The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  We have become accustomed these last 200 years or so to talk up the heyday of the trees in a particular form of words, ‘The Great Wood of Caledon’. In our minds it is almost exclusively associated with the Highlands, and with Scots pines. And it was a dark and fearfully impenetrable shroud. Even science is still apt to fall back on the careless notion that the Great Wood covered all of the Highlands. And because two foresters named H. M. Steven and A. Carlisle wrote in a landmark book The Native Pinewoods of Scotland, published in 1959, that ‘to stand in them is to feel the past’ and that Scotland has only one per cent of its native woods left, and because these sentiments appear to have extra resonance in our sound-bite-hungry century, you hear them again and again from the mouths of people who might have been expected to know better.

  I have stood in almost all of Scotland’s pinewoods, some of them many times. To stand in them today is to feel anything but the past, other than in the sense of a lament for that which was lost by climate change throughout their history, and more recently by the actions of many generations of our ancestors that brought much of what was left to its knees, or even its ankles, obliterating much of the wildlife of the treed landscape in the process. Rather, to stand in them is to feel loss, to feel the fragility of what remains, to fear for their future. And yes, to marvel and to admire the power and the beauty and the rightness of native trees in a native setting. I think, for example, of Glen Strathfarrar in late October, where the beauty comes at you in waves and puts an ache in your heart. And you can drive past the road end, as most of us do, and never know it’s there, and that massive indifference is fatal.

  As to the idea that we have one per cent of our native forest left standing, it may be true that there was a time in the 10,000 years since the ice age when this land of ours was home to extensive forests rather than disconnected woods. But that state of affairs was as false a representation of trees in our land as what we have now, for that forest had grown from the nothing that emerged from the ice age. The first tentative and thinly scattered woods that became a forest over 5,000 years then began to thin again as more and more of nature’s tribes thrived there (including our own tribe, of course) and the climate suffered wholly natural convulsions.

  All we can say today with any confidence is that in many parts of Highland Scotland, there are far fewer trees growing now than there were when the Great Wood was at its most extensive. If you insist on paring down the comparison to native trees alone, if percentages are more important to you than a healthy, diverse and widespread forest, then you can use numbers to paint a miserable picture. But if you do want to make comparisons like that, why not take the Great Wood back to its ethnically pure origins of eight or nine thousand years ago, when the first pines, willows, birches, and alders – not forgetting at least one yew – put down the first roots of the Great Wood. Then see how far forward in time you can travel before the first hazel, aspen, oak or rowan, say, washed up from some distant shore, or was dropped onto fertile ground by migrating bird or beast or man or woman. For every tree species that ever grew on Scottish soil grew somewhere else first. And whether it was introduced by what we think of as natural means, or by our own species (which we think of as unnatural, as if we were an aberration instead of just one more of nature’s species that does some things by accident and some by design), is less important than what we have since chosen to do with the ones we introduced by design, less important than whether or not we give nature its head to make the most of the opportunities at its disposal.

  Even as I write this, the Forestry Commission has set aside a small Scottish acreage as a plantation of giant redwoods, a Californian native, against the day when climate change may render it extinct in its own country. It is a slow-growing tree and reaches improbable age and height. I have never seen redwoods in their native land but I have stood often in that small cluster of half a dozen redwoods in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, and consider it one of the most moving tree places I know. If the Commission wants to embellish my native landscape with a few hundred redwoods they will get no argument from me. From the first, trees have come and gone from the Great Wood, and they always will. And over there, on the hillside across the glen from the window where I write, the lowering October sunlight makes a daring show of lit gold among the larches that race up the hills in tongues of flame among the solid green of the spruces. That wood, commercially planted, is home to its own population of red deer, badgers, red squirrels, red foxes, among much else, and if you insist that the larch is an alien incomer that should be driven from the land along with the Sitka spruce, then you might as well insist that only west and east winds should blow in Highland Scotland, and that those of the south and north have no place here.

  There is also this. Just because the seedbed of the Great Wood has gone from much of the visible landscape does not mean it has gone entirely. It is true of the 21st-century Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park where I live, and it is true of every historic homeland of trees. Wherever we lift the inhibiting pressure of our lifestyle and leave a space large or small, watch the trees push in. In the very changed circumstances of our own time, the trees still present themselves, still swarm slowly across the land wherever they are left to determine their own journeys, their stances, their particular strongholds. Where humankind has made its many inroads, determining which trees should be permitted to grow and where, nature makes what it can of the changed circumstances. Half a mile from my desk is a fenced-off area of perhaps three acres. It had been a fragment of a large commercial plantation, but now it is privately owned. The owner had it clear-felled of spruce trees then simply left it to its own devices. Ten years later, not ten thousand, it is a self-sown birch wood – nature making what it can of the changed circumstances. Rowans gather along its edges and even prance precariously along its drystane dyke, skinny roots clawing thin sustenance from thick moss and fissures between stones.

