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on the Grange.
    Slowly the petrol fumes cleared and I could breathe the clean air and the scent of the cut wood. It was June and the lime was in its first bright green flush of leaves. I tipped my mesh visor up and rocked gently on my heels, enjoying the light through the stippled canopy, the sense of space below and around me, the sensation of being held by the harness like a child on a swing.
    I love working with trees. I love their size – it’s like working with giants. I love the challenge of climbing up into them, and the incredible sensation of working at height, when all the rest of the world shrinks away beneath me and there is nothing else that matters, no problems, no one else, only me and the rope and the wood and the basic questions: Where next? Will this branch hold my weight? Can I reach?
    I love using my skills to bring down those vast structures, when it’s necessary to fell them, with clean precision. I love the fresh air and the weather in my face, rain or shine. I love being out on a frosty morning but feeling toast-warm from the heat generated by my own labours. I love the fact that I have to work hard, pushing my muscles to the limit, over and over. I love working up a sweat and an ache and then going home at night to relax into a bath with a favourite bath bomb fizzing around me filling my world with rose petals and perfume. I love watching the plants change with the seasons and slowly grow, knowing that the trees will be there for far longer than I will. And I love too the roar of the saw in my hands and the bite of a newly sharpened chain into the wood and the smell of sawdust and two-stroke mix. I love the fact that I do a job most other people couldn’t attempt. I love being good at this.
    There is no way you’d catch me working in an office all day. I’d go crazy.
    I stared out through gaps in the canopy, drinking in the view. From here I could make out glimpses of the grounds that were my new realm: the lawn hacked roughly from a pasture of waist-high weeds, the ruined glasshouse, a corner of the pond, and the tips of exotic trees planted in Victorian times and now coming into their full stature – great Douglas firs and monkey puzzles and tulip trees, the dark spires of a grove of wellingtonia, the golden foliage of ginkgos and larches. Further off, outside our boundaries, a hazy patchwork of fields stretched out to the grim line of the Dartmoor plateau. When I turned to look in the opposite direction my line of sight was blocked by the green bulk of Grange Wood, just coming into leaf, but I knew that Exmoor lay beyond that. We were sited almost perfectly in the centre of the vale between those two wild moorlands, but down here the land was lush and the climate sheltered.
    It was time to descend. There were more limes all along the drive to the Grange that needed attention. I took one last look around me and it was then that I saw her, perched on a branch to my left: an old woman with a hooked nose, wrapped in a shawl.
    I gaped.
    She winked one golden eye at me. The shawl was flecked brown wool, and from beneath it her bare feet stuck out, bearing the most incredibly filthy curved nails. She spread her arms wide and dropped off the limb, gliding away on wide wings.
    I nearly choked. It had only been a trick of the eye, but for that brief moment the illusion had been perfect. ‘She’ had been a bird all along: a big one, OK – maybe a buzzard – but only a bird. A twisted branch behind her had been conflated with her outline, and I’d completely mistaken the scale of what I was looking at, but it had been enough to fool me. I laughed out loud.
    When I’d recovered my poise and felt a bit less like an idiot I kicked off from my station and swung in to the trunk, catching myself on springy legs. From there it was a simple matter of abseiling down the length of the rope all the way to the ground. As I touched earth it felt like gravity had claimed me again, and I stretched my back, as