The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  The Great Wood began, once the Great Ice relented, with a handful of species, the pioneer tribes: juniper and birch and willow and Scots pine among the earliest, and, as I have suggested, quite possibly yew, given its capacity to survive almost everything. But other species came. They came by air on oceanic winds, they came by sea washed ashore from countries beyond the ice, and they came by the land bridge that still linked Scotland and Europe. They came with human settlers and would-be conquerors. So at what point do we decide that a tree species is an alien? Who makes our tree immigration policy?

  The Sitka spruce is a native of Alaska, not Scotland, but it is a natural in Scotland, perfectly suited to our latitude and climate, and demonstrably it thrives here. It may be a late arrival in the context of the Great Wood, but the Great Wood itself was a late arrival in a landscape whose oldest rocks are 4,000 million years old. What we have chosen to do with the Sitka spruce in Scotland is another matter, but I believe that the Great Wood can be a phenomenon with a future as well as a past, in which case the Sitka spruce will beapartofit, and as things stand, an essential part. If nature finds it easy to live with here – and it does – why shouldn’t we?

  So the view of the trees from my window differs at least by degrees from what we are inclined to think of as the landscape of the historic Great Wood. It is missing a few tree species, and every now and again a hillside is clear-felled in a quite unnatural way of which neither nature nor I approve. It is also missing quite a few mammal and bird species, but most of these are things within our control, and if we choose to put them back, if we choose to work the land with a philosophy more hand in glove with nature, we can. Now, as we agonise over the fate of our warming planet, now that conservation and the environment are higher than ever on our political agenda, now there is no better time for us to decide if putting these species back is what we want to do for the landscape. For that matter, shouldn’t we also make an educated guess at what nature would have us do for the landscape? And if we do decide to put these species back, there could be no more idealistic declaration of our intent than putting them back into a reconvened Great Wood.

  All of which begs the obvious question: what was the Great Wood of Caledon?

  For that matter, who first called it great (for it cannot have been the National Grid) and how reliable was their assessment? The reputation of the Great Wood that has been handed down to us has all the hallmarks of the handed-down reputation of the Highland wolf (and that is a grotesque caricature, a hybrid of legend, superstition, lies and ignorance, all of it finally drenched in an over-cooked and over-seasoned broth of Victorian invention that too many people swallowed whole, and for that matter too many still do)*. Likewise, we have been led to believe that the Great Wood was impassable, a huge tree ghetto of innumerable terrors which lay in wait to prey on terrified travellers. As with the wolf, that reputation evolved and grew bloated over millennia even before the Victorians got their hands on it.

  The concept of a Great Wood as something other than just a well-treed Highland landscape would appear at first glance to have been invented by the Romans, and its christening a casual one, apparently based on the word-of-mouth testimony of Roman soldiers written down by Tacitus and formalised by Ptolemy back home in Rome in the second century AD. It was Ptolemy’s use of the phrase Caledonia Silva that survived to appear on maps produced centuries later in mainland Europe, in particular one in 1513 and another in 1654, but the area of the wood appears to have doubled on the second map. That in turn may well have been a consequence of the influential Scottish historian Hector Boece’s ever-so-slightly over-the-top rendering of the Great Wood in 1527. The History of the Native Woods of Scotland says of Boece: ‘For him, the Roman wood had stretched north from Stirling and covered Menteith, Strathearn, Atholl and Lochaber and was full of white bulls with “crisp and curland mane, like feirs lionis”. There is no evidence in classical sources for this embroidery, but in any case the wood was located firmly in the past by Boece.’

  A third map in 1708, however, showed scattered, smaller woods rather than a single Great Wood, the most significant of them apparently rooted around Glen Orchy. And that seems to confirm that by then the Great Wood was history. Besides, we know from 21st-century carbon dating of the bleached remains of old scraps of trees preserved in peat in landscapes like Rannoch Moor that the Caledonia Silva as chronicled by the Romans was in decline for 3,000 years before they got here.

