Sanctuary

The ancient beech outside the ruined church needed a visit, so I set off with my camera. This tree has a uniquely beechy form... by which I mean that beeches can often become contorted, elephantine, bulbous and charismatic, and this veteran is a great example. Initials scored into the bark and huge fungal fruiting bodies add to the tree's distinctive appearance. This beech is the past becoming the future in a continual process of entanglement with human actions, fungal actions, and the actions of climate, birds, invertebrates... the tree is both process and matter... or matter in its intra-active becoming.

I took some pictures and then went inside, where I saw that someone had put a stone between the branches of the young oak. Is this an offering? A memento? As ever, bark drew me, but so did what seemed to be fungal bodies withing the walls of the ruined church. Their strength enough, over time, to topple the structure, surely.

I also saw a lot, and I mean a LOT, of large dog prints. And I wondered if a Hunt had come through here? The quantity of prints all the same age and all large, suggested a pack of hounds. I tried to work out where they might have entered and exited the walled churchyard. They could have jumped the walls, but I couldn't see evidence of that. No horses had been in, but some people had, I thought, been running in here, slipping on the mud, perhaps to get the hounds out of consecrated ground. Bear in mind, I am no tracker, so I can only make suppositions.

I was imagining the fox, mouth wide in a grimace of fear as he panted, flying the wall into the churchyard, with the baying hounds, breath steaming, long strides eating up the ground, in a tan and white pack behind him. The red tongues and the white teeth. The fox electric with desperation; the hounds ignited by the yearning to tear his amber hide into shreds.

It was very cold, and the wind was fierce, chilling. The sun came out, a brightening if not hugely warming relief, and I stood against the wall and asked the place to tell me.

A different imagining. The canny fox seeking sanctuary. He flies over the wall, with the hounds singing at his heels and then he leaps and climbs the broken crumbling stones to stand atop a wall, his golden eyes alight as the hounds leap at the sandstone, and the men, in a state of rare shame for those who delight at spilled blood, knowing that they cannot shoot at the creature in a sacred place. They gather the dogs with howls and whipcracks, a well-aimed boot here and there, and leave, snarling, spitting fury, as the fox cleans his pitch paws on the unforgotten remnants of a former world.