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THERE ARE TWO FOOTPATHS no more than twenty minutes walk from our house but, until today, I don't think I've ever walked them.Crackling white ice, the remains of this morning's snow shower, marks the path along a sunken lane. Old gateposts, twin standing stones, guard the entrance to a field. Holly adds seasonal greenery to the hedge. Ivy festoons a hedgerow Ash tree.
It certainly has the feel of an old trackway and I wonder if it was ever been anything more than a farm track from the village to the fields. It climbs the hill, passes allotments and a racing pigeon loft, then emerges at the Little Bull public house in the centre of the village. Perhaps it was once used by cattle drovers? Crossing the main road and following a path along the top of a shallow quarry, now filled with a row of houses, brings me out opposite a footpath that disappears between two houses. I've always thought that it didn't look very promising and assumed it just led down over an open slope. But, surprisingly, beyond the houses, you come out not a slope, but on a hidden, shallow, grassy hollow.
World Tree  By now it's almost sunset. A half moon rises in the east. Against a pale yellow sky to the south west an old ash tree seems to take on a symbolic presence. In the past it has been cut during hedge-laying so that it now forms what you could, with a bit of imagination, see as a headless cross, or a seven-branched candlestick. It reminds me too of Yggdrasil, the world tree of Viking myth, which had its branches in heaven, its base on earth and its roots in hell. From where I'm standing it frames what looks like a minaret. It's actually the top section of the local television mast at Emley Moor, just poking above the horizon against the glow of sunset. It summons the faithful, not to prayer, but, for example, to regular doses of soap opera, now up to about eight offerings a day on the various channels. The never-ending stories for our times.
The Forest of ArdenThe wooded valley sudden opens up as you walk across this grassy field. You've suddenly got a helicopter's-eye view below your feet of the deep wooded valley, which, according to the geological map, it a kind of miniature rift, bordered by two fault lines .In my research into the valley I've discovered a 1930s brochure for a local holiday camp-site, long since vanished, which refers to this view of the wood as 'the Forest of Arden', and quotes a passage on the pleasures of the rural idyll from As You Like It. Advertiser's hype of course, but it's stuck in my mind and that's the way I think of it now. There's a cheeky innocence about using the name, but, if you could come here and experience it for yourself, you'd realise that, in a funny way, it is quite true to the spirit of the place.
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