Ghosts of the Greenwood by Sarah Das Gupta

Sarah Das Gupta is a writer from Cambridge, UK who spent time, living and teaching in India and Tanzania. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologies in over twenty countries from New Zealand to Kazakhstan. This year she has been nominated for Best of the Web and a Dwarf Star Award.

I spent my childhood in a parish on the highest point of the North Downs in South-East England where the pattern of the fields had not changed substantially since Domesday. The steep slopes make the use of tractors potentially dangerous. I spent much of my time riding over the downs, through the woodland and along part of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury. Viewing the countryside from horseback, the rider has the opportunity to see into the depths of the woods and commons.

I was very alive to the changing seasons, especially to the end of summer and the coming of Autumn, that first nip in the air, the first frost of the year and the wonderful colours of the falling leaves. This point of change is the best time to see the traces of a much older world, a world still known to Chaucer and Shakespeare, even to Dickens in a novel like Great Expectations. The discarded acorn cups, the skirt of a fairy dress seen in the gleaming gossamer on the hawthorn hedges. In the fields the darker grass of the fairy rings appears with the sudden explosion of ball-like white mushrooms. In the fields, ancient hawthorns even now remain unfelled. Their magic doorways to the other world, still open.