Few pass this way any more. A path once followed the bank of the stream that flows sullenly and noiselessly through the woods. But it is barely visible now. Tall, gangling weeds choke it and obscure it. Footsteps have not flattened them.

It is raining, as it was on that day in April 1968 and even though the army of trees and the dense undergrowth hide them from view, the sound of race cars hurtling around the Hockenheimring half a mile or so away echoes through the forest like an elegy.

An auto festival is taking place there and the air is filled with the sounds of exhausts cracking and spluttering, tyres screaming and squealing and beseeching, and engines revving and roaring and squabbling.

 

These woods have borne sad and silent witness to these struggles and the casualties they sire many times but the circuit has been reconfigured and the track does not scythe through them as it used to. Now this is a place where only ghosts and secrets reside.

The stream flows slowly on. A duck flaps and fusses out of the water and flies on to the trunk of a fallen beech that lies across the channel, blocking what is left of the path that leads to the spot where Jim Clark, the Scotsman who was the world’s greatest racing driver, was killed.

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Jim Clark’s final resting place (pictured) just yards from where he lost his life has been neglected

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Clark pictured holding the Aintree 200 trophy he won in 1962

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Mail Sport columnist Oliver Holt (pictured) believes the current state of Clark’s final resting place is an insult to his memory