The woods that run down off Wincle Minn form one of the most wildlife-rich, if unwelcoming, places I know in the Peak District. From the north-south oriented ridge (the Minn) descend 10 nameless brooks that all trend south-eastwards. These have incised a long, rippling hem of steep-sided gullies, clothed in a mix of oak, ash, alder, birch and hazel.
Its underlying sand and mudstones break down to fine clay and all the surrounding pasture is marshy, while the footpaths are seldom less than silver streams of mud soup. The woods are grazed by cattle, which have poached the underlying leaf litter to mire. Walking on the gully sides, which are all finely greased, carries obvious risk, but even standing still doesn’t look straightforward. The ground is so aqueous and loose that even tree roots can’t gain full purchase, and I have never known an English place with so many fallen trees.
Most treacherous, however, are the flat areas standing above the brooks in the wood, where they form hanging aprons of what look like clear ground. Step on to them and you can sink boot-deep in calf-gripping orange clay, which splatters up your legs and body, and can hit you full in the face, leaving that ferrous-rich taste of fresh blood. Add in the deep shadow to the visitor’s own solitariness and Wincle seldom offers less than an intimate encounter.
But I love it: partly for the many funga flourishing on the deadwood; for the brooks’ shaley edges smothered in ferns, liverworts or mosses; partly for the ravens cronking overhead; and partly for the sounds of woodcocks’ wings, like washed linen snapped taut when they rise and jink through the alders.
I love it most of all because Wincle doesn’t need or want us. We are so consumed with extending the reach of our species – more building, more people, more growth, more rights to nature – that I feel we need to institute a statute of human limits. Not only for the sake of other species, but out of love for our own; not as a new year’s resolution but a UN resolution. Wincle Minn, however, is a self-willed commonwealth already living by this scripture.
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