Crossing from road to wood is both easy and hard. Easy because the boundary is a single strand of barbed wire, hard because I’m stepping outside the law, again.
The transgression pays off in minutes, though, as three wood-wraiths rise and drift ahead of me through the trees – brown hares, unhurried, seemingly unafraid. I pocket plastic as I go – cartridge cases, baler twine, a foil balloon – but can do nothing about feed sacks embedded in the soil or decades-old tree guards, brittle and disintegrating.
