Songfacts®:

• Laura Marling's sixth album Semper Femina is an exploration of femininity. The title is taken from a line in Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. The line is "varium et mutabile semper femina," which translates as "woman is always fickle and changeable." The singer came across the phrase in her early 20s and had a truncated version - "Semper Femina" (Latin for "always a woman") - tattooed on her leg.
• On this track Marling explores the archetype of the wild woman and her unrestrained physicality. "In the more masculine phase of my life I got really into hiking and bouldering, scrambling up trees or whatever," she explained. "And I just hadn't exercised that part of myself for such a long time, and it was felt fantastic. It touched something that was really sweet and innocent. At a time when I couldn't really find that center, I was touching on it running through a forest by Big Sur with no shoes on."
• The song was inspired in part by Laura Marling's fascination with mysticism. She told Q magazine: "In the last couple of years, I've been interested in ritual and the elements and alchemy, so there's all of that in there."
  
  "That song was written when I was spending quite a lot of time in Woodstock and that's the vibe there, definitely," Marling added. "There's all these streams and beautiful ancient stones. Also, I felt like Woodstock was a very masculine place. In America, there's a big resurgence in primal, masculine ancient survival skills, and I thought it was really interesting that people are finding solace in the idea that if everything goes to s--t, they could just run into the woods and live there."