The Dead Rides of Wychwood

Wychwood is held together by its rides, the straight hauling lanes cut twenty feet wide through the oak so that timber can be carted out. There are nine principal rides on the woodmote's rolls. Seven are kept open by the old obligation that keeps everything in the march. The other two are still entered on the rolls as rides, and nobody has cut them for three generations.

They leave the worked south as honestly as any other ride, broad and plain between the coppice falls. Then, out in the middle ground where the cutting stopped long ago, they simply give out. Nothing marks the place, but a party walking one cannot miss it: within a hundred yards the ride narrows, the saplings close across it, and the way ahead is oak like any other oak. Beyond that point the line of the old cutting can still be traced for perhaps a mile and a half by a man who knows what to look for, a straightness in the trees and a softness underfoot, before even that is gone.

Nobody in the wood will guide a party past the end of the cutting. The verderers will not send a man where their court cannot follow; the woodwards say it is no one's walk; the charcoal burners change the subject. Yet the dead rides remain the wood's own advice to anyone whose business lies north. Travel in autumn, once the leaves have fallen and a man can see between the trunks. Follow a dead ride, and blaze the route going in, since the road out poses its own problem. Fix a day, post one of your own by the last hearth to keep that day, and let that watcher stay put however late the party runs.