The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  There is a particular pleasure walking down Gleann nam Meann looking at the scattered pockets of survivors, then having your eye caught by a deluge of new young trees high on the hillside, and knowing that however often you walk here over however many years, the experience will only grow richer.

  So that is what lies at the end of the walk from below the window where my desk contemplates a view of trees. But if you were to forgo the watershed approach with its long walk-in and the slow-motion transformation of landscape by degrees from sterility to the slow, uphill march of the trees . . . if you were to decline all that, as most people do, and accept the blatantly visitor-hungry invitation of the Woodland Trust’s welcome mat, you would park your car near Brig o’ Turk and by the main road from Callander to the Trossachs, and select one of several waymarked walking and cycling options. The moment you begin to walk, hundreds of old oaks and thousands of young birches hit you between the eyes. If Wordsworth had wandered here lonely as a cloud his poem might have been called ‘Birches’ rather than ‘Daffodils’, such is the immediate impact of young trees in extraordinary quantities.

  The 21st-century Glen Finglas is a reserve, and at almost 10,000 acres, the Woodland Trust’s largest. For its scope, its diversity of tree species and tree ages (oaks the size of my hand to dying veterans of two or three centuries, the bizarre, dark geometries of those ancient hazels, crowds and crowds of ankle-high, knee-high, head-high birches, rowans, willows and Scots pines, all of them shepherded by tall, robust survivors many times their age), it is the most optimistic of places to spend time.

  All of which heads inexorably towards a significant ‘but’, and it’s this: but it is a reserve, and by definition a place carefully earmarked and set aside in order to restore its native woodland from terminal decline to rude health; in other words, the rebuilding of a remnant. This is not ‘the return of the forest’, so much as the return to a remarkable state of health of a living fragment of a forest that almost died. Almost.

  If you accept the historic notion of the Great Wood in some shape or form, then you can argue that the Trust is sewing back into place a small patch on the hem of that great filamor of a forest. What attracted the Trust to Glen Finglas in the first place was the survival of a few crucial threads – old threads that showed something of the weave of the place when nature was the weaver, something of the diversity of native species and of their preferred stances in that landscape, and crucially, sources of seeds with a pedigree reaching back several millennia to assist the recovery of a native wood. The fact of their survival at all when so many other Highland estates cannot muster enough native trees to make a decent bonfire may have been assisted by its long career as a royal hunting park. Glen Finglas was probably chosen for that role (by David II in 1364) because of the beauty and openness of the woodland, as well as being an easy day’s ride from Stirling Castle. Even after the estate was acquired by the earls of Moray in the seventeenth century, the priorities that governed its management remained those of a good hunting park. So when the onslaughts of the nineteenth century began, the Glen Finglas woodland was in a better condition to ward off extinction than many other Highland glens.

  Hunters knew from the earliest settlements within the Great Wood that deer needed woodland if they were to survive in good condition. That ancient wisdom was ruthlessly rubbished by the years of the Highland Clearances and the subsequent Victorian invention of the ‘deer forest’ and the ‘Monarch of the Glen’ philosophy of deer hunting. And while there is no denying the thrill that a red deer stag on a rocky mountain skyline strikes in a human breast,

  it makes for bad biology. Red deer stags in a European mainland forest are a third bigger and carry bigger spreads of antlers. It would be naïve to imagine that the hunting pleasures of the posh people never irked the woodland peasants as they still irk many of us today, especially conservationists and nature writers. In 1707, for example, the earl of Moray’s factor unearthed what he suspected was a conspiracy of local farmers to cut down trees and kill deer to create more and better farmland, and offered His Grace the maxim, ‘no woods, no deer’. And in the 1980s my friend Don MacCaskill told me ‘a forest is not a forest without deer’. And if you could have asked the opinion of thousands of years of Highland wolves they would have agreed too, for it is simply a timeless truth. Deer and trees belong, mutually, and in this of all landscapes it was never truer.

  So over the long cohabitation of trees and people and wildlife in Glen Finglas, they have all evolved and prospered and suffered in parallel, if not always in tandem. The nature of the trees dictated the actions of the people, and the actions of the people often modified the nature of the trees. The wildlife tribes made what they could of the changed circumstances; where they adapted they prospered, and where they failed to adapt they vanished. The earliest human settlements depended not just on the availability of wild animals (although that was essential) but also and increasingly on the availability of good grazing for their herds. But the settlers would recognise, too, that the Great Wood already sustained wild grazing herds – notably deer, wild cattle, wild goats, wild horses, the fabulous aurochs – and that all these fostered rich grasslands throughout its entire reach. In the concluding chapter of A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland the authors write: ‘It is important for conservationists to recognise that all our ancient semi-natural woods, without any exception, had domestic stock in them on a regular basis. It follows that woods in historic time were likely to have been full of glades which animals kept open by grazing, and where the grass grew best. There are numerous references to fields and even to cultivation in the woods: it is best to think of them as typically mosaics of wood, meadow and bogs.’

