Once upon a time, there lived a young man called Henry Summers, who lived at the Farmhouse over at the East End, just below the quarry. He was a wise man, strong in the arm and of calm manner. He never beat his animals or his wife. The family farmed ten fields and had several beautiful apple orchards.
Among the trees, there was one particularly ancient apple tree that Henry’s great grandfather planted and around which all of his children had played. The tree stood tall and strong, even though it was very old.
Henry believed that this tree was extra special, and he called it the ‘Apple Tree Man’. Henry always took great care of this tree, speaking to it kindly and ensuring it had plenty of water and cider at the wassail.
One cold winter’s night, Henry was visited by a stranger who had walked from Bristol and wanted to find friends in Nowhere. His clothes were dirty and his shoes were worn out. Henry was as kind to people as he was to his goats, welcomed the stranger into his home and gave him food and cider.
His wife looked out some more shoes for him. The stranger slept soundly in his clean bed that night.
The next day, the happy stranger revealed that he was, in fact, the spirit of the Apple Tree Man who had taken the form of a wanderer to test the farmer’s kindness.
The Apple Tree Man promised the farmer that as long as he continued to care for the apple trees, his orchards would make so many lovely apples every year, that he and his family would be wealthy and joyful.
The Apple Tree Man was true to his word, the orchards flourished, and the farmer and his descendants enjoyed bountiful harvests for many generations. And the people of Nowhere enjoyed their cider for years to come.
It’s January 1st and the floor of the wood is covered with fresh new leaves, growing in dense patches. The first flowers are starting to open. Within a week, the air is scented with a sweet fragrance. This is the winter heliotrope, which is just as much at home in Nowhere as it is in its native North Africa.
The winter heliotrope is unusual because it has separate male and female plants. As far as we know, the Victorian gardeners only imported male plants into Britain, because they liked the showy flowers and its rich scent. So, although the flowers make good 
By late October, the last of the visitors are leaving Nowhere Wood. House martins are birds that build nests in the 
Amazingly, for such confident, visible, birds, they have been able to keep this a secret from us. And, even today, we really do not know for sure. We think they fly to Africa, over the Sahara Desert, to countries like Cameroon, Congo and the Ivory Coast. That’s a journey of over 5 000 km.
If all goes well, they return to the wood, and even to the same nests. It is a dangerous adventure and not all make it back. The birds can be eaten by birds of prey, or trapped by hunters.
These animals look like cars parked in the autumn sunshine. They look harmless enough, but they have some 
We are in Nowhere Wood, about 300 million years ago, staring at a forest of tree ferns, watching them make oxygen. Over the years, these tree ferns have made so much oxygen that its concentration in the air has risen to about 35%, (compare that with the 21% found in the 21st century).
There is so much oxygen that the lightning strikes produce frequent explosions in the air, causing forest fires. Nowhere Wood is a dangerous place to be, sometimes.
The animals are using the oxygen to grown large: some millipedes are 1.5 metres in length and 0.5 metres wide. Some dragonflies have 70 cm wingspans.
With all of this food available, there are opportunities for new carnivorous lizards to appear, including Hylonomus. This is one of the first creatures to have a new eggs with membranes inside, a characteristic later shown by all birds.
Also the flesh-eating Anthracosaurs first appeared at this time. These are the direct ancestors of the dinosaurs, that appeared millions of years later.
We are not alone in Nowhere Wood, about 300 million years ago. We are deep in a forest of tree ferns, towering above us, fifteen metres high. The damp air has a sweet and woody fragrance, heavy with spores, heavy with promise.
The plants are silently photosynthesising, growing ever taller and adding oxygen to the air. Year after year, generation after generation.
The wood in the tree stems is a new invention of evolution: no other plants have wood and fungi have yet to discover a way to eat it. This means that when the trees die and fall into the swampy wet soil, they do not decay, but stayed for thousands of years, gradually becoming compressed together to form deposits of coal.
The tree ferns took carbon dioxide from the air and locked it away as wood and coal. They took so much and the amount of carbon dioxide in the air fell so much, that the climate cooled, lead to the destruction of the tropical forests.
Imagine you had a time machine, where and when would you go? Come with me back to Nowhere Wood, about 300 million years ago. That is long before humans, mammals or even dinosaurs existed, but frogs laid their eggs in pools, much as they do today. Today it is hot, humid and very quiet: with no birdsong or animal noise, apart from the distant croaking of frogs. Tomorrow, there will be a raging tropical storm and the mountain will be pounded by its violence.
Nowhere Wood is located just above the equator, and we are looking up at the aftermath of a series of global catastrophes, which has taken hundreds of million years to happen. Two continents collided and sent shockwaves through the land, pushing upwards to form the mountains that we can see ahead of us. We are in a valley, downstream from a range of tall mountain peaks.
The mountain rock is soft and is easily 
Mountains become tiny grains of sand settling at the bottom of the smaller streams running through Nowhere Wood. Layers upon layers of