Classification: Natural History / Forestry
Region: Bone Forest
Source Material: Forestry records, naturalists' journals, charcoal workers' accounts
Status: Species Classification Disputed

The Bone Forest contains ordinary trees. This fact is sometimes overlooked. Pine, birch, oak and other familiar species occur throughout its wider territory. Closer to the mound, however, the forest changes. Trunks become pale. Branches grow narrow and crooked. Bark becomes smooth in some specimens and deeply fissured in others.

At a distance, particularly during winter, the trees resemble enormous bones driven upright into the earth. Hence the modern name. Early botanists attempted repeatedly to classify them. Results were unsatisfactory. Leaves collected from neighbouring specimens were sometimes identified as belonging to different species. Seeds planted outside the forest generally failed. Cuttings occasionally survived. None produced the characteristic pale growth. One naturalist concluded:

The tree appears less a species than a condition.

He did not elaborate.

Cutting

Summertown has managed the woodland along its south-eastern edge for generations. Timber is harvested. Brush is cleared. Firebreaks are maintained. Charcoal burners once worked extensively along the boundary. This is usually described as industry. Older municipal accounts suggest another purpose. One annual expenditure appears for nearly sixty consecutive years:

Keeping Back the Wood

No further explanation is supplied. The amount increases steadily. Attempts to clear the pale trees nearest the interior produced stranger reports. A forestry ledger records twenty-seven trees felled during one winter. The following spring, the foreman counted twenty-nine. His superior accused him of incompetence. The following winter both men counted before cutting. Thirty-one.

They stopped.

Fire

Bone trees burn. They simply do not burn particularly well. Several charcoal workers describe pale timber producing little heat and large quantities of thin grey smoke. One account states that the smoke descended rather than rose. Another describes it travelling horizontally between the trees despite a northerly wind. Use of bone timber for domestic fires eventually became uncommon. No prohibition survives. Nobody seems to remember needing one.

The Boundary

The Bone Forest presses against Summertown's south-eastern edge. Modern residents may regard the cleared strips, lumberyards and managed woodland there as ordinary features of the settlement. Older records are less relaxed. The boundary is frequently described using verbs rather than geographical terminology.

Held. Cleared. Maintained.

And, on several occasions:

Lost.

One winter ledger contains only:

South-east boundary moved back forty-three yards.

The following year's entry reads:

Recovered twenty-six.

Nothing explains from whom.

Archivist's Observation

Forests grow. Foresters cut them back. There is nothing remarkable in this. What is remarkable is that for several hundred years the records of Summertown have described the process as though both sides were participating.