The Great Wood E-Book

Jim Crumley

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 251

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Great Wood of Caledon – the historic native forest of Highland Scotland – has a reputation as potent and misleading as the wolves that ruled it. The popular image is of an impassable, sun-snuffing shroud, a Highlandswide jungle infested by wolf, lynx, bear, beaver, wild white cattle, wild boar, and wilder painted men. Jim Crumley shines a light into the darker corners of the Great Wood, to re-evaluate some of the questionable elements of its reputation, and to assess the possibilities of its partial resurrection into something like a national forest. The book threads a path among relict strongholds of native woodland, beginning with a soliloquy by the Fortingall Yew, the one tree in Scotland that can say of the hey-day of the Great Wood 5,000 years ago: 'I was there.' The journey is enriched by vivid wildlife encounters, a passionate and poetic account that binds the slow dereliction of the past to an optimistic future.

Leseprobe

THE GREAT WOOD

ALSO AVAILABLE BY JIM CRUMLEY

Nature Writing

The Last Wolf

The Winter Whale

Brother Nature

Something Out There

A High and Lonely Place

The Company of Swans

Gulfs of Blue Air (A Highland Journey)

Among Mountains

Among Islands

The Heart of Skye

The Heart of Mull

The Heart of the Cairngorms

Badgers on the Highland Edge

Waters of the Wild Swan

The Pentland Hills

Shetland – Land of the Ocean

Glencoe – Monarch of Glens

West Highland Landscape

St Kilda

Fiction

The Mountain of Light

The Goalie

Autobiography

The Road and the Miles (A Homage to Dundee)

Urban Landscape

Portrait of Edinburgh

The Royal Mile

First published in 2011 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Jim Crumley 2011

The moral right of Jim Crumley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 84158 973 2eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 090 6

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, NewtonmorePrinted and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue: A Walk in the Woods on St Andrew’s Day

1 Soliloquy by the Fortingall Yew

2 A Lament for the Trees

3 A View of Trees

4 Glen Finglas

5 Sunart

6 Strath Fillan

7 Glen Orchy and Rannoch

8 Rothiemurchus

9 Creag Fiaclach

10 Glen Strathfarrar

11 The Great Woods

Epilogue: Out of the Trees

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

Psalm 1: The Book of Psalms

I do believe in God but I spell it Nature.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) for a grant that greatly assisted the cause of this book.

Three works by other writers were of particular assistance in my researches: A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland by T.C. Smout, Alan R. MacDonald and Fiona Watson; A Pleasure in Scottish Trees by Alistair Scott; Wild Endeavour by Don and Bridget MacCaskill. Thanks for permission to quote from all three titles.

PROLOGUE

A Walk in the Woods on St Andrew’s Day

It was St Andrew’s Day and I went for a walk in the woods. Autumn had been long and lingering and mellow and mild and extraordinarily beautiful. Waking to the first hard frost, I opened a window, smelled the change, shivered, closed the window. Over breakfast I looked out at foreground trees and wooded hills furred with ermine and blurred by low mist and sang to myself a line of James Taylor: ‘The birches were dream-like on account of that frosting . . .’ I decided that St Andrew’s Day to celebrate trees. I know a place . . .

The sun rises cloudlessly on a whitened land, defeats the mist, but slowly. The land has the sudden pallor of winter. Grasses, smoky orange in October, have bleached to all the shades of straw, and there are not many of those. Bracken has collapsed and darkened to all the shades of unburned toast, but with none of the allure of toast. Trees are battening down and all but bare – oaks hold a few wan, clustery leaves all the shades of cold tea, birches manage a smatter of old gold, palest green willow leaves thin out and whiten, drifting earthwards even without a wind to urge them down. An old hazel wood, crowded out by its own blackened, writhing limbs and looking like so many ancient dancing Masai tribesmen, whispers and spits and bristles at me as I pass, as if it didn’t like me to bear witness to its secret dance. Even on a windless day, hazel woods don’t believe in stillness.

