# The Forest Walk At Other Mindset (https://othermindset.com). A slow loop through the woods around the campus, in the spirit of shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of "forest bathing": walking among trees with no goal except to take them in. The trail leaves the north end of the waterfront, runs east under pines, oaks and cedars along the north edge of campus, climbs to the summit, and comes back down through birches and old oaks to the south end of the waterfront. Twenty-one stops. Nothing here is a task, and there is no wrong pace. At each stop you can face ahead along the trail, turn right toward the campus, turn round to look back, or turn left toward the deeper woods. Walk forward to the next stop or back to the last. Stand still as long as you like. ## The trail ### 1. Where the trees meet the shore - Ahead: The trail leaves the shingle and slips in under the first pines, a soft path of needles running east. - To the right (toward the campus): Through the pines you can see the north end of the waterfront, the pale shingle and the water beyond it, moving all the time. - To the left (the deeper woods): Black pines lean away from the sea, their trunks bent by years of wind and their bark broken into dark plates. Sea campion grows in the gaps between the stones. ### 2. The pine needle path - Ahead: The path is springy underfoot, a deep carpet of fallen needles. It curves gently inland. - To the right (toward the campus): A low dune, held together by marram grass and creeping pine roots, hides the shore. The sound of the sea is softer already. - To the left (the deeper woods): Older pines stand well apart here, with tall bare trunks and their branches only at the top, so the light comes down in long, warm stripes. ### 3. The first oaks - Ahead: The pines give way to oaks, and the path turns from needles to old leaves. The canopy closes overhead. - To the right (toward the campus): Between the trunks, far off, the long pillared front of the library shows pale through the leaves. - To the left (the deeper woods): A sessile oak spreads its crooked branches wide. Its bark is furrowed deep enough to hold a finger, and a little polypody fern grows along one high limb. ### 4. The footbridge over the brook - Ahead: A narrow wooden bridge crosses a brook, its planks worn smooth, and the path climbs a little on the far side. - To the right (toward the campus): Downstream the water slows into a pool under alders. Pond skaters stand on the surface, each foot making a tiny dimple of light. - To the left (the deeper woods): Upstream, the brook comes down over a ledge of stones in a small, bright fall. Hart's-tongue ferns, with their long glossy leaves, grow from the wet bank. ### 5. Beech hollow - Ahead: The path drops into a shallow hollow and rises out again, between smooth grey trunks. - To the right (toward the campus): One great beech has fallen across the slope and lies there, slowly becoming soil, with moss along its whole length and a row of bracket fungi like little shelves. - To the left (the deeper woods): Beeches grow close together, their bark as smooth and grey as an elephant's skin. Under them almost nothing grows; the ground is a quiet brown floor of leaves and beech nuts. ### 6. The cedar grove - Ahead: The path runs straight between the trunks of tall cedars, and the air turns cool and smells of resin. - To the right (toward the campus): Where one cedar has gone, a shaft of sunlight comes down through the gap and lights up a single patch of ferns, very green against the shade. - To the left (the deeper woods): Japanese cedars rise without a branch for the first ten metres, perfectly straight, their red-brown bark peeling in long strips. It is dim and very still. ### 7. The moss clearing - Ahead: A small clearing opens, and the path crosses it on a line of flat stepping stones set into the moss. - To the right (toward the campus): At the clearing's edge stands an old stone lantern, half grown over, with lichen in rings on its roof. - To the left (the deeper woods): The ground is a deep, soft carpet of moss in a dozen greens: feathery, starry, cushioned. A fallen trunk is so covered it looks like a green animal asleep. ### 8. The bamboo stand - Ahead: The path runs through a grove of tall bamboo, the canes crowding close on both sides. - To the right (toward the campus): The light here is green, filtered through thousands of narrow leaves, and on the ground new shoots push up like spears. - To the left (the deeper woods): The canes are as thick as your wrist and taller than a house. When the wind moves them they knock together with a hollow, wooden sound, and their leaves hiss. ### 9. The maple slope - Ahead: The ground starts to rise. The path turns into a series of shallow log steps, climbing east. - To the right (toward the campus): Looking back down to the right, you can see the round roof of the music hall above the trees. - To the left (the deeper woods): Japanese maples grow along the slope, their leaves cut like small open hands. In autumn they turn every shade from gold to deep red. ### 10. The switchbacks - Ahead: The path zigzags up the hillside, each turn a little higher, over roots and stones. - To the right (toward the campus): Bilberry bushes grow thick between the rocks, low and bright green, and below them the woods you have walked through spread out like a dark green sea. - To the left (the deeper woods): Silver birches hold on to the steep slope, white trunks marked with black, their