Our Grand Finale!

A stream of excited children and smiley adults poured into Ludlow Assembly Rooms yesterday evening for the Grand Finale of In woods we forget things, at the wood edge we tell stories.

There were cakes (made in Ludlow) which I did lay on in vast quantities, also tea, coffee and juice – and once everyone had been refreshed, I was thrilled to bits to find over 70 people sitting down to see photographs, live performances and short films of the project.

I am so grateful to everyone who turned out on a dark, cold November night to drive some miles into Ludlow, including teachers, teaching assistants, headteachers and support workers.  Your young people are magnificent!  And thank you to our experts in the woods, Karen Limbrick from Brineddin, Toni and Ru from Tru Wood, and Clive Dean of SWT at Brook Vessons.

Big thanks also last night to project volunteers Liz Hyder and Dougie Greatorex, who looked after everyone beautifully, and handed out extra cake.  Thank you too, to Darren Cadet at LAR, who fixed the technical difficulties I was having embedding the films.

Huge thanks to the funders of this project too – I’ve loved it – that’s the Shropshire Hills AONB Conservation Fund and Shropshire Housing Group.  Thank you Cath Landles and Helen Vaughan for travelling to see our Finale.

On the way out, everyone stuck a sticker on the Tree of Evaluation…  and if I may say so, the three ‘leaves’ over there on the right were added by very small younger siblings, who just seemed to want to join in.

‘Dark twin trees twist together’

This morning I drove up to Snailbeach through woods going gold while still green, to meet the P5/P6 class from Bishop’s Castle Primary for their final trip to ‘their’ wood – Brook Vessons.

We made short work of the climb up onto the Stiperstones, where we stopped to identify the saddle of Cader Idris, miles away and huge, to the west.  Then we were back in Brook Vessons, standing in a circle, silent and listening.  From a farm a dog barked.  Another dog answered.  A blackbird sang behind us.  A crow flew over and cawed.  Leaves fell.

Then we went to find the trees that line one of the old tracks through the wood.  All the children found ‘their own’ tree without hesitation, and set to, practising speaking their poems.

a tree trunk bulges like a stomach

I filmed them, one at a time,  the whole class moving along the trackway and settling again to hear each new poem, giving wonderful attention to the performers – a real challenge, this, since we were all ankle deep in crispy dry leaves, so there was lots of opportunity for unscripted crackling.  Once we had to do a second take due to a passing helicopter…

At the end we filmed Lily’s poem beside the one-night-house.  I found this really moving, as Lily read about what she’d imagined, the night the house was built, and the children watching the very first smoke emerging from the chimney.  For a moment, we could all hear the laughter and the singing on that early morning.

nettles swarm inside the deserted home

What a brilliant bunch of people.

‘The wood is as rough as a black bear’

Last week, on a day with a distinct October nip in the air, I walked back to the woods with Bucknell Primary’s Key Stage 2 class.  We carried laminated copies of the children’s poems, and cameras to film their performances under the trees they chose to write for.

Once we were in the wood, the children scattered to find their trees.  No-one had any trouble remembering exactly the right place.  Indeed more than one pair showed me the precise knot or bulge or bark pattern that had inspired a particular line or phrase.

Everybody practised, and then we all trooped round the wood, alternately being the performers, and the audience.  The performances were moving and joyful, and the quality of the listening was just as good.

We left the laminated poems tied onto the trees for Toni and Ru to find later.  (And we also left a poem for the Composting Toilet).

‘This one-night-house crumbles below the trees’

Today I spent the morning with the lively minds of Mr Harris’s class in Bishop’s Castle Primary, and we made amazing poems.  The children worked in pairs, revising the Poem Notes we made on our visit last week to Brook Vessons.

They worked on a first draft of the notes while I raced round, hearing them talk about their ideas and discussing where lines should finish, and how strong is a word and how many adjectives is too much.