I fancy that small covey of aspens just heaved a sigh; their heart-quickening autumn flames, the brightest light in any Highland wood, are dowsed beyond recall, and there is no leaf to work their tremulous sorcery. Spring is suddenly far off and unimaginable.

At this moment in the year, the dark green of Scots pine deepens, glows and ennobles. Here is a good one, not particularly tall, perhaps 50 feet, but the trunk is broad and hefty and reddish and round, the bark grooved like tractor tyres, the canopy wide and airy and smoky green. Such a tree is called a granny pine. God knows why.

Few things so ennoble a Highland hillside as a pine-wood spiced with birch and juniper, and every pinewood has its outlying sentinels, stoical stand-alone trees of all but indestructible tenacity. Here is one I have known for 30 years. It is quite alone on its hillside; the pinewood is over there, quarter of a mile away. Fifteen years ago lightning rearranged its handsome presence. A direct hit cleaved its downhill, north-facing limb from the parent trunk, almost but not quite severing it. The limb collapsed into the ground and was quite withered away within two years. But the tree still stands. In fact it thrives to east and west and south. The withered limb still clings to it, and if anything it has strengthened the tree by buttressing it against the steep fall of the hillside to the north.

Seton Gordon, one of the founding fathers of the modern Scottish nature-writing tradition, who spent much of his working life in the Cairngorms and their fringing pine-woods, noted a characteristic of the woods’ solitary outliers like this one: ‘I do not recall ever having seen a forest outpost or sentinel uprooted by wind; they stand, undismayed, against gusts which send their fellows farther in the forest crashing to the ground.’

He wrote about one such tree in particular in his matchless 1924 book, The Cairngorm Hills of Scotland:

. . . a very old Scots fir grows beside the burn. It is called Craobh Tillidh, or the Tree of the Return, and received its name in the old days when a summer population lived at the head of Gleann Einich, and when the stirks and the cows with their calves were driven up a few days before the people themselves went to the shielings. The herdsman accompanied the animals as far as the Tree of the Return. From here the beasts, knowing the road from former summers, were able to continue the journey by themselves and the herdsman returned to Rothiemurchus.

I found the idea of a Tree of the Return an affecting one, even though I never owned a herd of cattle to drive that way. In my own explorations and writings about Gleann Einich, I first identified another conspicuous solitary pine where I have always paused on my way into the glen, then christened it the Tree of the Beginning. Its story is written down in my own Cairngorms book, A High and Lonely Place (Cape, 1990; Whittles, 2000), but my many memories of it are jogged by this wounded pine much nearer to home. Both stand near old tracks, old ways through the hills, old ways into very old pinewoods. Both are recognisable at once and at a distance. The thought occurs suddenly: such trees were always landmarks. Whatever the greatest extent of our native forest may have been, there were always outliers – conspicuous, solitary trees that wandering or settled tribes acknowledged and celebrated; others that stood alone in clearings or at the confluence of rivers or at a meeting of old ways through the land; others that became meeting places, sacred places, churches without walls; others that marked the sites of great events, great lives lived, epic battles, love trysts . . .

Perhaps more than anything else, that single idea – a reverence for individual trees – is the symbolic bond that is still capable of evoking fellow-feeling with those who have walked this way before, not just Seton Gordon’s herdsman, but those shadowy folk who walked a much more liberally forested land several thousand years ago.

Like all symbolic bonds, its significance is perhaps overdone. Likewise the notion of that forest that popular imagination sees as something that smothered all but the mountaintops; that was reputedly prowled by slavering tribes of wolves and bears and big cats and cattle called aurochs the size of elephants, and terrifying blue-painted men; that we – or someone who walked this way before us – gave a name to, the Great Wood of Caledon.

So here is a good Scots pine, a wounded veteran of a lifelong struggle waged against this irksome climate, and if you linger like me by its tortured limb and rest your back against its still vigorous trunk and look west out across the crowns of the pinewood that soften the bulwark of mountains beyond, or north to where the low sun of St Andrew’s Day has made a yellow patchwork of still more mountains, and if you let your seeing eye wander there, you will find other solitary pines to set alongside other ways into the hills, other ways into the fertile history that is enshrined in our notion of the Great Wood.

