Tell it to the trees. This was once high praise in the village below the woods. It was what you might say at the close of a lively tale—told at dusk in late December, with a good fire snapping at the coals.

Not bad. You always were a dab at a story. You should tell it to the trees, see what they make of it.

If the mood was right—if there was a clear moon and no call to retire early, maybe you’d go further:

Let’s do it, you’d say. Come on. Let’s go and tell them.

If your companions were willing, you’d take up your cloaks and hats, fetch a lantern and stumble outside into the dark. You’d go softly through the dreaming village and the moon-shadowed fields, up the hill to Mockbeggar Woods.

By the time you reached the trees you might have begun to regret your earlier enthusiasm. The woods were an imposing presence by night. Nobody knew how old Mockbeggar was, or how big. The outside had been mapped and measured, but once you were in there it seemed to stretch much farther—fern and nettle, oak and beech, green on green for miles. Some nights, it was said, you might find yourself walking amongst trees that had fallen centuries before.

Mockbeggar grew by itself, hundreds of years before people took to tree-planting in this part of the world, and yet it was said that human beings had played their small part in its cultivation. In a distant time (the story ran) people cleared trees from the edge of Mockbeggar to make space for themselves, a place to build and farm. They moved in and stayed awhile, and then they were gone—wandering or dead, no one could say for sure now. But they left their relics behind: smashed pots, lost coins, assorted bones. And decade by decade, root by root, the trees moved back and swallowed it all. The saplings grew tall on a diet of history.