Private

There was a place that fascinated me when I was a child. We weren't supposed to go there, so we went. A cow sank in the mud in there - you're not allowed. We climbed through barbed wire and scrambled across the watery woodland by balancing on bobbing fallen logs until we reached a Victorian rubbish dump. It felt a bit like a churchyard, but wilder, swampier. Broken glass, ivy, uprooted trees, soil. I unearthed something exquisite: a tiny, intact perfume bottle complete with stopper.

We made a half-hearted attempt at building a camp once, but it was just too wet. Badgers and foxes had bagged the only habitable dry spots. No one ever went in there. The only human signs I saw were the game bird paraphernalia of seed hoppers and chicken wire at the periphery and, once, a troop of naturalists - bryophyte specialists perhaps, or civil servants, peering intently at tree trunks.

This secretive place is a privately owned wood with SSSI status. Sites of Special Scientific Interest, valued for the rarity or richness of biological or geographical features, are monitored by Natural England, the government's advisor on the natural environment. Management that compliments the site's full potential for biodiversity and heritage is advised, though not necessarily adhered to. 'My' SSSI seemed to be left to its own devices, and I only heard reference to it twice. A local amateur historian told us there had been an industry of clog making there, and Cambridge Natural History Society mentioned rare orchids in a lecture last year.

So it was a wild, impenetrable, protected place I rarely set foot in, but if I think about it, I've accumulated a wealth of singular moments, those on your own face-to-face with nature moments, some real one-offs that happened whenever I peered into its private, mythical depths.