small leaves trembling at the slightest breeze. ### 11. The heath - Ahead: The trees thin out. The path crosses open heath toward the bare ridge above. - To the right (toward the campus): The whole campus is laid out below: the quad, the walled garden, the roofs, and beyond them the long line of the shore. - To the left (the deeper woods): Heather and bracken cover the hillside, with boulders scattered among them, grey with lichen. The wind is stronger here. ### 12. The rock steps - Ahead: A last steep pull, the path cut into steps of rock, up toward the summit. - To the right (toward the campus): Cushions of thrift and wild thyme grow in the hollows between the stones, out of the wind. - To the left (the deeper woods): A single hawthorn grows out of a crack in the rock, bent almost flat by the wind, all its branches reaching the same way. ### 13. The summit - Ahead: The path tips over the top and starts down the far side, to the south. - To the right (toward the campus): The cairn stands at the highest point, a pile of stones carried up one by one by visitors. The sun goes down over the water to the west. - To the left (the deeper woods): Open sky, and the ridge running away to the south, bare and grassy, with the sea beyond it. ### 14. The ridge path - Ahead: The path runs south along the top of the ridge before dropping into the trees again. - To the right (toward the campus): Below, the campus again, seen from the other side: the game room's striped awning, the workshop's saw-tooth roof. - To the left (the deeper woods): Short, wind-combed grass and harebells, and the sky enormous on every side. ### 15. The birch slope - Ahead: The path drops off the ridge into a wood of birches and rowans, zigzagging down. - To the right (toward the campus): A rowan grows beside the path, with leaves like feathers. In late summer it hangs with bunches of scarlet berries that the thrushes strip in a day. - To the left (the deeper woods): Birch trunks stand white in the green shade like a crowd of thin people. Their bark peels in papery curls. ### 16. The spring - Ahead: The path levels out and crosses a wet patch on stepping stones, where water seeps out of the hill. - To the right (toward the campus): The wet ground around it is bright with marsh plants and golden saxifrage, and the mud is printed with the tracks of whatever came to drink in the night. - To the left (the deeper woods): A spring rises from under a mossy rock and runs away in a thread of clear water, so cold it aches. ### 17. The old oak - Ahead: The path bends around one enormous tree and runs on west, under oaks. - To the right (toward the campus): Its lowest branch, thick as a tree itself, reaches out over the path and rests its elbow on the ground. - To the left (the deeper woods): The old oak is perhaps five hundred years old, its trunk so wide that three people could not reach round it. It is hollow at the base, and alive all the way up. ### 18. The hazel wood - Ahead: The path runs level and easy now, west through hazels and oaks, toward the sound of the sea. - To the right (toward the campus): Through a gap you can see the museum's galleries on the shore, and the glass of its lobby catching the light. - To the left (the deeper woods): Hazels grow in clumps of many stems, cut back long ago and grown up again. In late winter they hang with yellow catkins; in autumn, with nuts. ### 19. The holly tunnel - Ahead: The path tunnels through a stretch of evergreen holly, dark and glossy, before the woods open out. - To the right (toward the campus): Ivy climbs every trunk, and in the autumn its round flower heads hum with the last insects of the year. - To the left (the deeper woods): Hollies grow thick under the oaks, their leaves spiny low down where deer might browse them and smooth higher up where they can't. ### 20. The reed edge - Ahead: The trees end. A boardwalk crosses a strip of reed bed toward the shore. - To the right (toward the campus): Yellow flag irises and purple loosestrife grow along the boardwalk's edge, and dragonflies patrol above them in summer. - To the left (the deeper woods): Reeds stand taller than a person, their feathery heads swaying, and between them is a glint of still, brackish water. ### 21. The south shore - Ahead: The boardwalk ends on the shingle at the south end of the waterfront. The loop is complete. - To the right (toward the campus): Along the shore to the north, the waterfront, and other visitors skipping stones in the evening light. - To the left (the deeper woods): The sea, wide open, and the wind coming off it. Waves turn over the pebbles with a long, dragging sigh. ## What grows along the way - Snowdrops (January to March): nodding white under the bare trees. - Primroses (March to May): pale yellow in the bank by the path. - Wood anemones (March to May): a white carpet that spreads only about two metres a century. - Bluebells (April to May): a blue haze under the trees, with a sweet, cool smell. - Wild garlic (April to June): broad leaves and white star flowers, and a smell of garlic when you brush them. - Wood sorrel (April to May): clover-like leaves that fold up at night and in rain. - Dog violets (March to May): small and purple, with no scent at all, unlike sweet violets. - Unfurling ferns (April to May): tightly curled fiddleheads uncoiling a little more each day. - Foxgloves (June to July): tall spires of speckled purple bells. - Honeysuckle (June to September): twining up a hazel, strongest-scented at dusk, when moths