Long Wood at Burghley is one of those mystical old woodlands that you see so often across the English landscape. Bluebells carpeting the floor in the spring, lush green hazel pepper-potted throughout the understorey and tall, drawn-out ash trees dominating the skyline. When the wind picks up, the great boughs of the ash trees sway like terrific pendulums, threatening to break at any moment with echoing creaks and moaning, but they rarely do.
On either side of Long Wood, farmland rolls away before eventually finding more woodland or a village edge. The gentle rumble of trucks trundling up and down the quarry road nearby is more or less an ever-present backing track to the creaking ash trees.
“A cloud of pigeons had come off a pile of sugar beet”
I had been in Long Wood on
