There is a patch of woodland near my childhood home. Technically, it remains private land. I remember many years ago they kept trying to fence it off, but people kept pulling the fences down. Public access prevailed.

There's a network of paths throughout this ancient wood. They've been embedded over countless years, stubbornly walked. I think I know them all.

I turned down one the other day. It turned out to be a track cleared in recent months by dirt bikers, churned into being by their wheels. The track looped back on itself, over deliberate ditches and swells. On the outer bend of the loop, another, smaller path I'd never seen, which I followed until it tapered into nothing.

At its end: charred beer cans, silver scraps, shredded aerosol bottles, cluttered round the long-dead remnants of a bonfire. Kids and their faintly dangerous games.

I loved fire, too, when I was young. I sat around fire in the woods.

I notice, in the ashes, warped knots of molten glass, obsidian and smooth. The flames must have been intense, a forge out here in the old woods, nestled just beyond the dirt bike bend, away from all the other paths, the illegal trails, walked and walked until people are no longer willing to let them go.