Sanctuary Wood

Many years ago my beloved and late ol' Dad used to tell me stories about a place called Sanctuary Wood from a WW1 battlefield in Ypres, Belgium. He would often talk about war history from books he had read and the place inspired him because it was given the name by British soldiers, who found it to be a sanctuary from the front line only for it to turn into the opposite once the horrors of war started to visit it and pretty much flatten the whole place with not a tree left standing. I think he liked the sad irony of the tale.

That said, on a recent family holiday to the Lake District I found myself consistently drawn to a secluded wood which was full of ferns, the turning autumnal tones of leaves and many, many mushrooms which really caught my eye. It was quite a busy week but in that place for a brief period every day I found real solitude in the sheer indulgence of trying to record and make sense of that incredible, damp place as we always do as photographers. Hence the connection with my Dad's story and the resulting name.

As I am prone to doing at the moment I have made it into a personal photobook with a general theme of a walk through the wood, beginning on its perimeter, moving into the wood and then finally to survey the mushrooms, or more specifically, the leaves that couched in them. I say couched because they reminded me of a line from one of my favourite poems, called The Great Lover, by Rupert Brooke, in which a man records all the wonderful things he has seen in his life, presumably on his deathbed. It begins ...

"I have been so great a lover, filled my days, so proudly with the splendour of love's praise",

followed by the list, including the line I mentioned,

"Radiant raindrops, couching in cool flowers"

If you've never read it, I highly recommend having a look here, it will really cheer you up if you have the time to relax and absorb it properly: https://poets.org/poem/great-lover.

So there you go, I shall let my photos do the talking now with the hope that you get something from them, even if it is only a fraction of the feeling I had when I took them. As per the book they begin with me looking outwards and then turning inwards as we travel deeper in to the wood, exploring the flora and fungi inside, then ending with a final image looking towards the foggy, yet slightly sunlit path in the distance as I was about to leave.