Why the Bare Months Show You More

There is a reason countryside naturalists do their best work between November and March. A wood in full leaf is beautiful and largely unreadable; a wood in winter is a working drawing. The canopy has gone, the understory has collapsed back to stems, and everything the trees were hiding is suddenly on display — the sweep of a boundary bank, the grey hump of a badger sett, the shapes of old coppice stools that have been cut and regrown for four centuries or more.

On a still frosty morning, with the ground hard enough to take your weight, ancient woodland becomes genuinely walkable in a way it never is in June. Bramble has died back. Nettles have gone. Paths that were tunnels in August are now open corridors, and the low sun rakes across the ground at an angle that makes every ridge and hollow stand out. Take a hand lens and an OS map, and go slowly.

Reading Badger Setts, Banks and Ditches

Badgers are the headline find. Look for sandy slopes, often on the edge of a wood where a bank falls away towards a stream, and you will see spoil heaps of freshly dug earth scattered outside the entrances. Winter is peak digging season for them, and the soil is easy to read: pale sand, dark leaf mould, sometimes a scratch mark on a beech root. Keep your distance, keep dogs away entirely between December and March, and never stand on top of a sett — the tunnels beneath can be twenty metres long and surprisingly close to the surface.

The archaeology of the wood is just as rewarding. In a genuine ancient woodland — one that has been continuously wooded since at least 1600 — you will usually find a woodbank and ditch running along at least one boundary. The bank is the spoil from the ditch, dug to keep stock out and mark the edge. On top of it, or just inside it, you will often find the giveaway: a line of ancient coppice stools.

• Coppice stools — fat, gnarled bases with many slender stems, often hazel, ash or sweet chestnut, cut on a rotation of ten to twenty years.
• Pollards — trees cut high up, above browsing height, with a swollen head and a hollow trunk. Hornbeam and beech are favourites.
• Boundary banks — low ridges running dead straight or following a stream, usually with a ditch on the outside.
• Indicator plants — spurge laurel flowering in January, butcher's broom with its prickly dark green shoots, hard shield fern, wood sedge.

Once you can see these, the wood stops being scenery and becomes a record of rural work going back centuries.

Fungi on Fallen Timber

Winter is not a dead season for fungi; it is simply a different list. The species that fruit now are the ones that tolerate cold, and they concentrate on dead wood, which holds moisture through the frost.

• Velvet shank — clusters of orange-brown caps on elm, ash or willow stumps, with a dark velvety stem. Beautiful, and one of the few good edibles of midwinter.
• Jelly ear — rubbery, brown, ear-shaped and almost always on elder. It rehydrates in rain and looks like a piece of old tripe.
• Candlesnuff fungus — tiny white-tipped black spikes on rotting stumps, like burnt matchsticks.
• Birch polypore — a hard, grey-white bracket with a rounded edge, growing on living and dead birch.

Photograph rather than pick unless you are certain of the identification and cooking it that evening. Several winter wood-rotters have dangerous lookalikes.

Boots, Ground and Daylight

Frost is your friend, but it does not last. Plan walks for early morning or immediately after a hard frost, when the clay is set and you are not churning a footpath into a bog. Wear boots with deep lugs, add gaiters if there is standing water, and carry a head torch even on a short circuit — woods go dark early and the last half-mile can take twice as long as you expect.

Stay on the paths where the wood is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and resist cutting corners on banks. Those banks are the seed bank for the whole wood; a single winter of trampling can compact them and lose a decade of ground flora.

Winter Work in Garden and Hedge

Bare-root season is the great gift of a British winter. From November to March, while plants are dormant, you can plant native hedging and trees at a fraction of the price of potted stock, and they establish far better. Order whips of hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, field maple and guelder rose, plant them in a double row with a spade slit, heel them in firmly, and mulch with well-rotted manure or leaf mould. Water them in even in January if the ground is dry.

Other jobs worth doing while the soil is cold:

• Prune apples and pears on a dry, frost-free day; leave plums and cherries until summer to avoid silver leaf.
• Lay hedges — the traditional season runs from October to the end of March, and it must stop before birds nest.
• Empty and turn the compost heap, then cover it with old carpet to keep the heat in.
• Clean, sharpen and oil hand tools, and service the mower before spring demands it.
• Keep harvesting leeks, kale, parsnips and sprouts; a cloche over winter salad will give you cut-and-come-again leaves by February.

Small Rituals of the Rural Day

Fill the log store properly in autumn and you will spend January indoors with dry ash and hazel rather than damp disappointment. Season wood for at least a year, stack it bark-up and off the ground with air moving through, and keep the kindling bin inside the back door. Snowdrops will be up before you have finished the last of the logs — and by then, the wood will be green again, and the badger setts hidden for another year.