In 2021 I was working near a wood I had already decided was not for me. I had first walked into it in 2017, a few times, and nothing in it had held me, so I had stopped going. Then, on a work break one day in the middle of summer, I stopped there for a walk, with no plan beyond getting out of the heat for an hour under the trees.
I was not looking at anything, or for anything in particular, only what was in front of me. I wandered the path system, dipping in and out of its areas, and when I lost my bearings I headed back to one of the waymarked trails to find them again. Somewhere in that hour the wood stopped being a place I had given up on. I fell in love with it, and the walk gave me reason enough to go back.
There were interesting trees, a great deal of moss and liverworts, and a wood that felt lightly managed, close to semi-natural. Not every part of it rewards a camera, dense saplings packed in, but other parts are genuinely interesting. None of it was new. The trees and the moss had all been there on my first visits, years before, when I had found nothing and gone away.
I had not found them. In those early visits I perhaps was not ready, as a photographer, to see what the wood had.
That walk gave me enough impetus to make a return visit. I went again, and again, probably five or six walks with a scrapbook camera while I got to know the place, and then, I think it was in autumn, I came back with the bigger camera. The conditions were nothing special, a little dampness, some rain, overcast weather, and that was enough to show me the potential of the place.
On one of those damp, overcast visits what stayed with me was the range and richness of colour in the leaves, set against the deeper colour of the mosses on the trunks in the wetter parts of the wood. It was hard to resist. It was around then that I realised there was some genuine potential in the wood.
I tell it slowly because it is not the only time it has happened. There are four woods I can think of that I wrote off and later came back to, each one dismissed and each one, in the end, opening. And the reasons I wrote them off were not the same reasons.
Two of them I crossed off for something as ordinary as access. At Epping Forest, the parking gates made it hard work, back when I focused on getting in early or staying late. Once I had opened my eyes to the potential of other conditions, those restrictions were no longer an issue. I found a few places where I could leave the car early and walk in on foot, and over time I built up enough local knowledge of the forest, a craft of its own that I set out in The Woodland Photographer's Other Craft, to begin to see what it had. Epping opened for me in 2013 or 2014.
Hatfield Park I wrote off for access too, and because I did not feel excited by it on the first few visits. It only became a place I worked when I was forced into it, during the first Covid lockdown, when it was my legal daily recreation. I walked it then as I never had before, every path, every corner of it open to the public, and that revealed something the early visits had not: the sheer number of ancient trees in the park and the woods around it.
My son was with me on most of my early walks there, very young then, carried on my back in a baby carrier; many of them, though not all, were early mornings. I could not carry much, no tripod, just a couple of lenses, so I was freestyling it. The fuller kit came later, after the lockdown, when I could go more freely.
I think I was lucky with the weather that first lockdown, and I had seen fog there before, on earlier visits; but going out to make something was a release from being stuck inside all day, and I think that played a part. It was not the only reason. The repeated walking meant that it began to mean something to me, and that was when the pictures started to flow.
The fourth is a wood I wrote off after the first few visits and have only lately come back to. The two ways into it had both put me off. From one side it felt overly managed; from the other it felt like a glorified mountain bike trail, and I had not explored the full depth of it. It took me some time to find the best areas. It has come back into my weeks since I moved house, which I have written about in Weather, Not a Verdict, when I was looking for some inspiration. I still have not walked all of its paths. But from what I have seen so far, I can see the potential.
One morning this autumn it was not foggy, but there was moisture in the air, and in some parts of the wood the light had a lovely quality to it. I made a few images I think are early keepers.
What has shown me the potential is the light there after overnight rain. The gaps in the canopy seem to suck the light down into the wood, and the quality of it in those places is really special, the kind most people do not get to see, because it is not the go-to condition for woodland photography.
Looking across the four, what the openings had in common was time, patience, and a willingness to build a relationship with each place, the slow return, as I have written in Farming Compositions.
It is very easy to write a place off. And perhaps that is the lesson. A wood gives you little on an early visit, or the way in puts you off, and you decide it has nothing for you and stop going.
These days I feel like I am slower to write a wood off, though that might change with the next place I visit. There is another new wood I started visiting after the move, and I have, at times, found it really difficult. A hard-going visit there normally involves a lot of wandering around and not really making sense of anything, beyond returning to the few compositions where I have made images I like, in different seasons. It is quite a restricted wood, the paths permissive byways rather than ground you can roam, and that makes it harder too. But that is part of the process, a different kind of challenge from many of the woods I visit.
I am battling through and persisting with it. I got lucky one morning in late winter with fog. I made some images I am really happy with in spring, too, among the bluebells. A couple of pictures I am pleased with came in the rain after the scorching summer. The rain made its own atmosphere there, and as it got heavier the denser stands of trees separated out, like fog, but so much better. This was not separation I had worked for; it came from the conditions, not from my moving, and the way it set the foreground, midground and background apart was really special. I am keen to see what the autumn there brings as it comes on.
Why do I keep going back to a wood that keeps being hard, when I would once have written it off? Partly, perhaps, I have matured a lot, as a photographer or as a person. I have more patience than I had, and I am trusting my own judgement there. And perhaps another part of it is that I have already made a few images there I am really happy with.
Whether they are significant images is too early to say, but they are perhaps the reason I keep going back, which is part of why I work the way I do. On some occasions I feel I have cracked the code of that wood, something I touched on in The Jar; on others I do not, and that is when it is really hard going.
Someone asked me recently whether there is a wood I have written off right now and not gone back to. I do not think so, at the moment, at least not one local to me.
What I still cannot say is whether either of these two newer woods is fully productive. The hard one is still hard, and the one I only lately came back to has more still to show me. That will only become apparent months, or years, down the line.
The woods in this essay are ones I gave up on and came back to. If there is a wood near home you have half-dismissed, my free guide The Wood You Already Have makes the case for nearby ground: the local knowledge it rewards, the overlooked places near you, and the practice that only a wood you can return to makes possible.