We made use of the IWB to do some whole group editing of a poem draft created by two people.  Below, Ryan is putting in purple slashes to mark ends of lines, and taking ideas from the rest of the class to replace a word with a better one.

After break each pair provided a single line towards a whole class poem.  We edited it a little bit on the IWB, and I’ve edited it a little more, and here it is:

We walk over hollow hills to where
calm cooling shade covers ground.
Dark twin trees twist together, Rowan
with Hawthorn, and their roots’
pointy claws grip hard to what’s under.

Their spiky branches are sharp as shark’s teeth.
Their berries hang like Christmas puddings
and a tree trunk bulges like a stomach.
We watch insects dance in the golden glare
of fiery sunlight through the leaves.

Nettles swarm inside the deserted home.
This one-night-house crumbles below the trees.
Brambles flow across its floor.
Our tree, a silent witness of the past.

 

‘On hollow hills full of lead’

We stood on the north end of the Stiperstones and stared into Wales.  Fifty miles away, every ridge of Cader Idris showed up.  Near at hand Mr Harris’s class from Bishop’s Castle Primary walked fearlessly by groups of Highland and Galloway cattle, who graze these moors to conserve the habitat.

We met with Clive Dean from Shropshire Wildlife Trust, who showed us conservation skills in the form of taking down self-seeded young birches using bowsaws and loppers.  If they were all left to grow, the damp grassland would be crowded out under shade.  Brook Vessons is a strange, atmospheric woodland that was once a settlement that grew up with the Snailbeach mining industry.  Working people built ‘one-night-houses’ here, and took on smallholdings to supplement their small incomes. It was finally abandoned by the mid 20th century, when the lead-mining industry declined, but remnants of fields and cottage walls remain.

The children worked highly efficiently sawing and lopping and by lunchtime we could see we’d had an impact.  Then picnic lunch under an ancient Rowan tree, grown broad and far older than usual as a result of its century of lopping and coppicing during the times that people lived here.

After lunch we walked through the kitchens of collapsed cottages to find a double hedge line of old trees.  Here the children worked in pairs to create Poem Notes for a particular tree.  It was exciting to read the seeds of poems to come.  Then we continued for a short way to find the last remaining ruin above ground.  There’s just a gable end and chimney left – perhaps this really was a one-night-house, built overnight so a fire could be lit in the hearth in the morning, and smoke be seen coming out of the chimney.  If you managed this, the landlord allowed you to build the rest of it and become part of the community.

We talked about the people who lived here, the children who ran about these lanes and in and out of the little houses, the people who worked so hard here.  Then the 21st century children sat down opposite the one-night-house and wrote.

Reading our poems to the trees

The rare and beautiful Spreading Bellflower

On a cool late September morning I met the Working Together Group and Karen Limbrick at the edge of Brineddin Wood.  We walked in with a clutch of poems.

On the way we actually found a very rare flower that Karen had described on our first visit – a bright harebell blue, but far more uncommon – the Spreading Bellflower, that flourishes at the wood edge.

And then the young people found the trees they’d written for, and read their poems aloud to them in the quiet of the wood.

 

 

Writing drafts with Bucknell Primary

1st and 2nd drafts by Greg and Fraser

The classroom hummed with busy children working on their Poem Notes from our visit to the wood.  I asked them to work in pairs, with the same person they’d made the Poems Notes with, and they were aiming for short (ish) poems of 6 to 8 lines.  We talked a bit about finding a zinger of a first line, and a really resonant last line.

And then we were drafting. We stopped to put some promising lines on the IWB and discussed how to choose the line endings.

And here’s a poem about Tru Wood’s composting toilet.  Toni and Ru are going to put it on the back of the toilet door, for the woodlice to ponder.

With half an hour to go, we stopped, and pairs of children chose a line from their poem to put towards a whole class poem.  Here’s what we’ve ended up with:

Dawn breaks through the wet and the wild wind hugs our oak.
Our mossy tree is shaggy like a giant hairy dog.

