Here were giants...

By Fiona M Jones:

This is a mountain-range on Middle Earth. Twisted folds of rock, precipitous cliffs and narrow hidden glens. Deep caves below, where live the things that hide from the light of day. Confronted with this massif you must scale it or negotiate, at your peril, the subterranean pathways—

OK, it’s a tree stump in a cow field. It’s still epic. By its girth it must have been a giant, shrugging off the centuries, a thing that lived until it had forgotten how to die. This one’s the largest in a widely-spaced row just outside the southern boundary of the Pitfirrane golf course, along from the prisoner-of-war base. 

Somebody, at some point in the mid-to-late 1900s, must have looked at these majestic trees and decided to cut them down. Every one of them, levelled to knee-height. I wonder where the hundred-tons of wood went—how much was burned, which gates and roof-beams came from these. And when. These tree-remains have stood for decades, rotting hollow and silvering, mossing on the outside, concealing who knows what of rodents and invertebrates. 

Perhaps this row of giants would all have fallen by now anyway, succumbing one by one to wind or lightning, untidy in their dwindling. Trees should be tidy, someone must have said; and untidy trees are only worth their wood. 

But how tidy do you need a muddy field, one you can’t even walk through except after weeks without rain? Even before it was a cows’ field it was only a prison camp. Before that it would have belonged to the original Pitfirrane estate. Someone two or three centuries ago planted a row of saplings for the edge of a road or the boundary of a vista. Most land in Britain has changed its use so many times you’ll find a king in a car park or a Roman bath under a shopping centre. I don’t know what this landscape was when these trees first came here. 

Here were giants, at the edge of this boggy field churned deep with the hooves of cattle. Not much of each giant is left. Enough to house a few families of hedgehogs and mice, and a nation or two of woodlice. If you step on top of this tree stump you still stand upon the roof of a world. 

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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.