In Pursuit of Autumn

I have never known an autumn like this one; never known myself so distracted by the intensity of leaf colour, nor the windfalls at the roadsides. I can’t recall having felt so keenly the crunch of acorns and beechnuts underfoot, nor made such eager beelines for apple trees, wherever spotted – I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so many apples. Perhaps it’s because I turned forty this September, and in doing so, entered what could be considered the autumn quarter of life, and some inherent magnetism has me all the more attuned to the change of season.

But more likely, it is the fact of 2025 being certified as a ‘mast’ year. Chasing up a warm, dry spring, the hottest summer on record left in its wake an autumn of bumper-abundance: a once-every-five-years kind of autumn that has overloaded Britain’s trees with produce. Fruit, nut, drupe, berry; purple sloe, crimson haw, apples of every shade. Hazels, acorns and coffee-coloured chestnuts too copious, even, for foraging wildlife. And seemingly symbiotic is the profound vibrancy in the leaves. As the days shortened, and photosynthesis wound down, the broadleaves lost their chlorophyl coating, revealing beneath an array of season-end pigments never richer: golden birch, amber beech, oaks in a spectrum of ochres; blazing red dogwood and American sweetgum; individual cherries, whitebeams and maples multicoloured like the forests of New England. Throughout, all I have wanted to do is bask in it all: to get out into it and revel, reap, pick and pocket. And yet, like a child classroom-bound at the approach of the summer holiday, I had to remain patient.

Some years ago, I wrote a piece for TOAST on following the road once taken by the poet Edward Thomas in his celebrated travelogue In Pursuit of Spring. Setting out from London through Surrey and Hampshire, a century after the book’s publication, my journey was an attempt to do as Thomas had done, making off in the direction of blossom and birdsong, to immerse in the seasonality of spring. It ended at Gilbert White’s House in the Hampshire village of Selborne, the former home (and now museum) of the celebrated eighteenth-century naturalist-parson. Under this rare and resplendent ‘mast’ autumn, I felt much the same seasonal pull: I wanted to journey out and absorb fully the clutter and colour of it all, before the moment passed.

On a morning run, a day after the autumn equinox, I found myself on the old road that leads southeast out of the Hampshire village where I now live – an ancient road full of ancient things: holloways, dells, chalk banks, and overgrown coppices; bluebells and anemones in spring. Saturated, just then, in radiant sunlight, the road bore all the signs of the turning season, and rounding a bend I saw, a hundred metres ahead of me, an arch of yew framing perfectly the rising sun, and the road passing beneath it gleaming and beckoning. This road, as it happens, leads all the way to Selborne, and I wanted nothing more than to set off right away into the glowing light and to travel with it all the way to White’s house, in much the same way I had done in that spring past.

But obstacles have since accumulated that make pursuits of this nature near impossible to undertake off the cuff. Deadlines loomed, the children would need collecting from school. Weeks passed. The great surge of colour went on around me, the mast went unweighed. The apples up at the village orchard pooled in the wet grass, and I watched the leaves of the churchyard ash redden, blaze and begin to burn out.

I spied a window in the calendar, a month on from my run, and pressed in a pin. A Wednesday, the forecast dubious, but the day feasibly free. I bought an OS map of Hampshire for the 22 miles to Selborne, and, the day before, packed a bag of edible autumnals: the last of the orchard apples (sweet little Laxton’s Superb’s), walnuts and medlars, and hazelnuts from the garden tree. I decanted a premature slug of the Christmas sloe gin into a pocket-sized bottle. The next morning I made breakfast in the dark, and was on the old road before dawn, passing quietly beneath its overhanging sycamores. Tawny owls were closing out the night with territorial hoots; an unseen robin sang closely from within the high hedgerow, and a faint but spreading light, far off, enlivened the cold morning.

Gilbert White was made famous by his astute and devoted observations of nature – a blending of the literary and the scientific that was considered unique in his time. His great achievement was The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), a book detailing the flora and fauna White encountered in and around this small chalk-land village in the heart of Hampshire, which, through successive reprints, became one of the most published works in the English language, after Shakespeare and the Bible.

Still in print today, White’s Natural History secured his title as the great-grandfather of all ‘modern’ nature writing. With exquisite attention, he wrote of Selborne’s willows and willow-wrens, lapwings and local lizards, and the beech-wooded slope (the ‘hanger’) that overlooked the village. He was at pains to examine and understand the ecological interrelations between creatures and their environment. Naturally, the spectacle of autumn in Selborne did not go undocumented by White. Writing on the 26th October, 1783, he reflected, ‘‘If a masterly landscape painter was to take our hanging woods in their autumnal colours, persons unacquainted with the country would object to the strength and depth of the tints and would pronounce at an exhibition that they were heightened.” Setting out for Selborne in the stirring morning, White’s autumn – his description of Selborne’s wooded hanger, in particular – lay firmly in mind.