  On the barest of mountainsides where regimes of sheep and deer and burning have held sway for 300 years now, find a loch and look at its small ungrazed islands, find Scots pines there, rowans wedged among rocks, a low fuzz of juniper, a birch or two – always a birch or two. Likewise along the hillsides, look where the steep-sided Highland burns clatter down through dark gullies that discourage grazers, find them thickened by oaks, birches, alders, a copse of vivid autumn-yellow aspens.

  Here are the ruins of an eighteenth-century inn and its outbuildings, owned – they say – by a brother of Rob Roy MacGregor, and where Major Caulfield fashioned a stretch of one of his eighteenth-century military roads from the track between the ruins, the whole footnote to our turbulent history made almost illegible by huge oaks, sycamores, and ash trees that no one planted. Follow the military road north up into Glenogle, where a railway line once traversed the hillside, and the ill-starred Dr Beeching used a landslide as the excuse to terminate that particular endeavour. It is as if the hill above the military road wears a belt about its waist, a belt of birches, of oaks, willows, ash, rowans. And where a stone bridge spans one of those steep burns, the old trees of the gully and the younger ones of the railway have collided and made a new wood on the open hillside. The very rocks of the landslide have been colonised by trees where they have come to rest in an arrangement too haphazard and chancy for grazing animals. But badgers have found the combination of trees and rocks to their liking and moved in. These things tell you that here, for many, many centuries, trees and hillsides were accustomed to each other.

  Everywhere you look beyond the old and established woods and the new and established commercial plantations, you find abundant evidence that the treed landscape is nature’s preference. The deer forest (and whoever came up with that form of words to describe such an enforced treelessness had a pitiable sense of irony) and the grouse moor with its meticulously tended heather are not inventions of the natural order but rather perversions of it. Red deer are woodland animals, both historically and biologically; everyone who knows anything at all about
deer also knows that they prosper in woodland and that the red deer of the Highland hillside, for example, are stunted creatures by comparison. My old friend Don MacCaskill put it thus:

  In the present day, there are red deer who have their territories and live out their lives entirely on the open hill; there are those whose territories are permanently within the forest; and there are those who use the forest verges for shelter, but who move out onto the hill to feed, or to rut during the season. But, in bygone ages, the red deer used to be entirely a creature of the forest . . . splendid stags with massive heads, and sleek, sturdy hinds, were to be found roaming the sparsely populated country. They were larger beasts than we know today. Woodland clearings and pine forest provided good shelter and feeding, and natural predators, wolf and lynx in addition to the fox and the eagle, would have killed off the weak and sickly, thus ensuring that only the fittest survived to continue the species.

  As the old forests began gradually to disappear, over the centuries the red deer was increasingly deprived of its natural habitat. It was forced to become a creature of the bare hills and glens, and there it survived, but at a price. As a pine, planted at an unnaturally high altitude in poor soil grows, but is small in size producing only inferior needles, so the red deer on the high hills and barren wastes continued to exist, but as a smaller animal, the stags growing only inferior antlers.

  So Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen is nothing more than an admittedly well-executed piece of Victorian propaganda. And he would have known as well as anyone that in the forest the relationship between people and deer is utterly changed, whatever the motive of the people, whether painter or shooter (all those damned trees) or nature writer. Don MacCaskill once told me: ‘A forest is not a forest without deer.’ When he told me this he was chief forester of Strathyre Forest and his employer was the Forestry Commission. Needless to say he was not a typical head forester and he was often at odds with the Commission’s sometimes institutionalised way of working. But in the matter of deer and forests he was right, and both red and roe deer love pinewoods, old and new.

  I was remembering an old autumn, a long day out on Beinn a’ Bhuird, ice on its high lochans and a fur of snow on the ice. The wind bit like crampons. The massive nature of the landscape (massif is a particularly good word for the Cairngorms), the toughness of that landscape, that environment, that season (early winter in every characteristic bar the date on the calendar), that wind . . . all that had been a brutal taskmaster, brutal and relentless. The pinewood under the mountain, when I reached it late in the afternoon, was spring water in a desert. At once the wind was elsewhere, the temperature was almost comfortable, the light softened, and adversity was overwhelmed by a sense of peace. I walked as deep into the trees as the wood allowed (for it is a small survivor, beleaguered by deer) then sat down with my back to a pine trunk that stood ankle deep in blaeberries and heather. I leaned my head back against inch-thick bark (the vertical landscape of treecreepers), closed my eyes and breathed in the scent, felt the stillness on my wind-fired face. I may have dozed briefly.

  I opened my eyes when I heard the stamp of many feet; heard the jangling clatter of antlers; heard the anthemic throb of the open throat of the red deer rut. I have watched the rut a hundred times on open hillsides, in corries, on island shores where stags thrash their antlers in seaweed, but until that moment I had never seen it or even contemplated it in a mountain woodland. There is this essential difference: that it announces itself while it is still invisible, so that its approaching tensions infect every creature in its path, which, as it happened, suddenly included me.

