Return to Mortimer Forest
It had been six months since we’d been to Mortimer Forest and it felt good to be back. Whenever we ride into the trees here we feel free.
But forests weren’t originally about freedom. As Nick Hayes points out in The Book of Trespass, the word ‘forest’ comes from the Latin foris meaning ‘outside of’. They were areas that operated outside of common law. They were where monarchs from William the Conqueror onwards kept deer and where, thanks to forest law, everyone else enjoyed fewer rights than they did across the rest of the land.
So, had G and I been unloading our bikes from the car centuries earlier, we might have been about to get into big trouble. But the royal hunting grounds were already long gone when the trees at Mortimer were planted by the Forestry Commission in the 1920s. The deer that live there today belong to no one, and we’re free to ride the tracks.