they shut the road through the woods seventy years ago weather and rain have undone it again and now you would never know there was once a road through the woods before they planted the trees it is underneath the coppice and heath and the thin anemones only the keeper sees that where the ring dove broods and the badgers roll at ease there was once a road through the woods yet if you enter the woods of a summer evening late when the night air cools on the trout ringed pools where the otter whistles his mate you will hear the beat of a horse s feet and the swish of a skirt in the dew steadily cantering through the misty solitudes as though they perfectly knew the old lost road through the woods but there is no road through the woods 
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