  That awareness was instant and acute. But I did not dare move for fear of what I might miss. I learned long ago that the best hours in nature’s company are achieved when I allow it to come to me, and while putting that philosophy into practice has given me my share of heart-in-mouth moments, I have learned to trust it utterly and fear plays no part in it. I was wearing the forest shades of dull green and grey and I told myself: be a bit of tree trunk.

  The hinds came first, entering my field of vision at a placid trot that rather devalued the furore of the overture. They slowed to a walk and paused by the river to drink. I counted 14. The sounds of battling stags shifted around left and right but offstage and behind my back. The knowledge that I now sat between the stags and the hinds laid an edgy frisson on the moment. It is rare in any endeavour to be so vividly alive, with every sense demanding to observe.

  The first stag I saw was going backwards, head down and twitchy. He passed me on my left two yards away. Not much more than the same distance on my right, the reason for his twitchiness announced himself with the rawest, most awful noise I have ever heard this side of a snow avalanche. My head jerked that way of its own volition, despite my advice to myself that I should be a bit of a tree. There stood the master.

  He was peat-blackened, barrel-chested, thick-necked, high-headed, wide-antlered. And he stank. He stepped past me, advanced four strides towards the young stag that was preoccupied with one straying hind. At the sound of the master stag, the young animal turned to face whatever was coming his way, took a blow in the neck that drew blood, shied like a horse, swerved away, conceded. He retreated down an alley in the trees, where, as it happened, the stray hind stood side-on and indifferent. But with all options suddenly removed, she turned and ran before him so that in his hour of defeat, and quite involuntarily, he had gleaned a harem of one.

  The master stag slowed, bellowed a rebuke at the retreating young stag, turned his attention to the hinds, tried to outflank them so that they could not travel back the way they had come. But he found his manoeuvre constrained by trees and they went anyway. He followed, as stags must in the rut, with only 13 hinds at his disposal.

  I imagine the whole episode had taken no more than two minutes. I sat still in stunned and sunny silence and in a kind of privileged shock. I registered only the lingering stench of the stag and the bark-spitting quest of a hunting treecreeper somewhere above my head.

  *

  I remembered the day as one that had elevated the place of trees in the landscape to something more profoundly elemental. From that day, that old autumn, I began to revere wild woods. And Don MacCaskill had just told me, ‘A forest is not a forest without deer.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  A View of Trees

  I have a view of trees walking

  the earth on elephant feet,

  a march so millennium-slow

  it escapes our notice

  that the next tree

  has just stepped purposefully

  into the vacant spoor of the last,

  and that the gap

  between their repositioned trunks

  is but a single stride.

  Stumbling blocks are these:

  rock, wind, thin Highland soil,

  and ourselves, the tribe

  that fells elephants.

  The march began in the West

  when the Great Ice ended,

  shrank and wended away

  inland, uphill, until

  the last grey glacier failed. Behind,

  each withering yard was dogged

  by the slow jog of the trees,

  freed from seeds

  that outlived the Ice, or bore

  ashore in the warming sea,

  or flew with birds seduced

  by the temptress sun.

  And in the remembered heat

  trees walked the earth on elephant feet.

  I have a view of trees from the window where I write. Without standing up or turning my head I can see birch, ash, rowan, willow, oak, alder, hawthorn, Scots pine, larch, hillsides full of Sitka spruce, and a distant cluster of big conifers in someone’s garden that may be Douglas firs. I know from countless explorations of the glen that these trees share the landscape to one extent or another with aspen, hazel, juniper, yew, beech, sycamore, maple, black-thorn, hawthorn and holly. There may well be others and I could make more of the list if
I was a bit more knowledgeable about which of the ten species of native willow are out there. The list of things I don’t know about trees is a thousand times longer than the list of things I know.

  Balquhidder Glen lies in the north-east of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, a heartland glen halfway between Scotland’s east and west coasts, and a well-treed landscape by the standards of today’s Highland glens. Of course, not all the trees are old or native. The biggest landowner inside the national park is also the biggest landowner in Scotland, the Forestry Commission. The favourite tool of its trade is the Sitka spruce, which is more or less routinely derided by the rest of us. It is the tree we all love to hate. The only thing we hate more in our landscape is the midge. In my view of trees, there are a great many Sitka spruces, and in any assessment of the Great Wood of Caledon the Sitka spruce has no place, right?

  Wrong.

  Because if the Great Wood of Caledon is anything at all, it is an evolving continuum. Here and there across the Highlands the native forest still lives in relict communities: Rothiemurchus, Glen Affric, Torridon, Knoydart, Sleat, Rannoch, Creag Meagaidh, Glen Orchy, the Trossachs, Sunart, Seil, to name but a handful. And although these are all depleted, much tampered with, and their communities mostly isolated from each other, they amount collectively to a kind of skeletal outline, the bones of what a Great Wood might have been. Throughout its life, and beginning in the painfully slow years of its protracted birth in the aftermath of the Great Ice around 10,000 years ago, the Great Wood has evolved, has ebbed and flowed in tides of trees. The twenty-first century finds it at a low ebb, but not its first low ebb by any means, and there are signs that its fortunes may be turning again after the prolonged lethargy of slack water.