If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a mild surprise.
Alright, so it's not very catchy, or even particularly alluring, but it's more honest than promising teddy bears that live in the forrest hanging out in their furry little gangs. George Lucas explained what woodland teddybears get up to in 1984 and it's a hell of a lot more violent than eating sandwiches.
Never forget...
When I went out in the woods near Brecon recently, my fiancee noticed a tree which had grown to almost totally swallow an old sign. I thought it was mildly interesting and so naturally took a picture and posted it to the Reddit page /mildlyinteresting.
Twenty five thousand upvotes later, and I can cross "front page of Reddit" off my bucket list. I've also been bombarded with comments saying that it looks like a vagina/butthole (it does), comments mimicking Jeff Goldblum's "life finds a way" line in Jurassic Park, and above all else, comments asking what this mysterious and almost-vanished sign actually said.
First and foremost, the tree in question is on private land, so I couldn't exactly grab an axe and try to excavate it - at least not legally. Luckily, another group of Redditors began to try to crack the code, the best guess being from a user named busy_yogurt who suggested that the original text might have read "HORSES HAVE RIGHT OF WAY, PLEASE MAKE ROOM FOR THEM."
This seemed like a pretty solid guess. I had no way of telling how old the sign was - the paint was still in pretty good condition but the letters had serifs - the little extra lines at the edges of letters. Nobody prints modern public information signs with serifs (I imagine because it saves on cost to exclude them) so the sign couldn't be that recent. I had no idea how old the tree was, or what species. The leaves looked to me like maple, but that's only because they looked like the Canadian flag, and that level of expertise should prove I'm no kind of arborist.
Today, prompted by my own curiosity and that of the internet, I went back out to look at the sign again. The first thing that struck me was that the font used didn't look as antiquated on close inspection as I'd first thought. Also, careful viewing from different angles showed that it almost certainly contained "MAR-" and "-ATH." My guess was that this was therefore something about sticking to the MARked pATH.
I walked a mile or so until I came to the nearest farm to see if they owned the path in question and if they could shed any light on things. I made my way down the drive and came across the farmer, dourly pouring red diesel into a lawnmower that was ten years older than me and at least as rusty.
"I wonder if you could help me," I began in my best cheerful tone. "The path on the other side of the river, the one that says Footpath Only, do you own that?"
"Yep."
This was not by any stretch the least talkative farmer I'd ever met.
"There's a sign at one end of the path that's been almost completely swallowed by the tree behind it..."
"The one that says 'No Path' ?" he said. It wasn't quite a question. One sign at the far end did indeed say "Private - No Path." The gate at the other end bore the slightly more accomodating legend "Private Land - Footpath Only." That whole section of the trail had done a perfect job of keeping the public slightly unsure of whether or not they were even allowed to be there, which I'm sure was the point. They could legally walk there, but weren't totally welcome.
"No..." I said, "the other end. There's a red sign."
He looked at me the way all farmers look at people - in a way that says "Why are you wasting my time with this? I have farming to do..."
"...I took a picture of it and posted it to the internet," I explained. "Since then a lot of people have wondered what it used to say?"
"It was about sticking to the path," he nodded.
"Right!" I said, encouragingly. "I thought I could make out something about 'Marked Path,' maybe? Like 'Please stick to the marked path' ...?"
"Yep. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was to tell people to keep to the perimeter path."
I thanked him for his help and left, considering as I did so that the perimeter path was hopelessly overgrown and that everybody had been ignoring that sign and traipsing through the middle of this guy's field since long before the tree grew over it.
It was as close to solving the mystery as I was ever going to get - if I went back and chopped a lump out of the tree to get to the exact wording, that farmer was going to have a pretty short list of suspects.
I can only hope that he never figures out who came back later and did this:
