We’re here, right back to our relatives in the Mesolithic. This is in essence a farming town, a marketplace and would almost certainly have existed as a community before records name it as Wada’s Tuna with its butter market before too the Norman’s threw up a new church in stone over whatever it obliterated. The B1108 from Norwich beats a grey line accompanied by the white regular blip of milestones along the roadside, at least in part it seems to plot a Roman road from Denver to Caistor St Edmund. It had also been reused, the dig turned up a Roman Skeleton lying on it’s side, dated from somewhere between the 1st and 4th century, it’s now housing.

There are hints here of a life before the Vikings and Saxons a Middle Bronze Age barrow sits nearby on the edge of Watton on the old RAF radar site, dug in 2010, it contained a Bronze Age cremation urn, other cremation evidence, and axe heads. Curiously the name has back-formed into another word-pairing, Watt and tun a medieval hare and barrel, the symbol the town lives under still.

This 84 acre triangle of woodland sitting next to the buzz and snore of the A1075 winding off towards Thetford seems to have obtained this iteration, possibly one of many from the Danes Wane lund a sacred grove. My instinct for romance of our untethered human footsteps through these roots and leaves prefers the former, and the vague guess-laden science borderlands of naming conventions and toponymy as a subject in itself point at hundreds taking their name from somewhere and that where would appear to be here. Wayland Wood lies just to the south-east of Watton in Norfolk, either lending or taking its name from the old Wayland. The dimensions of woodlands through time stand out as proud as the raised earth boundaries dug here in medieval times which can still be traced off through the shadows filtering off into the trees away from the entrance cut. These slabs of life in our sterile farmland carry a weight beyond wood and wildlife a breadth and depth of history you can sense and if you go equipped. It’s hidden in the words of folklore, poems, songs, fairytales and stories resides in place-names, leaks through into the things we understand, twisting them and changing them. It is in these wilds, between the thickets and the trunks that folklore, fairytales and legends grow: Babes in the Wood, Hansel and Gretel, Vasilisa the Beautiful and Baba Yaga, Genoveva, Snow White and even the Epic of Gilgamesh reside in these spaces. Beyond the sterility of the needle carpets of the pine stands in the managed farmed forests.

There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows, the greening, then yellowing, then bareness, with each revolution of the earth on its tipping axis.

Norfolk Folk Tales by Hugh Lupton