The Way Through the Woods

Tom has been doing quite a lot of work in his garden, which is very overgrown and has been for years. He's created a small patio by the back door and a path at the edge of the garden leading to some steps. 


The garden slopes very steeply and Tom found some old steps, which he's restored and was going to create a new level and then put more steps right down to the bottom.


By happy fortune, he's been working in the garden this weekend and has found a set of old steps (pictured below) which had been completely covered by a layer of soil and ivy. He's cleared the soil and there's quite a staircase uncovered.


The steps look really old and brought to mind a poem by Rudyard Kipling:


The Way through the Woods

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,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
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.

Old steps uncovered in Tom's garden and 
(below) how it used to look