When the enchanted animals of Hexwood discover they soon won't be magical anymore, they have to concoct an unlikely plan to save their village and themselves.
'Last Christmas in Hexwood' is a seasonal story of witches, enchanted animals and a series of unlikely plans to save Christmas.
Chapter 2
Almost twelve months after his meeting with the reindeer on Christmas Eve, Urchin the hedgehog was once again out on present-related business.
He was shopping on the High Street of Hexwood village, which ran along the bottom of The Ledge, the ridge of high ground which marked one edge of the wood. The village was named after the wood, it being in the middle of it and -- being only a small village, both in size and scale -- not quite meriting a name of its own.
Some said that the wood was called Hexwood because the witch lived there, ‘hex’ being another word for spell. This couldn’t, however, be right. The witch had only lived there a few years, and the wood had been called Hexwood long before that.
Ah, these wise old heads would reply: perhaps the wood had always been magical, and that was why the witch had moved there in the first place. This might have been true, but then they would have had to contend with the fact that the wood was called ‘Exwood’ on some old maps, and ‘Ixwood’ on others.
Some less serious people would go on to propose that the wood had been called ‘Ex-wood’, because it had at one time been felled for firewood and had so been an ex-wood, before the trees grew back again. But this was silly.
Perhaps not quite as silly was the suggestion that it had once been called ‘Eggs Wood’ because people had gone there from the village to collect birds’ eggs. Even more plausible was the idea that it might have originally been ‘Inkswood’, after the hamlet Inkstone on its western edge, and that the habitually sloppy pronunciation of the locals had slurred the name about so much that it had become quite different.
This last idea had been proposed by a one-time vicar of Inkstone who had not, perhaps, had a very favourable view of his parishioners. His suggestion had led to the general notion that the wood had once been called something very like Ex- or Ix- or Eggs-wood. But the idea had got around that the wood was in some way haunted or fairy-ish, and so the name Hexwood had seemed appropriate. And then the witch moved there, and sealed it once and for all.
There was one last suggestion, though: that it was in fact called ‘X-wood’, because two paths crossed in the middle of it, making an ‘X’ shape.
Which, in all fairness, they did.
Hexwood made a sort of bean shape; or, if you were of a more fanciful turn of mind, a shape like a plump crescent moon, following the curve of the River Ringing; which ran along its southern side.
The western end of this bean - or moon, if you prefer - stopped at the edge of the village green of the hamlet of Inkstone. At the northern end was a meadow bounded by the road leading to the nearby village of Small Stone.
Along the bottom curve of the wood, from the eastern to the southern end, ran The Ledge, a long, curving ridge that fell away in almost a cliff down to the River Ringing.
Outside of those bounds, to the south, beyond the River Ringing, were the fields of Ring Farm, in which stood the ancient ring of stones that gave the farm, river and district so many of their names. To the west, the roads from Small Stone and Ring Farm converged in the centre of Inkstone before they set off over the hill to the town of Stone Magna, which had a proper dolmen, a market square and a train station.
Within those bounds, then, was the actual Hexwood. The southernmost high point of The Ledge was a cathedral of huge beech trees, the ground under their dense branches quite bare. It was here that the villagers of Hexwood held their big parties on high days and holidays, laying out long tables in the dappled aisles between the great grey columns of tree trunks. At the eastern end of The Ledge was a copse of silver birch, all ghostly and whispering, which the locals called The Silver Forest. And round the witch’s house in the centre of the wood were thick firs and yews, dark and shadowy. Most of the wood, though, was quite as you would expect: full of oak and beech, chestnut and ash, bushes of holly and clumps of bramble, carpets of fern and thickets of hawthorn.
A long straight path known as The Walk ran from the northern side of the wood, from the Inkstone village green, right down to the southern edge, going up over The Ledge and down the other side via some steps to a small wooden bridge over the river.
Alongside The Walk ran a little stream called The Rill, which was fed by rainwater coming off the northern slopes of the Ledge and which ran, eventually -- after crossing under the Walk in a last minute dash -- into the Inkstone village pond.
From the western corner of the wood (where it met the road to Ring Farm) to the eastern edge (where it led to the Meadow) ran another path, known simply as The Twitten. Attempts had been made, long ago, to lay The Walk out, and it was wide and airy for much of its route, the Rill chattering along beside it, sparkling in the sun. But The Twitten ran under the Ledge and was overshadowed by it, and often cut its own ditch between overhanging trees, arcs of branches swathed in hanging ivy. The only open part of it was the bridge where it crossed the Rill, just before it met the Walk, but the rest was dark and secretive.
Nowhere was it more dark and secretive than where, just beyond the bridge and the crossroads deep in the middle of the wood, it was suddenly surrounded by threatening firs and the tall, prickly holly hedge that stood around the witch’s house.
There was some debate, locally, as to whether or not the witch had moved into a house that was already there. Some claimed there had always been a cottage there; some said there had been only a kind of shack or rough shelter. Some said there had been sinister old ruins, covered over by ivy and populated only by owls and ghosts. The truth was that no one had liked going that deep into the wood even before the witch lived there, and even those who had, hadn’t stopped to sight-see, there where the Ledge lowered over them and the thick trees blocked out the cheerful sun.
What no one could deny was that the witch’s cottage certainly looked like it had been there since time immemorial. Half-timbered and thatched, it looked as though it had grown out of the ground, like some kind of toadstool fertilised by a mulch of pulped fairy stories. Which was ironic, as it turned out.
Not many people went there to look at it. Once the witch lived there, even fewer locals went into the wood than had gone there before, even though she was a largely harmless witch; pleasant, even. She bought eggs from Ring Farm, and discussed the weather with villagers when she passed through. She even took a stall at the fete one year, although the people who bought her cakes didn’t eat them, and instead collected them under a bell jar in the village hall.
She wasn’t even doing magic out there in the wood, leastways not that anyone could see. What she was doing, in fact, was growing mushrooms. The village knew this, because the week she had arrived she had given an illustrated lecture in the village hall and finished with a strict admonition that no one should collect and especially not eat any of the mushrooms that they might find in the forest.
The villagers had had no intention of doing so anyway, so she found a willing audience and left content that her mushrooms were safe. There was, however, an audience that was not so easily persuaded.
The animals of Hexwood -- the foxes and rabbits, badgers and squirrels -- had not been there for the illustrated lecture, and would not have understood it if they had. Not yet, at any rate. Over time, the subterranean network of the fungi in the wood got into the food chain, and the food chain got into the animals, and the animals got into some wholly new ideas.
Ideas themselves were new to the animals, and they were quickly followed by thoughts, then words, then clothes, then post offices and pipes and pints of beer and so, at last, the village of Hexwood.
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