But ways into the future too, for among those solitary pines are a few that preside over new pinewoods, where something is being put back, where thousands of hand-planted head-high pines, and oaks and aspens on the lower ground, and birches and rowans that have sown themselves uninvited (but always welcome) and alders that shade the riverbanks are returning. It is happening in a small way, but it is happening here and there all across those parts of Scotland where 21st-century science tells us that native woodland once grew. I fancy I sense the weary approval of these few stalwart old trees that have borne witness to our recent past, the last two or three centuries, say, centuries that have been characterised perhaps more than any other of human occupation by crimes against the landscape, against trees, against all nature.

So I had decided that St Andrew’s Day was a good day to celebrate trees. I spent it in and around the pinewood and walked out in the late afternoon, pausing again by the wounded sentinel pine, the tree of a new beginning. An old friend of mine who had been a forester near here was much in my mind. His name was Don MacCaskill. He died about ten years before I wrote this, and his philosophy seems to be finding its way more and more into my books. On the last page of Wild Endeavour, the first book he wrote with his wife Bridget, there is this:

An area of woodland is the ultimate habitat and must be saved and expanded at all costs. The forest is a complex entity, a mirror of nature, and has the desired structure wherein a balance can be achieved. The people of this country, in whose history there is little of forest background, sometimes think that trees are an intrusion into the familiar scene of smooth bare hillside, or cotton grass bog. They do not understand that the heather or bracken-clad hill are arrested habitats which, if left to nature, could well become forest once again. A good deal of Scotland is a peat desert with severe erosion problems and a very restricted species structure. Trees provide a blanket to shelter the vulnerable soil, arrest erosion, provide oxygen and give a home to a wide range of species, be it bird, animal, plant or insect. A forest is a complex world, not easily destroyed. Without trees it is an over-simplified world, and one that is very vulnerable.

So it was in the spirit of finding something in my own lifetime to act as a kind of bridge to link what has gone, what is, and what can be, that I decided to go for a walk in the woods, to celebrate those trees that were the landmarks of my country for thousands of years, and to do so at a time when we are beginning to grasp the essential truth of Don MacCaskill’s philosophy.

Here and there and all across the face of the land, an old mist is rising in the face of something hopeful and enlightening, and the way ahead is slowly growing green again, and the Great Wood stirs from a long and ominous slumber and begins to throw new shadows in the resurrected sun.

Before the Resurrected Sun

Trees inhale in gasps,

the coldness rasps

in the oldness of their limbs

and sticks in the craws of ravens.

And still the thaw withholds,

and still the red deer pause,

keeping the wood’s edge near.

So it was when ice held sway

before the resurrected sun

arose and ice gave way,

and then

the ever deeper print of men.

CHAPTER ONE

Soliloquy by the Fortingall Yew

Ahigh stone wall embellished with thick iron railings and a hefty iron gate with a discouraging padlock stands in the corner of a Perthshire churchyard. It is a strange place for a prison. The solitary inmate is the oldest living thing in Europe, and just possibly in the whole world. But for the last 150 years or so it has languished in solitary confinement, apparently the consequence of too many Victorian souvenir hunters bearing saws and pruning shears. In the last 20 or so of the 150 it has been further demeaned by our own generation’s obsession with walk-this-way visitor interpretation that tells you what to think and feel and assumes you have a mental age of five. So my first impression was that something extraordinary and unique had been diminished by small minds.

I began by just watching through the railings, which, without a key to the gate or a substantial hacksaw or enough gelignite to blow the lock, is the only way you and I can watch and wonder. I was reminded at once of a snow leopard I saw long ago in Edinburgh Zoo, the magnificent made miserable. It looked miserable and it evoked miserableness in the watchers beyond the bars. Its plight offered a two-way exchange of miserableness. I was instantly and irredeemably against all zoos forever. Unlike the snow leopard, the creature imprisoned in this churchyard has no eyes for its incarceration to deaden, does not pace out its daily ritual along a bare path the width of itself. But see! There is a circle of inches-high posts inside its stone-and-iron cage, and that circle is the width of the creature’s trunk in its prime – 56 feet. Before it began to succumb it may have reached 60 feet in girth.

