It's not what you see

It’s not what you see ... it’s how you see it

article & photographs by Geraldine Woods-Humphrey

It’s evening; the sun has the Midas touch, turning everything to gold. I’m homeward bound, the dog at my side, enjoying this mystical time when the land shape shifts from day to night, shadows creating a different world.

After such a long, sunless winter I’m not hurrying back. The evening sun shines through translucent April green leaves like stained glass in a cathedral. The air is end of day still, the earth holding its breath before the night shift begins. The only sound is the squelch of my boots on the muddy path. Young trees cluster around an ancient oak, its gnarled boughs surely the repository of ancient myths and legends waiting to be told. Purple silver birch tops glow bronze in the light of the setting sun. Amidst the trees the elderly oak seems ready to tell those legends to those around it, of elves, woodland sprites and mischievous fairies stealing milk from the cottagers’ kitchens.

An ancient ash tree catches my eye, split so long ago who can remember when or how? I stop, for staring at me from the blackened trunk is a ghoulish lichengrey face, its eyes dark, sinister hollows. The green man, trapped for eternity in the ash tree? Or a skull of some tortured woodland brownie? The darkening day is playing tricks with my eyes, my imagination running wild. I looked again, there is definitely a face, and there, an elf in a pointed hat and is that a goblin above it? I look clos-er, the face is still there, will always be there because my brain has decided it's what I saw. Easy to see how myths could begin. Myth and folklore are wound around many of our trees. It was once believed that if you passed an ailing child through a cleft in an ash tree it would be cured. In Herefordshire it was unlucky to burn elder, which, if planted near the home protected it from evil spirits. Oak trees abound with myths and legends from their ancient association with Druids to the future Charles II hiding in one after the battle of Worcester. Often rowan and birch were hung above doors, or even stuck in vegetable plots to ward off evil spirits.

Daffodils were thought to be unlucky if they face you, trumpets down, and never walk through a bluebell wood because the fairies could whisk you away. Blue tinges the woodland floor, bluebells peeping through. I walk swiftly on.

What do you see in the tree? Maybe nothing at all, after all it’s only a split tree, isn’t it?