The Way Through The Woods Songtext / Lyric

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 they 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