The Road Through The Woods

There are many paths through the woods at Temple Newsam (where I took this photo yesterday) and though they remain open, I am often reminded of this poem by Rudyard Kipling when I walk there.
Sometimes I fancy you can still hear the 'swish of a skirt in the dew' and the steady canter of horses of bygone ages. Perhaps the footsteps of centuries remain absorbed in the earth and the beautiful trees. It's a lovely poem:

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because the see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods. . . .
But there is no road through the woods.