Wooded Coombes
This is part of one of the scarce ancient woodlands remaining to us. As well as its scents, silences and sounds, its flickering dappled light and dark shadows there is a dreamy sense of being outside time. This is the remains of a boundary bank and there are other signs in the undergrowth of a carriage way that the Grenvilles used hundreds of years ago to access their grand home – all gone now.
Woodland Bathing, Stibb Wood
Oil on canvas 81 x 107cm £1450
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woods.
from The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling
Wildlife Corridor, Poundstock
Oil on canvas 76 x 76cm £1250
Butterwell Lane, Stibb
Oil on canvas 76 x 76cm £1250