Footnotes

by Peter Fiennes

  Johnson arrived in Edinburgh on 14 August 1773 and immediately got into a row with a waiter, who had dropped some sugar into his lemonade ‘with greasy fingers’ and Johnson, in a rage, had flung it out of the window. He would have liked to have knocked the waiter down, but Boswell scooped him up and they walked, arm in arm, up the high street towards Boswell’s home, only for some homeowner, leaning out from one of those high Edinburgh houses, to tip ‘the evening effluvia’ over them both. They arrived in disarray (‘I smell you in the dark!’ growled Johnson), and Mrs Boswell served tea to this huge, twitching, sodden and reeking stranger, where ‘his conversation soon charmed her into a forgetfulness of his external appearance’. And the smell of human sewage.

  We could linger for days in their company. Like Boswell, I spent a few foggy years as a student in Edinburgh (the fog was mostly mine), and I am amazed how little it has changed – the dark streets, the glowing pubs – but Johnson will not be denied: ‘On the eighteenth of August we left Edinburgh, a city too well known to admit description.’ Boswell counted his blessings. Like a dog jealously guarding a bone, he now had Johnson all to himself, and he said goodbye to his wife, who ‘did not seem quite easy when we left her; but away we went!’

  I am standing on the ruined walls of Urquhart Castle, on the northern banks of Loch Ness. It is mid-November, late in the short day, and the sun is hanging low over the loch in a sky the colour of last year’s blackbird eggs. A chill, lazy wind is probing from the far-off mountains. Closer, the hills are purple and black, and – where the shoreline greets the steel-blue waters of the loch, and as the sun slips down the horizon – all of a sudden the lower slopes flare with a golden, tawny fire. I have whisky on my mind, naturally enough, but it’s larch trees, I presume, and the last of their needle-leaves, breaking out into an autumn display, before the long Scottish winter claws them clean.

  There are several tourists here, even at this time of the year. Almost 250 years ago, when Johnson and Boswell rode along the side of the loch, there were none: just them, their guides, some soldiers, and the remnants of a local population that had mostly decided, despite the trauma of upheaval, to leave. (Dr J, growling: ‘No man willingly left his native country.’) A boat called The Jacobite (I think – it is darkening by the minute) is picking up an orderly row of tourists from the green in front of the castle and taking them off to the next stop on their Highland tour. People have come from all around the globe to drink deep of the romance of wild, untamed Scotland: there are only about twenty of us left in the castle, but as I pass little groups I hear Chinese, Italian, Spanish and (I guess) Urdu being spoken. North American too, of course, because that’s where so many of the Highlanders ended up – and now their descendants are back, bags stuffed with shortbread and tartan tam-o’-shanters from the gift shop, marvelling at the barren beauty of the place their ancestors were forced to leave. Johnson thought they would retain their customs in their new, fertile, alien land. But he thought many things, and despite his imperial proclamations he felt a deep pain that the clans were being disbanded: ‘their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued’ and their ‘language attacked on every side’. He needn’t have worried about the Scots’ contempt for government, but the Erse language was indeed almost entirely eviscerated, the local children forced into schools where only English was spoken, and that, at another time, contrary dog that he was, Johnson deemed a fine thing: ‘It is the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express.’ It’s a wonder no one tossed the old monster into the loch.

  It is strange to think of Johnson and Boswell on horseback, especially Johnson, whom we tend to imagine rolling and lurching along the London streets, but apparently he was a confident horseman. Only once, descending a steep incline just north of here, did the guides have to seize the reins. But he was not as secure as he seemed. Soon afterwards, he threw an absolute hissy fit and threatened to turn for home when Boswell announced that he was going to ride ahead to prepare their evening reception. It took all of Boswell’s skills to soothe him into continuing their journey.

  Like any Highland visitor today, Johnson and Boswell were looking for wild landscapes and wilderness, but more importantly (certainly for Johnson), they wanted to meet with people whose customs, language and traditions were different to their own. They knew that time was running out. Between 1763 and 1775 twenty thousand Highlanders and Islanders emigrated, four thousand from Skye in just one year. In future, Johnson writes, ‘a longer journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him whose curiosity pants for savage virtues and barbarous grandeur’. And then he roars: ‘To hinder insurrection, by driving away the people, and to govern peaceably, by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politicks … It affords a legislator little self-applause to consider, that where there was formerly an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.’

  Johnson may have thought that the Highlanders’ lives were being improved with the rule of law, and the building of roads and schools, and the disarming of the clans, but he was disgusted by the human cost. He was just in time to witness colonialism this close to home – more than once he compares the Highlanders to Native Americans. And so, if you ever do find yourself marvelling at the scoured beauty of the Scottish landscape, consider Dr Johnson. In the end, he is cynical: ‘They are now acquainted with money, and the possibility of gain will by degrees make them industrious.’ As for Boswell, we can assume that he was more interested in showing off his famous and eccentric friend to his contacts in the Scottish nobility than fretting about emigration.

  I think Johnson’s despair about Scotland’s battered and drained land is one reason why he spends so much time complaining about the remarkable lack of trees on their route. According to Boswell, this got him into trouble with the Scots, and Boswell smooths over the matter by explaining that there are indeed very few trees in the east of the country, which is where they travelled first from Edinburgh, via St Andrews, Aberdeen and Inverness, but the west is very different. In any case, it becomes an obsession with Johnson and the subject crops up throughout Journey to the Western Isles. ‘From the bank of the Tweed to St Andrews I had never seen a single tree, which I did not believe to have grown up far within the present century … [slow rumble.] A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice.’

  He was quick to point out that the lack of trees and forests was not Scotland’s natural state. Everywhere they rode through the deforested land they saw the stumps and roots of ancient trees. For many years, people have taken this as confirmation that up until the early eighteenth century much of Scotland was covered in trees. Now, we are not so sure. The stumps Johnson was seeing may well have emerged, hundreds of years old but perfectly preserved, from a peat bog. What we can say is that the Great Caledonian Forest had at one time covered most of the land north of the River Clyde and west of the River Tay, or so said Pliny the Elder, with a shiver of Roman disdain, and in the early eighteenth century it still spread over a much larger area than it does today. But it is also likely that most of it had been destroyed long before, through grazing and the never-ending incursions of humanity.

  Even so, after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, some of the English victors, and their Scottish allies, seem to have enjoyed a stampede for the last of Scotland’s timber. No attempt was made to manage or stagger the destruction, or to replace what was being taken out with new plantings. Forests of pine and oak were floated down the lochs and shipped off to England. If, today, you are looking for truly ancient forest in Scotland, it has to appear in the records before the year 1750. That date, just four years after Culloden, is significant. In England and Wales it is the year 1600. Before then, in all three countries, no one seems to have felt the need to plant new woods. But if a wood in Scotland can be traced back to before the year 1750, it has probably been flourishing since the last Ice Age.

  As they plodded along the shores of Loch
Ness, Johnson gazed at the ‘limpid waters’, the ‘high and steep rocks shaded with birch’ and the rocks ‘towering in horrid nakedness’. He’s clearly itching for a fight, because he picks one with Boethius, the sixth-century philosopher, who had written that Loch Ness was twelve miles across. It’s not, Johnson harrumphed. Boswell was enjoying himself, the scene ‘as agreeably wild as could be desired’.

  They stopped at the hut of ‘an old looking woman’ (says Boswell, who thought Johnson might find it amusing to pay her a visit). The hut was primitive (‘a wretched little hovel of earth only’), its only window closed up with a slab of turf. Johnson found that smoke from the fire escaped from a hole in the roof, but ‘not directly over the fire, lest the rain should extinguish it’. The woman may have looked old, but she had five young children (the eldest was thirteen) and an eighty-year-old husband out working in the hills. She gave them whisky and Johnson mused on ‘the old laws of hospitality’ that had not yet broken down in this remote place. He probably thought he was back in the days of Homer. Boswell, meanwhile, got into the woman’s bedroom, ignoring her protests, and found that there was a ‘kind of bedstead of wood with heath upon it by way of bed’. They gave the woman money, and then they left, chuckling over her ‘ludicrous coquetry’ (Boswell), ribbing each other over who might have alarmed her more. As others have said, she must have been terrified: an English officer had committed murder and rape in this same hut a few years earlier. I presume she waved her visitors off with relief, shouting prayers, in Erse, at their departing backs.

  I head further north the next morning. I am childishly thrilled to see Highland cattle and then, around a misty bend, mooching in a corner of a field, Shetland ponies. More heather and bog. Dark plantations of pine. Sheep drifting idiotically on the empty road. The beauty – and the dizzying air – dances through the open car windows. It is something other than alpine, although that is the only reference I have. I wish, not for the first time on this trip, that I had someone to share it with. Everyone I am following did, except for Jack Priestley, and he had many people to meet, and if he didn’t he would become maudlin or start lashing out at the ugliness of unfamiliar cities and the grotesque unfairness of everything. Boswell or Johnson would never have come this far alone.

  Still, I am travelling to meet Mick from the organization Trees for Life. He has said he’ll be waiting for me in his van in the car park at Cannich. We are going to be driving up to areas they’ve been planting on Forestry Commission land in Glen Affric, and the pockmarked road is no place for my cossetted city car.

  Trees for Life was founded in 1989 by a man called Alan Watson Featherstone, who has dedicated his life (until very recently – he is now photographing monkey puzzle trees in Chile or something) and given all he can to bringing back the butchered and almost extinct Great Caledonian Forest. He wants to restore the wilderness to Scotland. We all have a lot to thank him for, as well as the thousands of volunteers who have turned out over the past thirty years to work on fencing, to remove non-native trees and to plant Scots pine, birch, holly, rowan, alder and other indigenous species. Where they think they can, they just let nature go her own way – although that is not always as easy as you might imagine, in a deer-ravaged landscape with no wolves to keep them at bay.

  I have broken my own rule and briefly left Johnson and Boswell riding further to the west, but I think Johnson would allow me the detour, given his new-found obsession with trees. Boswell will do as he’s told. Mick has three others with him waiting in the van, Roy and Howard (who have been volunteering for years) and Fitch, a tall young Chinese man from Guangzhou. There is anticipation in the air. ‘Have you ever been to Glen Affric?’ someone asks and when I say ‘no’, there’s a collective ‘ah …’ (although not from Fitch, who is also on his first trip) and looks are exchanged that say, well, just get ready, because what you are about to see is something beyond the ordinary. Howard puts an anxious hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re not going to write about this place, are you?’ And I say, ‘Don’t worry’, laughing, ‘I hardly think what I write will change a thing,’ which of course is true, but I can’t help feeling later (here, now) that even so I should just shut up, or lie, and pretend that there’s not a lot that’s special about Glen Affric (just move along, nothing to see here, Loch Ness is the place – you’ll find tea shops), but I have also come to believe that we cannot fence off our last few remaining places of wild beauty and hope that they will remain hidden or ignored or immune to the spread of human need and the accelerating churn of consumption. They may, of course. In Sam Johnson’s short fable Rasselas, a prince and his companions are suffocating in a glut of perfection, their every need anticipated and fulfilled, and so they escape from their Happy Valley. ‘I have already enjoyed too much’, says the prince; ‘give me something to desire.’ All they find is misery and so they go back and pull up the drawbridge. But that’s not an option for us – and anyway the real message from Johnson, the man who claimed to hate change, is right here: ‘Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world.’

  Almost every conservationist will now say that the only way to ensure any wilderness survives is to expose as many people as possible, especially the young, to its wonders. Why else would anyone care? Or rouse themselves to fight? Which is all very well in theory (and I agree – or I want to), but imagine ranks of coaches drawn up, here, by the pines and the birch, the fallen rocks and the heather, the ice-sparkle of the peat-dark rivers, and on these lonely one-track roads, among the waterfalls and the eagles.

  So, what else can I say? Glen Affric is one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. Our van meanders and thumps over the potholes towards the Trees for Life bothy, where we are going to stay the night, and every few yards someone gives a shout and Mick stops the van and Howard or Roy leaps out and decapitates a rogue lodgepole pine (an unwelcome, non-native species, spread here from one of the Forestry Commission plantations – it grows fast and in the early years can quickly overwhelm the slower-growing, native Scots pines). At one point we haul up by the side of the road and spread out across the valley. I have been given gloves and some loppers and told to hunt down any lodgepoles, but to everyone’s relief there are very few here. Anyway, it is easy to become distracted by the ancient Scots pines and ragged clumps of juniper and the reindeer moss and heathers (the ground is the colour of faded tartan), and the onrush of young downy birch, bristling with hope, shielded behind fencing from the ravages of the insatiable deer. In one heart-stopping moment a family of partridges crosses my path in single file. The other side of the valley is devoid of trees (Sam Johnson is growling), the soil bare to the rock, but here on these slopes we are walking among groves of Scots pines, and single veteran survivors of the Caledonian Forest, especially where the ground tumbles steeply, but also, spreading back to where the van is parked, there are dozens, perhaps thousands, of young trees, no more than knee- or ankle-high, almost all self-seeded, a miniature forest of the future.

  I haven’t found a single lodgepole pine, but they are hard to differentiate from Scots pines when young (you can snap their less fibrous needles – or is it the other way round?) and anyway I was told earlier how one of the Trees for Life volunteers had one year proudly destroyed several Scots pines before anyone was able to stop him and I don’t want to be added to their annals of shame as the Man Who Killed All The Trees. The others are nowhere to be seen. That’s one of the reasons we are here, of course – to get away from other people. In the distance I see a great shaking in a grove and a thirty-foot lodgepole pine comes crashing to the ground. Roy emerges with needles in his woolly hat and beard and a look of joy on his face.

  We are at the outer reaches of the western range of the Scots pine, which is not exclusively Scottish at all, but spreads all the way across northern Eurasia. To the west of here it is too damp for the pines and (or so the books tell us) what you should find instead are birch and then oak forests.
In reality, it’s mostly bare mountains and moors and planted blocks of Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine. For some years now, Forestry Commission Scotland has been working with Trees for Life – and on its own – to re-establish native species, and open up its woods to the rest of us, so it does seem as though things are changing for the better. It’s just that, at this rate, it’s going to take many long centuries to reforest the Scottish Highlands, unless there’s an unprecedented surge of rewilding. Also, someone is going to have to do something about the deer. And especially the grouse moors, which are kept free from trees (they are burned) so that the birds can thrive in sufficient numbers to give passing pleasure to the men with guns. What do we want with this land? And who should decide? Unless I happen to be addressing one of the very few aristocrats, charities or traceless overseas companies who own the vast bulk of Scotland’s Highlands, I’m afraid it’s not you.

  A single prop plane putters overhead. The Thirty-Nine Steps! We are in an empty place, a John Buchan land of fugitives and pheasant shoots, musty tweed and the prince across the water, eagles clasping crags with crooked hands, the Monarch of the Glen, and Queen Victoria strolling along a brook with her kilted Mr Brown at the ready. Empty, though. The last wolf in Scotland was shot not long before Johnson and Boswell got here – rumours of lone wolves lingered on – and the brown bear and the lynx were exterminated much earlier. Here’s Johnson: ‘All the beasts of the chase would have been lost long ago in countries well inhabited, had they not been preserved by laws for the pleasure of the rich.’ So maybe we don’t need access for all; and it doesn’t matter if we enthuse future generations to love and cherish someone else’s land; and perhaps it’s the rich in their fenced Happy Valleys who are the best or indeed the only hope for preserving and restoring the glories of the Scottish wild. They certainly seem to think so. There’s a hunting lodge nearby, looking trim and well-tended. And there are a few landowners in Scotland who are working hard to bring back the forest, and fill it with lynx, beaver and boar. Even wolves, some of them, if they ever get permission from a nervous government. Should we just let them seal themselves off (assuming we even have the choice), and leave them to their schemes? Who’s to know what they or their successors might do next? Scotland’s private land is concentrated in fewer hands than anywhere else in the developed world. Wouldn’t it be wiser to let more people have a say? And where does this leave the extraordinary work of the volunteers for Trees for Life?