"The Way Through The Woods" lyrics

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