The Forbidden Forest

I assume all kids who grow up in neighborhoods on the edge of wooded areas live in a land with made-up names for places defined by childhood imagination and fears. We certainly did. There was the Pretty Forest, the Forbidden Forest, and the Beaver Pond.  Ironically, the engineered drainage stream that formed the spine of our childhood wanderings, and continued into town as a major landscape feature, had a real name.  That name was unknown to us and unneeded.  It was "The Creek," with a sense of primacy that needed no description to distinguish it from others.

The names were passed along among the kids.  We learned them from older siblings and friends, and younger kids picked up the usage from us.  I don't know the origin of the name "Pretty Forest," which was the closest and most widely used of the wooded areas.  I guess it did look kind of pretty when you looked up at the sky through the trees, or when the leaves kind of, sort of changed color a bit in the fall.  The name "Forbidden Forest," on the other hand, seems to have arisen from parental prohibitions against going too far, and was almost certainly reinforced by the fear kids had about following the creek out of the woods into the open to get to the next thick stand of trees.