How easy it is to miss the grandeur of the world. I can’t count the times I’ve walked into town this way, never once realising what lies just yards from the path. This treasure isn’t found in a beauty spot; in fact, it’s hidden on a highway embankment. To reach it you have to pass beneath crackling power lines, then cross a bridge over the roaring A19, all the while enduring the stench drifting from the household waste recycling centre.
Usually, I hurry this part of my walk, but last week for the first time I found myself slipping into the trees growing on the embankment. Planted about 30 years ago, most of the woodland consists of ailing ash trees standing in a flotsam and jetsam of cans, bottles and fast-food packaging; but in a natural regeneration, phalanxes of holly are rising and, in their midst, a single, wildling yew.
A meeting with a yew tree can never be underwhelming. Not considered ancient until they’re 900 years old, they are the UK’s longest-living trees, with Perthshire’s Fortingall yew thought to be 3,000 years old. But my A19 yew isn’t one of these arboreal Methuselahs; it’s a mere teenager. Though only growing at head height, it was the youngster’s needles that caught my eye. The green leaves glinted in the understorey even on that foggy February afternoon. Frequently found in graveyards, for millennia yews have been associated with mortality; they also dealt out plenty of death when used as longbows, or as poison. Yet they’re actually a tree of life. Their bark and pointed needles provide us with docetaxel and paclitaxel, two of our most powerful chemotherapy treatments.
All trees are time travellers. Their longevity makes us wonder what they’ve seen through the centuries. But a young yew has the power to take us forward in time too. If it remains undisturbed, what might this youngster witness in the long, slow millennia to come? Human lives will come and go like the leaves, but the yew and its glinting, curing needles will remain.
Subterranean blues
There’s another splendour I’m guilty of taking for granted. I’m so used to seeing molehills that I barely register them but those little mounds of dark soil always point to hidden wonders. When you see a molehill, you’re standing above a vast, subterranean masterpiece: their tunnelling systems can wind back and forth for hundreds of metres, filling half an acre of land. This underground network of chambers and tunnels is all interconnected, allowing the mammal to live almost entirely underground.
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To maximise the mole’s ability to feed on worms, which form its main diet, most of the excavations are within a foot of the surface, but some can be up to a metre down, enabling the mole to escape the earth-hardening effects of frosts or drought. To avoid rising water tables during persistent rain, a few chambers can even lie above the ground in specially constructed heaps of earth, called fortresses. Many compartments double as larders. Moles need to eat 50g of worms a day. During times of plenty, they immobilise worms by biting their heads off, and then store them in these purpose-built pantries for later consumption. One or two burrows are lined with dead grass and form bedrooms or nurseries when mothers give birth.
Most of a mole’s life consists of being alone, patrolling the tunnels that lie beneath our feet, and feeding on the worms that fall through their roof. But at this time of year, the males are expanding their territory, digging through the earth in the hope of breaking into a female’s territory. Because these are the days when the solitary moles meet and mate.
High-rise rapture
The surprises never stop coming. A few days after finding the yew, I went to London. My thoughts still full of ancient yews and freshly dug, nuptial mole tunnels, I had wandered into Coal Drops Yard, a plush development around King’s Cross station, when I heard the last thing I’d expected. A song thrush. Filled with irrepressible delight, I hastened towards it. The sound led me as far as some new high-rise flats set in a small area of bushes, then disappeared. But something just as wonderful took its place. Sparrows were chirping, and starlings calling. I glanced up the side of the flats and saw permanent metal nesting boxes, on which, high above, spuggies and starlings were perched. After all, how simple it is. An estate agent on the ground floor was offering two-bed flats for £2 million; but what price could you put on finding Cockney sparrows and starlings?
Jonathan Tulloch’s children’s novel Cuckoo Summer was nominated for the 2023 Carnegie Medal
