Grasping Vines

Growth armed with thorns, which moves, and pulls whatever it holds down into the earth. In Wychwood it is told of the no-cut belts and of the ruins within them.

Plants keep still, and so the wood’s people will not name it one. They tell it of ruins grown over, the more so of ruins inside the no-cut belts, those strips of old woodland where no blade is ever put; and in the Chapel Belt there stands such a ruin, nothing of it higher than a man’s waist, one stone bearing a cross cut into its face. A man, the tale runs, goes in among the briars, and they close. Commonly his friends cut him loose, working from outside and at arm’s length, with a hook carried for that purpose. Once or twice the telling ends another way, and is given at the hearth in the voice used for the rest, flat, with the parish named and nothing added. The growth, say the charcoal burners, was standing over the stones before he went in, and lying over him by the time they raised their eyes.

Of all the wood’s rules the strictest is that nothing whatever is done inside a belt. Two days a year every parish along the edge owes to its nearest belt, walking the boundary stones, raising the fallen and clearing them of growth; and the whole of it is done from outside, reaching in. Any stone out of reach from outside is left where it fell and recorded as down. A party that went within to shift a fallen tree off a stone would find itself presented at the next woodmote, which is the wood’s own court, and the woodward, keeper of the wood, presented beside it for permitting the thing. Good husbandry, say the verderers, the wood’s officers, when asked the reason. The parishes say nothing. Twenty-two years has the woodward held his place without once needing to send for a parish that did not come.

There are four accounts in the wood of why the belts are there, and room for the vines in each. By the priory’s, the ground was hallowed or profaned at some time and the record is lost; briars it does not mention. By the verderers’, briar is briar, and four centuries uncut will make any belt thick. By the charcoal burners’, there are things living in the belts that were there before the wood was ever worked. By the account of the families who live unrecorded in the middle ground, between the wood’s worked half and its unworked, the belts were agreed with someone, at a date no one can give, and what grows at the edge holds the agreed line as a gate holds a field. Proof exists for none. The company that would remain welcome learns the four and chooses none, as the wood itself has done for four hundred years.

As witnesses describe it

Under a full moon, before broken walls, twisting vines thick with thorns have wound about a shouting man and are hauling him into the mud; one hand still reaches out of them. The card names them Grasping Vines, animated plants.