come to it. - Brambles (June to July): pink-white flowers that will be blackberries. - Blackberries (August to September): ripe and dark along the path, the best ones just out of reach. - Heather (August to September): a purple haze across the hillside, buzzing with bees. - Harebells (July to September): pale blue bells on stems so thin they shiver in any breeze. - Bilberries (July to August): small dusky-blue berries hiding under the leaves. - Thrift (May to July): cushions of pink flowers on wiry stems, at home in salt wind. - Sea campion (May to August): white flowers with a puffed-up, papery cup behind each one. - Yellow flag irises (May to July): bright yellow at the water's edge. - Marsh marigolds (March to May): like huge buttercups, shining gold in the mud. - Rowan berries (August to October): heavy bunches of scarlet. - A fly agaric (August to November): the red-and-white toadstool of fairy tales, under a birch; beautiful, and not to be eaten. - Chanterelles (July to October): egg-yolk yellow among the leaves, smelling faintly of apricots. - Bracket fungi (all year): shelves stepping up a dead trunk. - Turkey tail fungus (all year): thin fans banded in brown, grey and cream, like a turkey's tail. - Maples in autumn colour (October to November): every shade of gold, orange and red. - Falling leaves (October to November): drifting down one at a time in the still air. - Holly berries (November to February): bright red among the dark leaves. - Hazel catkins (January to March): hanging yellow "lambs' tails" shedding pollen at a touch. - Moss (all year): greener than anything else in the wood, especially after rain. - Lichens (all year): grey-green rosettes and beards, a fungus and an alga living as one. - Ferns (May to October): arching fronds, every leaf divided and divided again. - Bamboo shoots (April to June): which can grow nearly a metre in a single day. - Reed heads (August to February): feathery and purple-brown, nodding together. - Purple loosestrife (July to August): tall magenta spikes. ## Who you might meet - A red squirrel: A red squirrel buries hundreds of nuts in autumn and forgets many of them, which is how a good many trees get planted. - A wren: A wren weighs about ten grams, and its song can carry half a kilometre. - A robin: Robins sing in winter too, and by night near street lights; both males and females hold a territory. - A great spotted woodpecker: A woodpecker can drum twenty times a second; a thick, spongy bone and its tongue wrapped around its skull cushion the blows. - A jay: A single jay may bury several thousand acorns in an autumn; oak woods have been planted by jays for thousands of years. - A nuthatch: The nuthatch is one of very few birds that can climb down a tree head first. - A little flock of tits: In winter, different kinds of tits travel the woods together in mixed flocks, which helps them spot danger and find food. - A rabbit: A rabbit's eyes are set so high and wide on its head that it can see almost all the way around itself. - A roe deer: Roe deer are most active at dawn and dusk, and can stand so still among the trees that you look straight past them. - A fox: A fox can hear a mouse squeak a hundred metres away, and pounces on what it hears under snow. - A hedgehog: A hedgehog has about five thousand spines, and can travel a couple of kilometres in a night looking for beetles and worms. - A wood mouse: Wood mice sometimes lay leaves and twigs as markers while they forage, so they can find their way back. - A common frog: A frog's skin lets it breathe underwater; frogs hibernating in pond mud take in all their oxygen through it. - A toad: Toads walk back to the same pond to breed every spring, sometimes for more than a kilometre. - A banded snail: Banded snails come in yellow, pink and brown, with or without stripes, and the pattern helps hide them from thrushes. - A speckled wood butterfly: Male speckled woods each guard a pool of sunlight on the woodland floor and chase off any other male that flies into it. - A dragonfly: Dragonflies have nearly all-round vision and catch most of the insects they chase. - A grey heron: A heron can stand still for so long that fish forget it is there. - A skylark: A skylark can sing without a break for several minutes while hovering a hundred metres up. - A stag beetle: A stag beetle spends up to six years as a grub in rotting wood, and only a few weeks as a beetle. - A gull: Gulls can drink sea water; glands above their eyes get rid of the salt. - A shore crab: A shore crab can grow back a lost leg; the new one appears, small at first, the next time it moults. - A tawny owl: The famous "twit-twoo" is two tawny owls: one calls "ke-wick", another answers "hoo-hoo". ## Invitations, if you want them - Walk more slowly than you think you need to. - Notice five greens before you take another step. - Listen for the farthest sound you can hear, and then the nearest. - Find one thing that is moving and one thing that has not moved in a hundred years. - Breathe out longer than you breathe in. - Look at the ground for a while, and then at the tops of the trees. ## For agents - `GET https://othermindset.com/api/forest?format=text`: the trail. - `GET https://othermindset.com/api/forest/{stop}?facing=ahead|right|behind|left&format=text`: one stop, one way. What is flowering and who is about change with the month and the moment. - Over MCP: `walk_in_the_forest`, at https://othermindset.com/mcp, with `at`, `facing` and `move` (forward, back, left or right).