The Ned Wood Archive

Let everyone debate the true reality

I’d rather see the world

The way it used to be

Dusty Springfield

There is something very satisfying about really getting to know a place.  Especially when that place is like my ten square kilometres of Derbyshire: calm and relaxed and beautiful.  

Every morning, I’d get up nice and early and cross the road to the cottage near the pub where the old dear sold me something to eat for a few bob, getting that special warm buzz you get from having your breakfast before the rest of the world.  Then I’d collect my little rucksack with my tools in it – my notebook, pencil, map, tape measure, hammer, and compass – and step out. 

I walked all of the paths in that corner of Derbyshire, the well trodden ones and the unused ones. Once I’d said to Holly that freedom was being able to sit on your own and do nothing and she’d said, no: freedom was being able to choose your own path. So I chose my own paths all summer. That day we went to Stonehenge and walked down the avenue, Oxford Rich had shown us a quote about how nothing can be lost on a well worn path. And Chris said: “If something hasn’t been lost, then it can’t be found. You can’t find anything on a well worn path, you have to go down the road less travelled.”

I’d started in the north-west corner of my area, and worked field by field, road by road, rock by rock, across the ten squares on my map.  Ten square kilometres that I had to turn into a geological map.  Dotted around England that summer, as every summer, a few hundred geologists were walking round doing the same.

I’d call at each farm and explain what I was doing.  Most were happy, but just as I’d been warned, the old bugger at Hall Farm didn’t want me disturbing his veins, so we had to sit down and work out which fields were his and colour in a big no entry sign on my map.

But within a few weeks, even he was just as friendly as the rest of them.  Sounds a bit corny doesn’t it – the mighty Ned Wood charms the old bugger round.  But, if you think about it logically, what else would happen?  There’s this bloke who’s not very confident around folk he doesn’t know so he’s a bit sour with newcomers.  He gets a reputation for being grumpy.  Maybe something happened to him in the past; perhaps he got ripped off by someone, so he’s doubly suspicious.  Some new kid comes looking round his fields, so he’s bound to be wary.  Then the weeks go by and he sees the kid more often.  He gets used to him and feels more comfortable and lightens up a bit.  No surprise that he’s giving me a tour around his fields by the end of the summer.

And as I went round my ten square kilometres, I recorded each rock I found sticking its head above the vegetation.  I’d measure its thickness, try to find a bedding plane and measure its slope, and try to describe its colour as accurately as I could.  In my pockets I had little chippings of what I called light grey, medium grey, and dark grey so I could calibrate the rocks I’d found.  Soon I added very light grey, not quite so light grey, and dark and smelly grey.  Where there wasn’t an outcrop, I searched the walls for anything unusual, knowing that farmers would have picked up the odd stone from the middle of a field and left it at the nearest convenient place.  Sometimes you’d find three or four blocks of lava in a wall and be able to guess that you were walking on an old volcanic flow, even though there was no other difference in the slope or the vegetation.

I felt at home with my rocks.  Bernie had once been telling me how this planet was just a collection of atoms and that these atoms get recycled through all the animals, vegetables, and minerals on earth as each animal is born and dies, as each plant grows and decays, and as each rock is created and is weathered away to nothing.  “It’s karma isn’t it,”  he said.  “Your atoms start out as seaweed, then come back as punk rockers.  If you come to think of it, we all started out as rocks.  You’re looking at our past lives. All of our atoms were in the first rocks of the Pre-Cambrian.  In fact, really, we’re still rocks.  Just rocks that can move around.  Rocks that dance.’

I told myself that’s why I felt so at home – I was back among my brothers.