The Century Walk of the Green Man

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — a Gloucestershire hedge-line, midsummer

I first heard of the Greenwalk from a hedge-layer in Gloucestershire who would not say which wood he meant, only that his grandfather had hung a crook in an oak past Birdlip and never took it down. The story he told sat easily beside what any church-crawler in England already half knows: that the leafy, staring face carved into corbels and roof bosses from Devon to the Borders, the mouth sprouting oak and hawthorn, the eyes fixed somewhere past the nave, has no settled name older than a few generations. It was Lady Raglan who called such carvings the Green Man in 1939, borrowing a title that folk memory had perhaps already half-invented for him. Before that he went by vegetation deity, foliate head, wild man, Jack-in-the-Green, and in some parishes by no name at all, only a shrug and a nod towards the ceiling.

What the hedge-layer added, and what I have since heard in variant from a shepherd near Painswick and a woman who keeps bees outside Cirencester, does not appear in Raglan's paper nor in the church guides. It runs like this: that the Green Man sleeps in the hollow heart of the oldest oak in a shire, and once in a hundred years he wakes on midsummer night and walks. Three ravens go ahead of him, marking the road he will take, and no two tellers agree on whether the birds choose the path or simply announce it. Wherever he passes, the orchards set fruit early and the barley stands taller by morning. Shepherds who see him coming are said to hang their crooks in his branches as he goes by, though none of my informants could tell me why a crook and not, say, a scythe or a coin, only that it was always so.

The walk ends before first light. Where he lies down to sleep again, a new wood is supposed to stand by the time anyone comes to look, full-grown and older than the ground has any right to allow. This is offered, by everyone who has told it to me, as the true origin of the shire's ancient woodland, that certain old woods mark not slow centuries of growth but a single night's lying-down. I do not think this can be tested and I am fairly sure no one telling it expects it to be. It belongs to the same order of explanation as the crooks in the branches: a way of accounting for what is old and unaccountable by fixing it to a single, sacred, unwitnessed event.

The one rule that holds firm across every version, and the one I was warned about most sternly, is that an oak found holding a crook must never be felled. Two of my three informants named a specific tree, in each case a different tree, and both refused directions past the parish boundary.

Whatever the truth of the walking, the foliate face itself is not in doubt. He looks down from Southwell Minster, from Rochester, from a hundred quieter naves where nobody now remembers commissioning him, mouth full of leaf, neither wholly Christian ornament nor wholly older god, and both congregations and folklorists have argued for a century over which he started as. I came away from Gloucestershire no closer to settling it, only with a stronger sense that the disagreement is itself part of what is being carried forward, and that some stories keep better for never quite closing.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.