Community woodland, Mid Wales

The community uses the woodland actively — there's a cottage, a couple of caravans, sheds and structures distributed through the trees for work and shelter. Nothing is maintained beyond what's necessary. A mint-green caravan in the winter woodland, the colour faded and the sides marked with weather. A green metal caravan partially buried in autumn leaves and fallen branches, the leaves banked up against the wheels. A derelict wooden cottage with a moss-covered roof and bare climbing vines on the walls, the mortar going soft. An open door frame in a dilapidated structure, the interior the same grey-brown as the woodland around it.

These are not ruins. They're in use. The distinction matters: the moss and the weathering and the sense of the land pressing back in around the structures is not neglect but the result of working with a woodland rather than against it. The mint-green caravan is someone's shelter.

The tree trunks are bright green with moss up to head height, where the moisture is. Above that the bark is grey. Close up, the moss on a tree trunk is a different ecosystem — leaves, spores, the tiny structural complexity of something that grows by the millimetre. The path through the woodland, bare ground with fallen leaves.

The frost persists in shadow all day in December. By three in the afternoon the light is already going amber and the woodland is going dark.