When I was wee, I lived in a house in a village that backed onto some woods. It was a time when it was quite normal for kids to be left to their own devices, so I would quite happily run around in the woods until it got dark.
Around eight or nine, my dad let us take his little axe out into the woods to make camps. We were given guidelines: only knock down trees that were already dead, always make sure the tree wouldn’t land on anyone or anything, only do this deep in the woods, any injuries were entirely our fault.
It was great. I found one area where there were lots of dead elm trees surrounded by new saplings. I diligently worked around the saplings and cleared an area where we made what was, frankly, a castle from old trees. It had a roof and what looks like turrets, but was single level because I was a bit scared about falling through the floor.
About a week after finishing it, Bigger Boys found it. They used it as their drinking den/porn stash/smoking hole. They didn’t let us back in, and worse, they pulled up a lot of the saplings.
After a fortnight, I went down there early one summer morning. I thought about knocking it down, but the holes I’d dug for supports would’ve made it way too easy for them to reconstruct.
So I burned it down. A totally natural reaction for a nine year old.
And the fire spread to cover most of the common.
There was about a day where really thick acrid smoke covered the village. It wasn’t a blazing inferno, but because the woods weren’t maintained there was a lot of leaf litter which caught fire easily and smoked like you wouldn’t believe.
The woods are still there. It’s a lot clearer nowadays, partly because of the fire getting rid of years of accumulated debris and partly because the village now has a yearly clearance of most of the woodland to prevent it happening again. I felt terrible at the time - who wouldn’t? - but apparently it’s made the woodland thicker and allowed the trees to grow quicker and better.
We didn’t play much in the woods after that.
