chestnuts wood

In 1944 Leonard Clark returned to the Forest to find his beloved Chestnuts Wood clear-felled: “There, to my horror, I saw a bald hill with just a thin ring of trees on the top. My eyes flooded with tears. So this was all that remained of my Chestnuts Wood” (A Fool in the Forest, p11). Startling as this present-day scene is near Worrall Hill, thankfully it’s a long overdue harvest of chestnut coppice – so soon new shoots will be sprouting, and in just a few years chestnut trees will be reaching for the sky again and resounding with bird song in spring. Leonard Clark wrote three fantastic books looking back at the Forest of his youth. In those books, and in many of his poems he brilliantly evokes the deep and rewarding relationship we can have with nature and landscape, ever changing as it is. Successful author, poet, editor he is also a hugely important figure in the history of Forest of Dean writing – someone to inspire the next generation of Forest writers?  

Leonard Clark depicted in the Cinderford mural by Tom Cousins