In amongst all the reds, golds, browns, yellows, in all their various shades, we came across a scattering of these paper white leaves. Strangely, the area where I found these pale shadows of their former selves, was in the large cleared area formed by the entrance to a field closed farthest away from the road by a very infrequently used gate. The whole space, from road to gate was deep in beech leaves. The road at this point is flanked by a beech wood and the remains of a very old beech hedge, which has now become a line of half a dozen or so elderly beech trees.
These odd extraneous sycamore or some kind of maple leaf must have blown in recently – and they must have blown in from some distance because try as we might, amongst the beech trees around us, we could see no sign of a maple. Now I don’t want to be dogmatic about it, beech trees and maple trees with no leaves on do have similar looking trunks it’s true, but I did take this into account and we walked up and down the road peering into the woods and searching the ground for more evidence.
The fact that there was already a good thick layer of beech leaves and that the maple leaves were lying on top, leads me, using the principles of archaeology, to believe that these maple leaves are recent immigrants to the beech wood.
Possibly a wandering tribe of nomads trekking through in search of a pile of leaves of deep religious significance.
