Category: Great Ridge Wood: Gleanings

Ralph Whitlock, in his book Salisbury Plain, published in 1955, writes:

. . . . . the Fonthill estates. These extend over the climbing downs and embrace the greater part of Great Ridge Woods, a vast, lonely wilderness of stunted oaks, hazels, birch and scrub, through which wander many ancient trackways and a Roman road from Sorbiodunum to the Mendip mines. Many of the old downland pastures on the slopes around the forest have been ploughed in recent years and yield, when the rabbits will let them, reasonable crops of barley; but barren, unspoilt corners still remain, jewelled in summer with all the exquisite little downland flowers that are here never stifled by ranker growths.

W.H. Hudson in A Shepherd’s Life, published in 1910, referring to “the Great Ridge Wood, which clothes the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale of the Wylye,” says:

“It is an immense wood, mostly of scrub or dwarf oak, very dense in some parts, in others thin, with open, barren patches, and like a wild forest, covering altogether twelve or fourteen square miles – perhaps more. There are no houses near, and no people in it except a few gamekeepers: I spent long days in it without meeting a human being. It was a joy to me to find such a spot in England, so wild and solitary, and I was filled with pleasing anticipation of all the wild life I should see in such a place, especially after an experience I had on my second day in it. I was standing in an open glade when a cock-pheasant uttered a cry of alarm, and immediately afterwards, startled by the cry perhaps, a roe-deer rushed out of the close thicket of oak and holly in which it had been hiding, and ran past me at a very short distance, giving me a good sight of this shyest of the large wild animals still left to us. He looked very beautiful to me, in that mouse-coloured coat which makes him invisible in the deep shade in which he is accustomed to pass the daylight hours in hiding, as he fled across the open space in the brilliant May sunshine. But he was only one, a chance visitor, a wanderer from wood to wood about the land; and he had been seen once, a month before my encounter with him, and ever since then the keepers had been watching and waiting for him, gun in hand, to send a charge of shot into his side.”

Hudson continues:

“That was the best and the only thing I saw in the Great Ridge Wood, for the curse of the pheasant is on it as on all the woods and forests in Wiltshire, and all wild life considered injurious to the semi-domestic bird, from the sparrow-hawk to the harrier and buzzard and goshawk, and from the little mousing weasel to the badger; and all the wild life that is only beautiful, or which delights us because of its wildness, from the squirrel to the roe-deer, must be included in the slaughter.”

“One very long summer day spent in roaming about in this endless wood, always on the watch, had for sole result, so far as anything out of the common goes, the spectacle of a hare sitting on a stump. The hare started up at a distance of over a hundred yards before me and rushed straight away at first, then turned and ran on my left so as to get round to the side from which I had come. I stood still and watched him as he moved swiftly over the ground, seeing him not as a hare but as a dim, brown object successively appearing, vanishing, and reappearing, behind and between the brown tree trunks, until he had traced half a circle and was then suddenly lost to sight. Thinking that he had come to a stand I put my binocular on the spot where he had vanished, and saw him sitting on an old oak stump about thirty inches high. It was a round mossy stump about eighteen inches in diameter, standing in a bed of brown, dead leaves, with the rough brown trunks of other dwarf oak-trees on either side of it. The animal was sitting motionless, in profile, its ears erect, seeing me with one eye, and was like a carved figure of a hare set on a pedestal, and had a very striking appearance.”

“As I had never seen such a thing before I thought it was worth mentioning to a keeper I called to see at his lodge on my way back in the evening. It had been a blank day, I told him – a hare sitting on a stump being the only thing I could remember to tell him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve seen something I’ve never seen in all the years I’ve been in these woods. And yet, when you come to think of it, it’s just what one might expect a hare to do. The wood is full of old stumps, and it seems only natural a hare should jump on to one to get a better view of a man or animal at a distance among the trees. But I never saw it.’ What, then, had he seen worth remembering during his long hours in the wood on that day, or the day before, or on any day during the last thirty years since he had been policing that wood, I asked him. He answered that he had seen many strange things, but he was not now able to remember one to tell me! He said, further, that the only things he remembered were those that related to his business of guarding and rearing the birds; all other things he observed in animals, however remarkable they might seem to him at the moment, were things that didn’t matter and were quickly forgotten.”