As Britain’s breadbasket, Suffolk is not one of the UK’s most wooded counties. But the forests it does possess - such as Dunwich, Bradfield and Rendlesham - are full of intrigue, especially Rendlesham, with its compelling UFO myth.
Suffolk’s historic architecture has often also been wood-based, notably in Lavenham and the wool towns, not to mention the traditional timber-reliant boatbuilding industry found here, with Woodbridge one of its centres of excellence.
Wood is therefore resonant here, and it is to the ancient oaks of Staverton Forest that photographer Jeremy Young turned his lens in his limited-edition book The Thicks – Yesterday’s Tomorrow. Comprising 50 photographs of a 240-acre area of Staverton called the Thicks – a group of about 4,000 ancient oaks garlanded with sky-reaching holly, birch, ash and rowan – the book brings out the powerful charisma of this ancient habitat.
“In the Thicks, the oaks date back over 400 years,” says Jeremy. “You can easily get lost among them. The wood is so dense that it was difficult to move around with a large camera, so I was constrained by the very thickness of the forest itself.”
The Thicks are likely to be unique in Britain. “They haven’t been managed for 200 years,” he says. “So, when trees fall, blow over or rot from the middle, they are simply left on the forest floor.” Hence the ‘Thicks’, in the sense of thickets, and Jeremy’s interest in their close observation: mosses, lichens and all.
Inspired by the work of Dusseldorf School photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, as well as British landscape photographer Jem Southam, Jeremy observed the Thicks over a couple of seasons, walking around the area and wondering how to approach the subject, before deciding to shoot it in the first two weeks of two successive Novembers.
"I chose the end of autumn as there are still a few leaves on the living oaks at this time," he says. "You can see changes in the bracken, the ferns turning, rich colours everywhere.” November also suited his work as he wanted to photograph the trees in flat light, without contrast, and with a palette as neutral and objective as possible. And, while some might read in the images a certain Grimms’ Tales-like fascination with the forest, or a celebration of the fecundity of our national tree, Jeremy had “no intention to create a dramatic landscape, more like an objective portrait or record of each tree.” This leads each image to have an immersive quality that multiplies as part of the wider series.
Jeremy captured 88 images in total, and some 50 of these photographs have been selected for The Thicks. They have been exhibited at Snape Maltings, where some visitors anthropomorphised the trees, seeing faces and fairytale-like creatures in the gnarls of the old bark, while others enjoyed the evocation of the trees’ incredible biodiversity, and a few remarked their role as a harbinger for the end of the Anthropocene (or human-dominated) age. No matter the interpretation, in each photograph one feels the deep sense of time which struck Jeremy when he was immersed in the woods capturing them.
"I remember thinking that you could look around and be standing within any given moment in history”, he says, a realisation that brought a sense of the future and the importance of conserving places of environmental value, as well as a feeling for the power of contemplation. “I often went on a Sunday when it was completely quiet, and would find myself in constant surprise, admiration and awe of the trees." As nature writer Mark Cocker puts it in the foreword to the book, “…they say so much about all of life and about our lives." Fortunately, the Thicks is protected as a Special Area of Conservation (SAC), a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), and part of Natural England’s “maintenance and restoration management plan”. Let us hope it keeps the Thicks alive as a prototypical piece of rewilding.
The Thicks - Yesterday’s Tomorrow is available from Harry CJ Wix in a limited-edition run of 90 copies, at £85 each. Prints of The Thicks are also available for purchase in different sizes.