Hilary Davies on British Rainforests: A Poem and Interview

Various species of mosses and small plants with capsule-like structures in a natural setting
Plate 72 from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904), depicting a grove of mosses (referred to by Haeckel as “Muscinae”, a label now obsolete) — Source.

Interview by Zoë Brigley

A smiling person with short hair and glasses wearing a patterned green and blue jacket in front of blurred bookshelves
Hilary Davies

Welcome back to our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman. We offer a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human. It relocates us in relation to the mystery.

This week we meet Hilary Davies, a poet and essayist. Her fifth collection, Compass Light, was published by Renard Press in September 2025. She has been an RLF Fellow at King’s College, London and the British Library. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year award.

The Toll Gate

We arrived at the toll gate. The drive along the coast had been spectacular. Actually, the entrance was more of a folly, A miniature Gothick turreted thing, The sort you see guarding 19th century reservoirs, Built to look like a clan stronghold And provide a viewpoint for walkers. This one, though, was much smaller And down a little track off the main road. Well, the main road petered out here, in fact; Beyond, the land fell, thickly wooded, straight into the sea. So, the only way was back, or up, Through the toll gate. We stopped. You spotted a bell hanging, a tiny, tinkling brass, And gave it a ding. The door of the folly opened And out came an aged crone. Yes, I mean it. Turned over on herself, with grey hair all out in wisps And fingers like claws. But her eyes Were dark pools, and kind. She enquired whether we wanted to pass through. How much? I almost expected her to ask for a guinea. 50p. Cash, obviously. Hardly worth the trouble taking. The sign at the gate read, ‘I in 4. Road dangerous in winter’. But this wasn’t winter. You engaged a low gear, nevertheless. She waved us through with a friendly gesture. Immediately, the trees closed in. Hazel and wrinkled oak, Low-growing, sinuous, Every twig covered with lichen, Pea-green, sage-green, lime-green, opal-green, A green that comes from beyond the land, Out of the ocean. The light shone upwards off it. You revved, ready for the hill. But the engine echoed strangely In those groves and, when we peered, We saw a mist strung like rags Among the branches. The road rose sharply. Up we went.
Suddenly, out of the gloom, a flit, A flitting, a rushing sideways, something, Some thing, dozens of them, running athwart, Racing, even skating, both ways, every way, Across our path. So many, they rippled In rivers of gold and crimson, But every so often a pure white like an abrupt dove. They came in drifts, a shock, a rout, A rustling, feathered coat of autumn, An exaltation of pheasants, miraculous. You gasped, and braked. They stretched As far as the eye could see Into the disappearing reaches of the wood. Sometimes there was an upward rising in the stream As an alarmed bird batted away With a rasp into the undergrowth, And one or two hesitated when they saw our wheels. We stared without moving. On they crowded. It seemed hours passed. We quite forgot the reason that we came. The mist and lichens grew In the grey and gold wood. Then, just as swiftly, a last scuttle Through the leaf litter, a hok-hok in the bushes, And the embroidery of the birds was gone. It was not even dusk. All still. You started, and looked about As if remembering a gesture. A little breeze lifted, and, in the distance, Rooks began arguing. You released the brake, let in the clutch And we moved on, up. At the top the wood vanished, And we came out into high meadow air, Where there was no gate But a blue dome falling, and the sea far off, Like the kingdom we had come for.

Zoë Brigley: Can you tell us about the place that inspired this poem? Was it based on a specific journey or location?

Hilary Davies: The toll gate, just as I describe, was on the coast road from Porlock Weir on the northern scarp slope of the Quantocks where they fall into the Bristol Channel.

Zoë: The descriptions of the trees, lichens, and birds are vivid and precise. How do you approach capturing these natural details in poetry?

Hilary Davies: These woods and others like them in Devon , Cornwall, Wales and Ireland are temperate rain forest, an ecosystem that is even more endangered than its tropical equivalent. One of its characteristics is low sessile oaks, hazel and birch, moss covered banks, trees and streams, and festoons of lichen that can often be magically multi-coloured.  It is also the Arthurian forest, quite unlike the majestic oak and beech forests we think of in Central and Eastern England. As a child on holiday in the Brecon Beacons, where my father came from, I was used to spending whole days by the streams in such woods.

Zoë: The poem has a flowing, almost cinematic rhythm. How did you approach its pacing and line breaks?

Hilary Davies: I work very intensively on the precise words I wish to capture a visual image in my mind. I don’t think consciously about line breaks or pacing, but rather the language is chosen at the level of what the poet David Jones called, quoting the philosopher and theologian,  Jacques Maritain, the ‘pre-conscious life of the intellect’. In other words, it is born of craft and practice over many many years so that it is no longer conscious. I always have a very powerful visual image in my mind when I write: in that sense, you could call my work cinematic.

Zoë: There is a sense of awe and revelation as the natural world overwhelms the human perspective. Is this a recurring theme in your work?

Hilary Davies: Yes. Except I wouldn’t use the word ‘overwhelms’ but rather say that the human is suddenly aware of a transfigured natural world.

Zoë: Is there anything else you want to tell us about this poem?

Hilary Davies: Like many of my poems, this poem was born of a sudden transformative ‘appearance’ of the world as different, other, revelatory. Such moments often lie maturing just below the conscious, in a liminal space, in my mind for years, even when they only lasted, as this one did, maybe twenty minutes at most.  But about twenty years elapsed before I wrote the poem. You will also have spotted that it occurred on the hill up from Porlock Weir, and there is the subtlest of references to the significance of that placename for English poetry in the poem. But it is in no way a ‘poetic tourist’ poem.