These are the trees I walk with
The Tree at the End of the Road
This is the third in my tree trilogy posts. It also belongs to a wider body of work I’ve been making under the title Walking Words: six walking-based pamphlets made from routes, poetry, photography and reflective text. They grow out of the Follow the Stone walks in Churchtown and Marshside (Southport, UK), and I’m hoping they will come into the world in the autumn. For now, The Tree at the End of the Road is one of the pieces gathered on the way.
I have been walking ever since I can remember moving: with Sid the dog to Coventry City Centre from Almond Tree Avenue at 5.15 in the morning; I know because I noticed the time on the clock. Six of us marching behind dad from Ramsgate to Broadstairs to get to the ‘last drinks’ in time, Back late at night after attending a gig in Bulkington Working Men’s Club walking home alone, lost and gathering courage to knock on the door of one of the posh houses for a lift because it was dark and I didn’t know which road led out of Bulkington to Coventry and I could end up in Bedworth. It was safer in those days but I didn’t know that. I was terrified and my over-age boyfriend was playing in a band that meant he couldn’t take his under-age girlfriend home. Luckily my dad wasn’t living at home and my mum was pretty soft in those days – even with me. I was fifteen. Anyway the walking, the walking: Walking for a solution, walking for clarity, walking with a story, walking with a memory. Walking to a tree. Round and round a garden, walking up a cliff. Walking, just walking and then the poetry came. Then the Walking Words came. At autumn time when harvest comes The words, the tree, the steps will meet: Six buckets full. The Tree at the End of the Road She’s a Scots pine, the tree at the end of Carisbrooke. She’s huge and she’s beautiful. Her form fills my vista. You just cannot miss her. She gushes buckets full of cones kicked by careless walkers flattened by passing drivers. She threads her pavement mats mirrors her rooted canopy threatening a rupture in the corner house. She’s beautiful. Before long she will be lined up for execution like her Scottish sister, Mary, Queen of Pines. Also Forres of Macbeth fame. You’re courting disaster! We are offstage! Shhhh! I have had a lifelong journey with that Scottish play, that wood that is Birnam full of oak and Scots pine. It’s been an unrequited love affair of some fifty years and counting.
This is the third in a trilogy of Substack posts about trees. The first was
The second was
Thank you for reading.