  So it was all a bit casual, the vaguest of beginnings for something that has become such a fixture in one of the stoorier corners of Scottish history. The history of the Scottish people has been a constant preoccupation of academics for many centuries. Geology explains a lot about the history of the rocks beneath our feet. But the history of the landscape on the surface remains our great unknown, as devoid of the crucial heartwood as a 5,000-year-old yew tree.

  It is very possible that the Romans exaggerated the difficulties which the Caledonia Silva posed because they failed to penetrate it significantly, because they were at the extremity of their empire and their comfort zone, because they didn’t much care for what they saw looking north from the ramparts of the Antonine Wall or their fort at Callander. The Pass of Leny 1,500 years before the A84 was built would not have been without its ferocious aspect. Nor did the Romans much care for what their galleys reported back when they went prospecting up the west coast. So, for domestic consumption back home, they prepared a portrait of impenetrable mountain forests populated by fearsome creatures including white bulls like fierce lions and wee painted people. It’s not as if they were unfamiliar with mountain forests and wolves and lynx and brown bear, for they had them all at home, but something failed them here that had not failed them before, and they felt the need to blacken the reputation of the landscape before they finally faded away whence they had come. Centuries later, that fearful vision of a Great Wood which they had taken home with them returned to us through civilised European channels rather than an invading army. It returned to haunt us, and we seem to have been willing to believe in it, as we have been willing to believe in the storytelling tradition that also reached us from Europe and blackened the reputation of the Great Wood’s most influential, non-human creature, the wolf. What is unclear is why native knowledge – the Picts’ knowledge for example – of both the wolf and the Great Wood was so eagerly discarded by much later generations of Scots in favour of the received wisdom of strangers.

  A twentieth-century American writer, Hal Borland, observed that ‘when man’s earliest ancestors achieved reason and dreams they found the makings of tomorrow on the forest floor, saw the future’s shape in the long shadows of the woodland . . .’ and that was just as true here too. When the first hunter-gatherers washed up on Scotland’s post-ice-age shores around nine or ten thousand years ago, with only a few hundred years of primitive woodland growth in place since the retreat of the ice, there was no Great Wood, simply because there had not been time for one to grow.

  The first coastal explorers, then, found a young wood, and the human population grew slowly and matured as the wood became great. The people and the Great Wood evolved together, but the wood evolved faster. There were millions of trees by the time there were thousands of people. In time, the people would maintain – or create – clearings for settlements and grazing. They managed small areas of the native forest almost from the outset. It is how people and trees co-exist. Besides, in a northern hemisphere wilderness, which is what the first people encountered, nature works with varied densities of trees as well as varied species; with every age of tree, with grassland, with heath, with wetland, with bog, and with a natural treeline often halfway up the mountainsides. It also works with grazing animals and their predators, and that dynamic relationship also insists on open woods with many wide clearings. So, for that matter, do big winds, and no matter how much the climate warmed and cooled and warmed again, Scotland was the mountainous northern half, first of a peninsula, then an island in a northern ocean, and wide op
en to winds from the Atlantic west and the Arctic north.

  That combination of factors does not beget dense jungle. The Great Wood was never impassable. So when the Romans decided to pull back from this, their outermost frontier, it was almost certainly not because the landscape defeated them, but rather because they had finally overreached themselves. Sooner or later, all empire-builders overreach themselves. They left behind the unconquered Picts, for example, who seem to have managed fine in their Caledonia Silva, and who treated the wolf as a revered hunter and a teacher, much as the native North Americans did before the advent of the white man. Its portrait appears on their carved stones and their jewellery among other revered creatures and sacred objects. And the Scots, when they came from Ireland with their Christianity-peddling emissaries, were undeterred by wolves, by forests, or by pretty well anything at all. The Scots liked what they found in Caledonia, including what remained of its Silva, and they stayed. Fifteen hundred years later, they’re still here.

