Christopher Somerville’s A-Z of walking

G is for Green Man

My 10-year-old self lay back on the turf of Bulbarrow Hill in the shade of a beech spinney, book in hand, all alone in deepest Dorset. And I’ll never forget the cold pang of terror when I looked up from my book to see an evil little face, with goat-like eyes and the most cynical of smiles, staring out at me from among the tree trunks.

The hallucination (if that’s what it was) certainly had a lot to do with the story I was reading: The Music on the Hill by Saki, a Gothic fantasy in which a woman destroys an offering to Pan in the woods, and is herself gored to death by a stag driven wild by mysterious piping from a copse. I was a fanciful boy (and how the child has proved father to the man!), with a capacity for wild flights of imagination – easy prey for Saki’s baroque whimsies. I can remember running off, not daring to look back, in dread of eerie music and the hot breath of a stag on my neck.

Now, when I’m out walking and the path takes me deep into tanglewood, I’m occasionally conscious of a something or a someone there – a presence neither benign nor malign, but watchful and quietly amused. I think of it as a manifestation of whatever it was in the medieval psyche that gave rise to the Green Man, that enigmatic carved face sprouting leaves and fruit from its nostrils which we see in so many of our country churches. I’ve never again experienced anything like my childhood terror of the wildwood. But even if it isn’t the sort of thing a proper grown-up admits to, I’m quite pleased, if truth be told, that the Green Man hasn’t vanished from those psychic thickets quite yet.