Hmmm... crouching tiger, hidden dragon and all that... so that's what they
were climbing in the film...
Tony Vowell
Swyddog Coed/ Trees Officer
-----Original Message-----
From: Clive Mayhew [mailto:CMayhew@xxxxxxxxx.gov.uk]
Sent: 23 February 2009 15:23
To: UK Tree Care
Subject: Beachcomings & Birch Swinging
For those bookworms out there with a more spiritual arboricultural bent,
I've just finished 'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane. Lots of
general wild Britain stuff, along with more specific tree ponderings
such as; the climbing qualities of various trees, and whether it would
be possible to cross a woodland by swinging through the branches and not
touch the ground?
He also quotes (page 264) the Robert Frost poem 'Birches':
"I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
.....
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
Macfarlane also says. "I told him about the birch trees I was climbing
in Langdale, how whippy they were, and how, if you found a young tree
slender but strong enough, you could climb to its summit, and allow your
weight to bend the tree's tip over and down, so that it deposited you
lightly upon the ground from which you had begun, before springing back
up to the vertical."
What to do????
Read it ... went out on Sunday afternoon and did it!
Can safely say it was by turns the stupidest, most audacious, and by a
clear mile the funniest thing I'd ever done in climbing boots..... and
to my amazement no limbs were broken!
Anyone else had a go? I'd never heard of it before, but now I view every
'young slender but strong' birch as a potential swinger ....
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