait, I think about the woods in these parts. There are remnants of a forest near here that have been hidden within a valley for thousands of years, glimpsing every nuance of human activity.
Jowkin Wood, in the Cheesden Valley, is classed as one of England’s ancient woodlands. It has had a continuous presence for around 10,000 years. The primeval nature of Jowkin is both sublime and jarring.
No government-funded gravel paths or stiles – just desire paths that reveal journeys of necessity in their splayed diversity. Many of the paths aren’t of human origin, and the thought of that grounds me.
Today, here in Chesham Woods, as the sun hangs stubbornly below the horizon and the last of the shadows pool between the branches, I can’t help but think of what they’ve seen of humanity. Stone giving way to bronze and iron. The first farms taking shape in small clearings. Tribes forming, kingdoms rising, the long shadow of Rome settling over this island and then fading away. Empire, war, hope, division – the full, restless sweep of us. All those grand designs, all those leaders who believed their works would last forever, now worn down to little more than footnotes. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” they said – yet the woods are still here, unhollowed by the boasts that have blown through this landscape like the gusts that whip through the branches today.
Their form of survival – symbiotic, relational, rooted, consistent – has outlasted every story we’ve told about ourselves. While we pushed and conquered and rebuilt, they spoke to each other below the ground, caring for the weak, steadying the young, passing messages through mycorrhizal networks older than any nation-state. In their shade, countless other lives threaded themselves into being: fungi, insects, birds, a whole drifting biota – a miasma of other worlds rubbing against our own.
Scientists now understand that the oldest trees act as hubs – mothering the younger ones, sending nutrients and signals to saplings, supporting the vulnerable. Even dying trees don’t vanish; they release what remains of their stored energy back into the network - like glow worms unleashed from a jar - fuelling the next generation. This isn’t the competitive battleground we once imagined. The forest thrives on reciprocity – a parallel world of wisdom where survival is collective rather than solitary.
Their complexity is far greater than ours. Some scientists say they have a kind of decentralised consciousness that is far less prone to the hubris that comes with a single, self-centred brain. It’s a way of existing that hints at the quantum strangeness of the wider universe. Whatever the case, so much of the forest – even with all our bristling AI and tech – still lies beyond our comprehension.
Back in the here and now comes that moment before dawn when the dark is at its fullest – a depth of gloom and tangle where nothing seems to move. But within minutes, against all odds, the silhouettes begin to rise sharply against a sky that’s filling up with colour.
Shapes I couldn’t name in the dark repopulate their edges; the world is remembering itself through the fractal and the prism.
And it’s here, at this first hint of light, that I’m always stopped short by the sight of winter trees standing in silhouette: its whole architecture pressed into sharp relief. I never quite understand why it moves me so deeply.
Perhaps it’s the way that three dimensions are suddenly distilled into two – perfect cut-outs where every twist of branch is captured with a precision daylight rarely gifts. Perhaps it's the way that, here within this entangled life, there is no beginning and there is no end.
Even in dormancy, there’s motion – a slow, internal flux – and with it the sense that nothing here is ever still. Fractals repeat themselves from tree to branch, each echoing the shape before it. Light threads through the canopy and I’m reminded of a feeling I had when photographing the Herkenrode glass at Lichfield.
In many ways, what I’m witnessing here is nature’s stained glass – an arborescent tracery holding the last flashed and silver stained colours of the morning in a lattice that reaches for the heavens. Having stood beneath a canopy of fallen trees fashioned into angels, I think how angelic the living canopy that embraces me is today.
In this balance of shadow and hue, the tree reveals both its scale and its truth and something inside me responds in kind.
This is my religion, my politics, my tribe. I choose to observe and to learn, to step out of the noise and into the presence of things that hold a clarity that isn’t tainted by irony, free from posturing, and grounded in the rooted wisdom of the land – and to find sanctuary.
I take my last photograph and turn away from the wonder before me, stepping carefully through the soft, broken litter underfoot. As I move, I notice a casualty of my own journey: an acorn crushed beneath my shoe on the way in. The imprint, the acorn – two alien worlds crossing. For a moment I pause, thinking I’ve ended something before it even had a chance to begin. But then I look again and realise it isn’t an ending. Crush an acorn – by accident or intent – and it will still find its arc of growth, pushing out that first thin lime-green shoot. Nothing can stop it.
Alexander von Humboldt was one of the first scientists to see nature as a network. He noted that each step we take into a deeper knowledge of nature only brings us to the entrance of new labyrinths. And standing here, in this tangle of dark branches, observing the acorn, my understanding of it all shifts to a different spectrum.
I realise that the time spent here in the filigree twilight is helping me mimic the acorn. Even when everything feels stalled or spent, a small, stubborn idea pushes upward – the beginning of a new way of anchoring, of navigating, of seeing – a path forming beneath my clumsy feet.
It’s as if the understory is inducing a de-centring of the self, a re-ordering of my ego in the vast complexity of the place I’m in. And in the midst of that unravelling, Merlin Sheldrake’s words from his book Entangled Life surface in full: “Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system?”
Out here, I’m reminded that there are ways of interpreting, of listening, and of speaking that move beyond the narrow orbit of human intent. The trees provide the answer every day; and as long as they speak, I shall listen.
*some photographs here were taken on a separate occasion in the same woods.
Membership really does help. Thank you.
Chesham woods reminded me again how wisdom sits in places. Membership is what lets me keep seeking it — travelling, writing, photographing, and sharing it freely each week. It also powers the Member Powered shoots that support historic places.
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I'm giving to the next person to sign up for membership a copy of Janet Gough's new book Divine Light (with many of my photos inside - including the Herkenrode Glass) and a stained glass transfer of 'Angels Ascending to Heaven' - from St. Mary's Warwick. (I have one in my van window).
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Andy Marshall
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Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be....
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with iPhone 17 Pro and DJI Mini 5 Pro.
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