When it was younger and unincarcerated it was free to wander the wild wood by way of its several thousand generations of offspring; these were borne out into the world by winds and by those countless tribes of the wild-wood that wittingly and unwittingly carried and scattered the seeds of trees, and these would include bird, bear, boar, wolf, man.

It is argued of course that its incarceration has spared it from death by a thousand cuts from a thousand pairs of pruning shears and from tourism’s worst excesses. But coming to stand and stare in something of the spirit of pilgrimage like so many before me, I was confronted by this zoo creature – dishevelled, decrepit and wretched, cowering in its dark corner – a creature as brought down by its circumstances as a snow leopard that has forgotten how to be exquisite or how to wear the tribal finery that is its birthright.

I came on an April day of cheerful winds and on-off suns, the air fast and fizzing like swifts. I dutifully took the approved path to the tree with its tourist-trade messages carved into the flagstones, and felt my eager mood evaporate. The air barely stirred in the tree’s compound, and sunlight was rationed there to a few bright scraps the size of fallen leaves that had squeezed through the bars to tease ancient limbs.

And science has done this. It has made a freak show of perhaps the oldest living thing, taking and tending cuttings to sustain the oldest known pedigree, but at the expense of the spirit and the will of the living tree. I want to liberate it, to bulldoze the prison and let in the wind, the sun, the rain, the snow, the frost, to let it be a tree again for what remains of its life and let it take its chance with the rest of the world as it did for all of those unknown thousands of years before the jailers arrived.

I watched a group of loudly chattering visitors plod round the path, reading the panels and trying to decipher the flagstones. A woman of about my own age detached herself, skipped tourism’s preamble, and came over to where I was standing. She fretted by the railings. She had a camera in her hand. I sympathised:

‘It’s not easy to photograph, is it?’

‘Oh, I don’t care about that,’ she said, ‘I’d just like to touch it.’

A small green plaque was there and several other plaques on the outside wall offering visitors sundry scraps of information ranging from mildly interesting to worse than useless. None of these was quite as useless as the small green plaque. It has been planted inside the compound, but positioned so that it can be read through the prison bars. It was planted in 2002 to mark the Queen’s Jubilee, so that it might proclaim the Fortingall Yew as one of Fifty Great British Trees, and adding insult to that particular injury, it declares that it is sponsored by the National Grid.

So it has come to this. The single living reference point to the so-called Great Wood of Caledon, the only living thing that can claim with all honesty the right to say ‘I was there’, has become an advertising hoarding for the National Grid. Whatever the Great Wood was, this is its one miraculously alive survivor. By what preposterous arrogance does anyone get to sponsor a plaque to tell the world that such a tree is ‘great’? And what on earth has it got to do with the Queen?

If the National Grid really feels the need to pay tribute to the greatness of trees let it sponsor the means to return to nature arguably the greatest of all known trees by virtue of its age alone. Pull down the walls and let it breathe, let it bow to winds and warm to suns. And yes, let the woman standing next to me touch it and take home with her whatever it is that she would take from a moment of intimacy with a living organism whose very life is so far beyond mortal comprehension.

So, I told myself, understand that first: it lives. The cowering, shadowed creature still lives. Then what?

Then consider the potential of yew trees. This one is very probably upwards of 5,000 years old and very possibly nearer 10,000 than 5,000. No one knows, not even to the nearest thousand years, how old it is. You need the heartwood to acquire such knowledge, but old yew trees are hollow and where the heartwood once grew there is now a gap almost 60 feet wide. What does grow there now is a pair of unlovely thin trunks on the outskirts of the tree that was.

