I’ve just been out in Beacon Woods, Talaton.

Drenched right down into my shoes. My body pulsing heat from the cycle. I stood still in the woods and let my eyes absorb the raindrops as I looked up at the dripping canopy. The fuzzy clatter of rain on leaves fills the air, so loud and insistent. My mind hums with it, engulfed and quietened under the noise. There are no spaces to fill.

But it isn’t white noise. Against the background static, big blobs land with a thump, a little stream drums onto a leaf near my head, the ivy sprawled on the ground crackles and spatters. Then the trees shake off in the wind and a flurry of drops smacks against my coat.

I look around where I stand in a little clump of old trees, in the fork of two lanes which run through the woods. The tall beech have a rain-sheen running down their trunks, their limbs glinting off the pale clouds. The leaves in the canopy look so green in the rain, like the colour is transmitted through pure droplets into my watery eyes, never changing medium.

The rest of the woods is now a commercial quad biking track and not much worth seeing. It isn’t really a wood so much as a tree-based obstacle course. Therefore, I didn’t go any further and instead I went the other way to a new replanted woodland near the village. I went through a damp gap in the hedge to get in. The trees in the little stand look about 30 or 40 and have burst out of their plastic guardians. These rowan, willow and hazel are thin and tall- all started at once and all reaching up into their own little patch of light, shoulder to shoulder. Moss grows on the ground and a few big ferns have already unfurled their feathery limbs. But a wood of this age lacks character. You can feel it’s youth in the uniformity; the bean pole trunks spaced evenly over clear, flat ground. It is not yet shaped by death and decay. There are no fallen giants lying in scraggly undergrowth, no memory held in the ground to be expressed. It is not much more than trees for now, but it wouldn’t be if it was left alone.