THERE is a dappled glade in Sadler’s Wood where someone has set a rustic log bench, a good place to rest and pause on my early-morning walk and contemplate the rich stillness, the standing sabbath of the trees. Once one has stopped walking, steadied, and stilled a little, one becomes aware not only of the sights of the forest — the sheer variety of texture, shape, and colour, even in a single tree, or in the leaf and chestnut-strewn path beneath one’s feet — but also of the sounds.

The forest may seem quiet on an early November morning, but it is not quite silent. First, one hears the sheer variety of birdsong, and then, more distant, softer, up in the woods behind, and then again, quite near, the distinct pattering sound of the prickly husks of sweet chestnuts falling and meeting the loam with the lightest muffled thud, to join all the green husks, some already half split open to reveal the rich dark brown of the inner kernel with its swirling grain — almost like the burr on the bowl of the old briar pipe that I am smoking meditatively while I sit.

And no sooner have I noticed one than there is another, and another: a scattered counterpoint of pattering as the stored goodness of the forest falls, a feast for the squirrels, and later perhaps, when chestnuts are roasted on open fires, for some of us.

I love that pattering sound, and also the sound of the word “patter” itself. It so perfectly imitates the sound that it denotes that one assumes that it was pure onomatopoeia: the sound itself turned into a word. But this is not the case. In fact, our word “patter” goes back to the Latin Pater noster, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. Because, in the rubric in the Latin mass, the priest was enjoined to recite that prayer in a low indistinct voice, the sound of his muttered “Pater noster” became the word “patter”.

The effect was further enhanced by the endlessly cycling recitation of the rosary, by clergy and laity alike, in which each decade of Aves followed a Pater noster, on the big Pater noster bead that marked out the decades. Indeed, the whole set of beads, as it clicked and passed in its patterning through the hands of the faithful as they pattered out their prayers, became known as a Paternoster, hence Paternoster Row, in London, where the beads were made and sold.

The lovely new chestnut emerging from its husk at my feet might well have made a fine paternoster bead; and, as a few more came pattering down in the woods around me, I mused that, maybe, the origins of “patter” are not so far off the mark. “The trees of the field shall clap their hands,” the Psalmist said, imagining his own olive groves in a vigorous Judaic circle dance; but perhaps the woods of England prefer instead to patter out their Pater nosters. Perhaps the whole wood is at its orisons. Or perhaps their patter should prompt me to mine. That’s what George Herbert thought when he wrote:

Trees would be tuning on their native lute
To thy renown: but all their hands and throats
Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute.
Man is the worlds high Priest: he doth present
The sacrifice for all. . .

So, deep in the woods, I, too, turned to my Pater noster.