  One aspect of Boece’s assessment of the Great Wood is worth considering – the extent of its realm that ‘covered Menteith, Strathearn, Atholl and Lochaber . . .’. These are all names whose notional boundaries have contracted over the centuries. Today, for example, Menteith is a loch mistakenly called a lake, a village on its shore, and a small range of low hills. In Boece’s day it was the generic name for much of what now constitutes the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. Atholl might well have encompassed much of the Cairngorms, and in terms of the Great Wood was indistinguishable from the extensive pinewood tracts of neighbouring Badenoch. Boece was Aberdeen-based, so perhaps he can be forgiven for writing off everything west of the Great Glen. The mountainous bulk of the Monadhliath west of the Cairngorms might have been such a physical and psychological barrier that it never occurred to him that the Great Wood might extend west of the Great Glen. The Monadhliath never seems to have figured in any roll call of the wooded Highlands and the same is true of several other parts of the country where mountains dominate utterly. But west of the Great Glen, the parallel east-west glens of Strathfarrar, Cannich, Affric, Morriston, Garry and Arkaig all still have their pinewood souvenirs; here was a substantial stronghold of the Great Wood, one that probably extended south and blended into the oak-woods of Morvern and Sunart in coastal Argyll. The pinewood glens are in varying stages of decline and recovery, but these oakwoods are carefully managed and conserved in the twenty-first century, to a telling and quite beautiful effect. Fragments of coastal and island woodlands from Skye to Mull and as far south as Seil also fit the notion of a Great Wood that was as prolific north and west of the Great Glen as it was south and east of it.

  All those western woods, whose every characteristic was shaped by the Atlantic Ocean, would greet many of the first settlers, and given the ubiquitous occurrence of hazelnuts among the unearthed remains of the earliest human settlements, it may be that those tough, wind-and-salt-sculpted Atlantic hazel woods that still cling to our coasts are the direct descendants of the very first seedbed of the Great Wood. Gavin Maxwell wrote in Ring of Bright Water that ‘man must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it’. In the context of the Great Wood, perhaps only the Atlantic hazel woods still offer us the opportunity to do just that. On the other hand, if man now tampers with the notion of the Great Wood to good effect, the day will dawn when his descendants can look at some portion of the earth as it was after he tampered with it because he will have put back his idea of how it was to begin with. And if he lets nature be his tampering guide, his descendants will have cause to be grateful.

  The inexplicable omission in Boece’s assessment of the extent of the Great Wood is arguably the stronghold at the heart of it all, from Rannoch to Glen Orchy. The all-buttreeless Rannoch Moor we know today coughs up bone-white tree remnants thousands of years old all across its mighty girth, and the Black Wood of Rannoch is still a vigorous pinewood with a back-to-the-ice-age pedigree. There are remnants at Dalrigh in Strath Fillan near Tyndrum, at Loch Tulla west of Rannoch and in Glen Lyon. And in Glen Orchy the demonstrable tree fertility of today’s glen confirms the claims made by several historians of a long woodland pedigree. The riverbank is thick with willows and alder. Old stands of pines, oak, aspen and hazel cluster randomly on the lower slopes. Rowan, birch and aspen grow profusely wherever they can grab a foothold, and there are miles and miles of flourishing commercial plantation.

  So I have a view of trees in my mind’s eye, disorderly invasions of trees slow-marching across the land; first the empty land left by the ice, then, as the climate grew benevolent, more and more trees in perpetual and irresistible conquest. But this was a benevolent conquest that took a land that had been made desolate by the ice and smothered it with life, with colour, birds, beasts, plants and a million or two lowlier life-forms, until at last a far-flung and airy spread-eagle of forest, a Great Wood, healed the ice-wounded Highlands. There is no end to the daring or the march of the trees.

