Wendy Mewes

Writer, Walker, Guide

Forest

Forest was Dante’s metaphor for mid-life crisis, a dark and gloomy place to suffer through. But forest is all about operating beneath the canopy that obscures direction, in a light distorted into darts and flashes, confusing vision and perception. The duality of forest provides both concealment and unseen dangers, and these notions of safety and risk have been reinforced by stories like Robin Hood or countless fairy tales. It is a place where reality becomes the shadow of movement.

As long as man has formed notions of the past, forest has been synonymous with wildness, the nature of land before trees were cleared and settlements formed, the refuge of wild animals and giants, a place where normal rules malfunction.

It has been associated with this primal state from the earliest literature. The epic of Gilgamesh tells how the hero defeated a monster to cut down the cedar forest for practical use. In the hagiography of Breton saints, clearance of forest represents the ‘civilising’ arrival of Christianity, and the destruction of paganism. Forest later becomes a more sophisticated literary theatre for the quests of Arthurian knights and deceitful tricks of Shakespearian characters. From this mixture of myth and economic reality, forest represents the psychology of transformation, the teasing out of identity.

There’s a challenge, to claw our way out of the mesh of culture into a purer landscape. Here choices are made, feet set on one of a dozen paths without clear sight of the end, as forest holds and releases. It offers an essential stage of self-examination, passage not destination. Forest is within.

The Mirror of Landscape

With the coming of the Christian church came the symbolism of landscape. Land to be worked and weeds to be cleared were metaphors of conversion and adherence to virtue over sin. The church wanted control over the landscape as well as its people, literally and figuratively.

St Brieuc began to build his monastery on the donated land. He had many trees cut down in the forest, both to clear a space for the building and to provide timber for the construction. Even before it was finished he moved in with all his followers and word sped far and wide that what had been forest but a few days before was now occupied by the monks. Before long not only was the monastery finished, but a whole settlement quickly grew up in the vicinity. (Life of St-Brieuc)

Legends of Brittany

To the north of the canal is the Forêt de Lanouée and the village of Les Forges, both once busy sites of Rohan enterprises. The garde in charge of the forest in the mid 15th century was paid 115 deniers a week, a reasonable income with free lodging and firewood thrown in, enough to buy bread and meat regularly. This part of the family’s estates was especially important for breeding horses, with haras (studs) at Branguilly and Lanouée. The horses were reared in the wild and then captured as required. Les Forges was the centre of a network of economic activities – wood-cutting, charcoal, metalwork, smithies – connected to the management of the forest.

Crossing Brittany: walking the Nantes-Brest Canal

Man makes forest a game

Of giant’s fiddlesticks.

But forest knows how to die,

And so lives on.

All text © Wendy Mewes

See my blog at www.wendymewes.blogspot.com