7:15am

Bramble and blackthorn leaves gleamed from the hedges; even the hazels were exceptionally bright. The soft, fluffed down of wild clematis seeds clung like cobwebs to their brittle branches. I spooked a wood pigeon from the oak above; there were no cars, yet, on the road. Out in the fields I could hear the familiar, haunting bark of a muntjac deer. Growing sunlight shattered the clouds into thin lengths of cirrus.

8:30am

Just past North Waltham I stopped in at the Wheatsheaf pub for coffee and a glance at the map. The distance travelled – by then only short – felt good to chart. I felt good, too, for the warmth in my legs, though self-conscious in the quiet of the pub lounge: already muddy-booted, I got the once over from breakfasting guests.

9:45am

Exiting the crossroads hamlet of Axford, the roadside became dark with the long, serrated leaves of chestnut and I felt the bump of their fruit at my feet. I kicked free from the spiky husks a handful of gorgeously fat, shiny, pin-pointed nuts, and pocketed some, turning them over in my hand like marbles. Where they had fallen on the tarmac, the nut husks had dampened and browned, and been flattened by passing cars, becoming knitted together like a worn, sprawling doormat. Close by, large acorns of red oak lay scattered and curiously halved across the middle. Exposure and oxidation had turned the starchy innards to a beautiful pink.

12:15pm

Looking for a lunch spot, I detoured from the road up a narrow, chalk and flint lane that edged a fallow field, to where an enormous oak had been felled and laid on its side. I climbed on top of it, using the deep fissures as footholds, and sat with the sun in my face. I had the medlars first – naturally sweet, like cooked apple – and then the nuts, the apples, and the gin, then lay back on the trunk and let a quarter of an hour pass. Oaks of a similar size, still living, closed the sky out overhead, and circling above the open field in front, two kites called to one another.

1pm

On the outskirts of Alton, five miles from Selborne, the route became an A-road, and I was forced to hop a threshold and skirt a succession of fields, leaping the stub-ends of summer crops and squeezing through gaps in the dividing hedges. At times, however, I was forced back onto the roadside where the traffic roar overtook all romance. Ever an optimist – at times, a fantasist – I had hoped the walk might play out more like a Thomas Hardy novel, where protagonists in books like Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess are forever traipsing southern county roads on long walks, drifting in contemplative distraction. An absence of mind now, in the modern context, would have me abruptly dispatched by a BMW.

3pm

Over a field of pink-white mustard, the sun had lowered already, the furthest trees showing red and plum-purple.

It is fair to say I’ve not entered my forties lightly: I find it somehow baffling to have reached this age, and question, as all I’m sure do, how it could have happened. In the most appalling of clichés, my attention has hard-focussed on aspirations not yet achieved, heightening the sense of free-floating downstream, and the passing banks beginning to blur. Reflecting on this, on my road to Selborne, I came to a kind of quiet revelation: that I feel time passing most dispiritingly when I find I’ve not connected fully with the season at hand; when I feel there’s no time to visit the bluebells, pick blackberries, go looking for chestnuts or crunch over the ice. This year, the mast made starkly apparent the beauty of ephemeral autumn and the necessity of bearing witness to its every detail; it got me out and off walking on a year when I probably needed the walk most – my thanks, therefore, to the apples. The revelation, and so the resolve: to take a walk – as intentional a walk as this – at least once in every season, ad infinitum. To take a day to absorb the changes, just four days a year, might in fact be one of the pillars of a fulfilling life… time will tell.

4:05pm

At the narrowing of a field, the sun lowering further, I was turned once again unavoidably back onto the roadside, where cars were going at sixty miles per hour. A short yet perilous way on, however, I came to the dip that leads into Selborne, and soon after caught sight of the enormous and stately tulip tree behind the garden wall at Gilbert White’s. The leaves of a tulip tree in golden flourish are more luminous than any other species, I always think, and the towering specimen was like a lighthouse guiding me in.

I passed beneath the steel sign of the museum and over the pavers that lead to the back of the brick and flint house. Through the garden, up into the orchard, where I picked two sweet apples from a tree – Golden Pippin’s, a variety once grown by White from grafted cuttings. Continuing on over the grassy rise of the garden I came at last in full view of the Selborne hanger and its promised colours – a view exhibiting every conceivable tone of peak autumn: oak, birch, hornbeam and poplar, and great mounds of ancient beech; beech trees that have stood sentry for centuries. They were indeed more magnificently coloured and tinted, in that moment, than a landscape painter could conceivably contrive.

Words by Matt Collins.

Photography by Matt Collins and Eva Nemeth.