  *

  The first snow of winter came with the first day of December. It did not linger on the lower forested slopes for more than a couple of days although it camped on the hills for a fortnight, the snowline advancing down and retreating uphill in wraiths of cloud as temperatures rose and fell. The morning after that first big snowfall was grey and still as a graveyard, the next the snow had dwindled, patchy and drippy by noon, and all the length of the glen the clouds and mist rose and fell and collided and overlapped, a slow pageant of mostly monochrome tones. Spaces kept appearing high up and low down, spaces with trees in them, trees set against snow and broken shards of cloud, outlines softened and sharpened by the restlessness of the lowering clouds, the swithering mist. In such midwinter hours, the Great Wood of Caledon is easy to believe in. It’s easy to believe that it’s there now, that if you were to walk up in the dusk to where woods cling to high crags in the moonlight, you would find wolf tracks in the snow; believe too that if you raised your voice in imperfect imitation of a howling wolf – your own lone wolf howl – the pack would answer from above, from the midst of the cloud-and-mist wraiths, their upper edges moon-silvered. The small flocks of tourists who gather in every month of the year round the grave of Rob Roy MacGregor in Balquhidder kirkyard would dine out for the rest of their lives on the memory of that edgy thrill.

  All afternoon I had walked in the snow. Sometimes the cloud and the mist conspired to close the land down to fifty square yards, drifting in among the ranks of spruce, larch, birch and scattered coveys of rowans, so that it seemed as if the trees themselves were absorbed in a slow and silent dance, advancing and retreating, now solitary, now a swirling host. And all the while my own footsteps in the snow orchestrated the dance, for nothing else sounded, no other rhythm, no other sound of wind or rain or moving water lent its pulse to the day. Sometimes I followed deer tracks, once the bounding spoor of a pine marten, once the dead-straight contour of a fox that had carefully placed its right hind foot in the pad of its right forefoot, the left hind foot in the pad of the left forefoot. A wolf, the greatest of all snow travellers, does the same thing. That way, the animal’s footfall only has to break through the snow crust once for every two steps. But mostly I broke my own trail, pausing often to snatch views above or below, and ahead or astern, whenever the grey dancers drifted apart and holes opened, holes that accommodated endless variations on a theme of trees.

  Balquhidder is a great deal more wooded than it was 40 years ago. I have two OS maps of the area, one from about 1965, and also a newly minted one. The most conspicuous difference is the amount of green. Much of it is plantation forest, of course, but native trees, notably birch and rowan and oak and alder rush into every unplanted acre. The wide, flat floodplain of the River Balvaig is bordered by thickly wooded banks. Its northern edge, which was once divided into crofting strips, is no longer worked. Instead, birch and alder wade in the winter floods the locals call ‘Loch Occasional’, and whooper swans glide among the trunk
s. You give this glen half a chance and it sprouts trees as readily as an untended garden beckons to weeds. Un-checked, nature could make a small Great Wood of the glen in 20 years.

  But Balquhidder is southern Highlands, a dozen miles from the Highland edge at Callander. Its climate is moderate by Highland standards. Cross the watershed of Glen Ogle going north and you arrive in Glen Dochart, a great trough of a glen wide open to the assaults of east and west winds, and the beginning of a northerly march into ever more spartan lands. It’s not that trees don’t grow in more northern glens, it’s just that they need more encouragement and fewer inhibiting factors like sheep and deer and absentee landlords who reckon the worth of their estates in the number of stags and the acreage of manicured grouse moor they carry.

  Looking down on wooded mountainsides from above the treeline when the mountains are white and happed in fleeces of dense grey that occasionally rearrange their folds to bare a hill shoulder, a gully, a crag, a stand of Scots pine, a clearing among trees where a red deer stag is suddenly revealed and staring at you so that you wonder how much longer he has been aware of you than you have of him . . . all that was the landscape of my afternoon as the winter daylight faded from its dull zenith to a gathering gloom in about three hours. A raven called from the bosom of a cloud, a two-syllable shard of sudden sound that echoed from a rockface. The bird called again, again the echo. I wondered if it could hear the echo and was fooled by it. Then I wondered if it knew about the echo in a certain part of the glen and understood it and was playing with it. But it did not call again and the glen lapsed back into silence, a silence somehow deepened by its intervention.