Fungus grows in sparkling colonies under peacock
feathers tied with lace and silk to trees.

Big Red supports another tree that is tired and falling over.
Now the hedgehog starts to curl to spikes like barbed wire

and leaves drop like bombs falling from a plane
and squirrels rattle in the twigs.

Late burning sun dances like a disco ball on warty trees.
Treebuds are raindrops hanging.

Making Poems with the Working Together group

Following from our visit to Brineddin Wood, I walked into Ludlow to visit the Working Together Cafe.  Only slightly distracted by hot scones being baked in the adjoining kitchen space, we all set to work to re-draft the group’s Poem Notes into poems.

Everyone was so enthusiastic, and so full of ideas that we rapidly produced a wonderful group of poems.  I’ll be publishing them elsewhere on this blog to celebrate them.  But here’s a few lines from some of them.  Enjoy.

I watch the knots
and the leaves sway
and drop on me.

Roots grow into stones
and seeds go into earth
by tiny acorns that haven’t grown.
Becky

The rain came heavier and heavier
so it ran underground, the sound
of running water

came from nowhere,
nowhere to be seen.
Steph

The tree is bent over
remember the day has gone.
The tree bent over my head,
sitting here on my own,
thinking of you coming back
to victory.
Chloe

 

 

‘Wind hugs our oak’

Truly, today the sun smiled on us all.  I spent a wonderful day with children and staff from Bucknell Primary School.  We walked down the lane to Tru Wood, which is owned and managed by Toni and Ru.  And now their 12 week old baby, Lena, who was possibly the best behaved baby ever to join a school trip.

We chose leaves from a bucket, then found other people who had the same kind of leaf as we did.  (Oak team pictured above).  And then we set off into Tru Wood to create wildlife habitats.  Great detail was created, with moss-lined nests for hedgehogs and upper storey boutique apartments for mice and solitary bees.

After lunch the children worked in pairs in a poetry workshop.  They located trees and spaces they ‘adopted’ and then wrote on a shared clipboard about it.  Some fantastically imaginative ideas and language followed very naturally – I remember ‘slug roads’ up an oak, and detailed descriptions of mice and fungi!  I’ll be able to capture all these great things next week when I go into Bucknell Primary to work with the class on their Poem Notes, and edit and re-draft them into finished poems.

The day finished well, with marshmallows cooked outdoors on an open fire.

‘Leaves rustle with dancing deer’

I’ve just come home from an exhilarating day out with the Working Together group.  We went to Brineddin Wood and met with Karen Limbrick, who is part of the Redlake Valley Community Benefit Society (RVCBS), who care for a quillet of woodland there.

We walked along a narrow path into the woods, the oak trees rising steeply up the hillside above us.  Karen told us stories about the wood, and its history of coppicing and charcoal burning, and how horses would have dragged out the timber, leaving distinctive hollows in the ground.  For some 70 years the quillet (a measure of woodland) has been unworked, and the trees have grown close and the deer destroy young shoots.  Members of the RVCBS are now coppicing again.  We set to work with Karen’s guidance to make cages around freshly coppiced stumps, picturing the urgent pressing of slender heads of Roe Deer as they reach in to crop off new leaves.  We gathered fallen twigs and wove them closely.

After a tasty picnic in almost-sunshine at the wood edge, we gathered our notebooks and pencils and set off to get close to trees, and ground, and write.

We already have some glorious words emerging from our Poem Notes:

at the end of the night
the mouse comes out
rain patters down
leaves rustle with dancing deer…

winding ivy round the tree, spider inside a delicate cobweb
strung across twigs…

 the tree is bent over to remember
the day has gone
leaf litter at my feet
I was picking the sticks
from the ground…

Tomorrow I’ll being going along to the Working Together cafe in Ludlow to work on editing and drafting our Poem Notes.  As we said goodbye we talked excitedly about how we would then return to Brineddin Wood to read our completed poems to the trees.