The Great Yew stands in the village of Fortingall near the mouth of Glen Lyon and a few miles west of the Highland Perthshire town of Aberfeldy. Whether or not it is the oldest living thing in Europe or the whole world, it will certainly be the oldest living thing I will ever rest my eyes on, you too if happenstance or pilgrimage cause you to pass this way. So when you consider the potential of yew trees it is almost disappointing how quickly you become nonchalant about a thousand years here or there, how casual you become with your ‘probabilities’ and your ‘possibili-ties’ and how interchangeable they suddenly seem. Science pronounces its best guesses, then qualifies them with an embarrassed shrug, then disagrees with itself in the face of some new theory. Science does not always like to own up to what it does not know. Specifically, it does not like to be defeated by a single tree. This is something from which I draw considerable comfort.

There again, whether it is 5,000 years old or 8,000 or 9,000 hardly matters, for it is in any case a number far in excess of anything you and I can comprehend when applied to the lifespan of a single organism. Even 500 is nebulous enough, and 500 years old is the point at which (in the event that it survives that long in the first place) a yew tree begins to grow again. It’s a sort of second childhood. So 5,000 years old should be like being born again ten times, living biological proof of reincarnation. But in order to reincarnate you must first die, and the Fortingall Yew has not died; except that somewhere along the line reincarnation gives way to deterioration and the thing begins to die, bit by bit. Science’s determination that it should apparently be kept alive forever by means of taking cuttings and replanting them seems to me to suggest a lack of faith in the immortality of trees. Shame. Yet also, bit by bit, it begins to live again, even from its ever-depleting resources. There is a green canopy above the mysterious darkness, above the stone walls and railings. New sprigs of green still reach eagerly towards the south-facing gate, for that way lies sunlight, and every living tree, whatever its predicament, strives towards the sun. Seeds still grow in their due season, fussy seeds like tiny acorns life-belted by a red berry-like flesh, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 harvests, an incomprehensible fecundity.

Here then is an invitation to consider a different definition of time from the one we routinely use that recognises days and hours and minutes, and when it considers years at all it thinks mostly in terms of human lifetimes. The Fortingall Yew invites you to dare to consider the possibility of immortality. Fred Hageneder, an American tree expert, wrote in his 2001 book, The Spirit of Trees: ‘While the heartwood inside the hollowing trunk slowly rots away, sheaths of new growth encase the old dead wood to strengthen and protect it. Thus yew renews itself from the outside in . . . A yew that appears to be a hollow, decaying wreck is often at the beginning of its self-regeneration process. Yew can resurrect itself from complete decay. There is no biological reason for a yew tree to die – it can virtually live forever.’

But immortality in trees is not a new idea, even among nature writers, and especially among the pioneers of the American nature writing tradition. Some cite species other than yew. John Muir had the Sierra juniper in mind when he wrote: ‘Surely the most enduring of all tree mountaineers, it never seems to die a natural death, or even to fall after it has been killed. If protected from accidents, it would perhaps be immortal.’ And Donald Culross Peattie wrote of the giant sequoias: ‘Those who know the species best maintain that it never dies of disease or senility. If it survives the predators of its infancy and the hazard of fire in youth, then only a bolt from heaven can end its centuries of life.’ Or not; witness the Scots pine I passed on my St Andrew’s Day walk.

We know now that Scots pines can live for three or four hundred years, and that in places like the Cairngorms and the hills in and around Glen Affric there are populations of pines whose lineage can be traced directly back to some of the earliest known forests in the land. We can walk in such forest remnants now and something reaches out to us that is outwith the scope of plantation forests in which great age is routinely missing. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘in the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith.’

Hmm, maybe. It is said that John Knox liked to preach under yew trees; if he did, he just rose in my estimation. But that was a tradition already old when he would have taken it up. It may also have been a nod to a still older and undatable Celtic tradition (but certainly one that was already old when Christianity was born) that associated yew trees with sacred sites.

