Richard Williamson's Country Life Column December 22

Thirty feet from the bedroom window the female chastises her mate with a "whip-whip-whip" which if you're still asleep hurtles into your dreams like a police siren or baby screaming. His response is a long drawn calming tremolo, and a bold statement to the whole wood: "Who?" But once you're focused it's a nice way to be woken.

If there is a wind you can listen to the trees talking to each other with their branches, tittle-tattling through the dark waking hours as they remember the hurricane when they were bent double and the beech over there lifted a root plate as big as the side of the house and never moved again; or the oak across there which has leaned on its neighbour ever since.

The ash will be saying how the green woodpecker is waking inside its wound, pecking at the dead wood for something to do until there's light enough to leave. The trees stand as black as iron, some over a century old and glad that the year has turned once again, feeling on their twigs the ten minutes more of light and a deep, cold, movement in cells of their rootlets fine as hairs inside the ground.

Richard Williamson's Nature Trails appear every week in the WSG. To read the full version of this article see December 22 issue