‘The owl regarded us for a few precious moments then turned with wings fanned wide, plunging silently down and away through the trees, a keeper of secrets, a creature of night, its image forever a memory, a small detail in a continuing story’
There is a moment in the deep dark wood when all is quiet, all is still. The day shift has retired, the last shuffling and ruffling of wood pigeons at roost has faded to silence and the night company of mice, owl, fox and badger has yet to appear.
I couldn’t say how long this moment has lasted, perhaps just minutes, but the air hangs thick with expectation. My son Will and I sit beneath the canopy of an ancient oak tree, the ground a shallow dell where flint has been mined out in ages past – before the Romans came, when wolf, boar and bear roamed the land.
Last week, not far from here, we discovered a Bronze Age burial mound almost hidden within a stand of oak. This was once grassy downland, the hillside cleared of its primordial forest and the turf cropped short by grazing animals. I try to imagine how the barrow would have looked back then and wonder at the unknowable lives of ancestors entombed within.
The grazing of livestock ceased several centuries past and oak woodland has grown once more to reclaim the land, each epoch overlaying its impression upon the hill. For three and a half thousand years the sands of time have slipped silently by and still the barrow stands…Here and now, in this world, night is gathering, coalescing around the great tree trunk and mighty boughs that rise, vault-like, above our heads. To sit in such a place at such a time, I can commend to all who seek re-enchantment. It is a magical time, an in-between time when the veil thins between the apparent world and other realms; a time for old stories to take shape in the imagination, a time for their retelling.
Night arrives earlier beneath the dark canopy of the forest. Outside, at the woodland edge, the sun has not quite fully set, nor the moon fully risen, though bats and moths already hold sway over the dying embers of the day. Inward, from the heart of the forest, small stirrings can be heard – leafy branches gently swishing, soft paw-pads carefully placed.
It’s one of my favourite times for making photographs and in many ways, of course, also the hardest time. My gear is very simple – the tripod is left at home and the camera limited to one fixed lens. I use only manual settings and my images are unedited, they are what they are. All of which is liberating, as it allows me to move freely, think freely. But yesterday, half way up the steep winding lane we stopped to watch a tawny owl as it swooped to alight on a branch nearby. I didn’t try for a picture; sometimes the mind’s eye cannot be bettered.
The owl regarded us for a few precious moments then turned with wings fanned wide, plunging silently down and away through the trees, a keeper of secrets, a creature of night, its image forever a memory, a small detail in a continuing story.
Writing & Images David West – Beale, Summer 2025
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