All the writers quoted above were moved by trees much younger than the Fortingall Yew. The more you consider it, the more extraordinary its survival seems, and the less sceptical you become about the possibility of an immortal tree. Consider, for example, the discovery in 1991 of the Ice Man in a frozen glacier in the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria. His preserved Stone Age body was accompanied by an equally well preserved axe handle and a bow stave, both made of yew. Apart from anything else, there was never a more telling demonstration of yew wood’s capacity to resist rot and damp. We already knew about that, but what about ice? If the wood can emerge intact from millennia of incarceration in a tomb of ice, are there yew trees out there that survived the ice age, whether as seeds or even living trees? Was this at Fortingall one of them? Just how old is the idea of an immortal tree?

Yew bark, foliage and seeds (but not their berry-like coverings) are known to be poisonous, and the potent darkness within the cloistered space created by the drooping curtains of a mature tree’s foliage creates uneasiness in a susceptible human mind. In fact it is unarguable that the yew, of all tree species, has resonated uneasily in the human mind for as long as the two species have cohabited in the same landscape. It still does. Here, for example, in a brief interview for the book Flora Celtica (Birlinn, 2003), is Peebles-based bagpipe maker Julian Goodacre on the subject of his raw materials: ‘Different woods evoke different feelings in me. I love yew. We use a lot of yew. It has strange associations though, and is a curious wood. Like the tree, the timber imparts a sense of foreboding. It contains poisons and mysteries, and I feel uneasy about breathing its dust.’

Is that sense of foreboding what John Knox had in mind? Was his liking for a congregation held in the round embrace of a yew’s drooping canopy a psychological trick? If he preached ‘I am the Light’ in the pervasive gloom and the uneasiness of the yew’s dust, was the congregation only too willing to lean towards the Light he had to offer?

However far back you go, you find yew trees in high places. A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland by Smout, MacDonald and Watson (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) notes: ‘Irish Brehon Law of the eighth century classified trees into four classes with seven species in each: the classes were termed nobles, commoners, lower orders and slaves, reflecting both the Gaelic sense of hierarchy and the economic importance of each group . . .’ Needless to say, the yew was a noble.

And there is another potent hint from within the Gaelic sense of hierarchy that appears to elevate the yew’s sacred symbolism. In the Gaelic language’s 17-letter alphabet each letter is represented by a tree, and the letter I is Iogh, standing for Iubhar, the yew tree. And in the wake of St Columba’s decision to set up camp on Iona, the island acquired a one-letter name – I, and the name lives on in the island’s single conspicuous hilltop, Dun I. It may have nothing to do with the yew tree, of course, and Iona is hardly the first place you would think of in terms of woodland, sacred or otherwise. Or it may have everything to do with it.

Much earlier sacred sites than Iona were beside landmark yew trees, and it is at least plausible that before sacred buildings, the yew trees themselves were the ‘churches’, such is their capacity to create a small curtained space where people could gather and shelter and their rituals were screened from view. In time, burial mounds and other pagan structures were built beside the sacred trees, then the Christian ones were built on the site of the pagan ones. Whether your Christianity leaned towards Columba or Knox or something in between, the yew tree was the easily recognisable symbol, and its earthy enclosure was – still is – as moving and affecting a space as a wee kirk or the chapel of a great cathedral.

So when you pause in your 21st-century travels by the Fortingall Yew and feel it manipulate your mind and invite you to consider the power of trees, perhaps it is presenting you with the key to the padlock. Perhaps it is asking you to consider the historic place of trees in the landscape, and, in the context of Highland Scotland, that means grappling with the concept of the Great Wood.

Ah, if only I might interrogate the Fortingall Yew, I could untangle a few strands of truth from the thorny understorey of the myth-makers, let in light to illuminate history’s shadows. But the yew is a husk of the tree that was, and husks are poor conversationalists. The two ragged trunks and sundry twisting tendrils crouch by the compound’s furthest wall. There are too few crumbs of sunny comfort to relieve the elegiac gloom in which the yew passes its days.

I wanted to write something that gave me a clearer idea of the Great Wood, one that an exploration of the landscape