  None of this is lost on the Woodland Trust in their efforts to regenerate native trees throughout their entire natural range in Glen Finglas, a range that extends from the edge of the ominously named Black Water marshes west of Loch Venachar and the Brig o’ Turk mires, to the blasted acres of Meall Cala and Moine nan Each almost 2,000 feet higher. A working farm maintains the practice of grazing, although the numbers of cattle, sheep and red deer are now carefully controlled. The raison d’être, after all, is to grow trees. Deer and trees will find a workable balance in time, even if ultimately it takes the reintroduction of wolves to demonstrate nature’s true efficiency in that precarious art. But as an object lesson for the immediate wolfless future I well remember the Nature Conservancy Council’s ground-breaking decision to buy Creag Meagaidh above Loch Laggan in Inverness-shire, back in the 1970s. The plan was to spare it the terrible fate planned by its owners, Fountain Forestry, who had recently bought it, and to nurture its entire range of montane vegetation from lochside to plateau, and in particular an outstanding mountain birchwood. Shortly after the take-over I interviewed the NCC’s Dick Balharry who masterminded the work on the ground. Given the widespread criticism of what many saw as a heavy-handed red deer cull, I asked him how many deer the NCC was prepared to cull to achieve its ambitions. His response was that they weren’t counting deer, they were counting trees, and that when the deer population could be sustained by a vigorous and healthy birchwood, that was how many deer they would cull. You see, people and woods have interacted forever, and they still do.

  So venison, lambs, calves and – of course – timber are products of this latest evolution of human settlement in Glen Finglas, and that too honours the oldest woodland traditions of our species. There are other restoration and new planting projects around the country although none is on this scale. The Glen Finglas restoration is praiseworthy work, but it is local. Its influence does not extend beyond its own boundaries, does not cross watersheds. At least, not yet. The Great Wood of Caledon, if it ever lived up to anything like the historical hype, must have been a Highlands-wide forest that characterised at least the heart of the mainland Highlands as much as did the mountains. Even if the legend of its past is only half true, those surviving woods that we presume to be its remnants are too far-flung and too f
ar apart to be environmentally meaningful today as any kind of entity. The Great Wood of Caledon has the same fabled ring to it as Tír nan Óg or the Loch Ness Monster. But watching Glen Finglas over four seasons and several years has put the possibilities of belief within my grasp . . . the eagerness with which this rugged land responds to trees, and to the slightest encouragement from the human race . . .

  Whenever I walked in Glen Finglas, watching and being intrigued by what unfolds there, being flabbergasted at just how eagerly the trees respond and transform, I kept thinking: if only we could safeguard and enlarge the woodland strongholds, those surviving enclaves of trees that bridge the chasm of the millennia by their very survival in the very landscape where their first elephant-slow march across the land set down their earliest ancestors. And then, if only we could connect them up with patches of new forests. And why can’t we enlarge the strongholds and connect them with linking groves of new trees? Why can’t we put it back? If all of those bare glens beyond the watershed to the north of Glen Finglas could be thoughtfully wooded again, mimicking nature’s old design – linking Glen Finglas to Loch Voil’s wooded south shore in Balquhidder Glen and the Strathyre Forest along both shores of Loch Lubnaig, where there are also significant oak woodlands among the Commission plantations – something that amounted to rather more than the sum of the parts would begin to take shape. Then the Trust acquired a piece of land that might achieve something similar but at the southern edge of its estate, extending it right along the north shore of Loch Venachar to meet the southern end of the Strathyre Forest at the foot of Ben Ledi.

  And then, it seemed to me that the very location of Glen Finglas assumed a critical importance. I now think that if there is one place in the southern Highlands that can become a showpiece not just for demonstrating the worth of an expansive tract of diverse native trees for its own sake, but also for making the argument for a born-again Great Wood that blends enclaves of native trees with much higher standards of plantation forestry . . . that place is Glen Finglas. Loch Achray and Loch Venachar lie to the south of the Woodland Trust land. West of the lochs lie the Trossachs oakwoods and Loch Katrine, while south of them is the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, which is the Forestry Commission’s showpiece at the heart of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. At their best, these Commission woodlands blend old and new pine and oak and birch woods with spruce and larch plantations. But nowhere in the huge scope of the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park is there anything on the scale of Glen Finglas to reveal the purity of purpose of ruthlessly native woodland restoration. It is the company Glen Finglas keeps that will permit the shining example of its fully-fledged woodland to soar beyond what even its most ardent champions envisaged – that and the fact that it drives the impetus of the forest world northwards into wilder hills with no main roads, and to within a few miles of Balquhidder. If I were a rich man (instead of a nature writer) I would happily put a lot of money on a future which demonstrates that when Glen Finglas is finally replete with native trees of all ages growing throughout their natural range on the estate, it will prove infinitely richer in every imaginable form of wildlife and infinitely more satisfying to people as an environment in which to spend time and marvel than anything the Forestry Commission has to offer.

  The value of Glen Finglas is that it shows what is possible. The sum of what is possible Highlands-wide, and Scotland-wide for that matter, is limited only by our imagination, by our daring, by our vision and by the extent of our willingness to realise it, and our willingness to pay for it. If you are as helplessly in love with the Highland landscape as I am, and not a Roman legionary pushed far beyond the extremity of your comfort zone, you may judge the results of such a vision to be one of the soundest investments that 21st-century Scotland will ever make.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sunart

  ‘The woods, of which the oakwoods are the dearest and Highland-rarest, are a deceiving, coast-hugging, burn-clinging throwback, an echo of the landscape that was. The richness of the meagre thrivings only underpins the sadness of the few moor-stragglers about their fringes, isolated trees set eerily against a sea-rooted ground mist in autumn dawns. It is winter for the oakwoods, however, for these are the last of their tribe.’

  I wrote that in 1989 in a chapter about Ardnamurchan in a book called West Highland Landscape. I now cheerfully eat my words; a second spring for these very oakwoods has begun.

  In the same chapter I also wrote this:

  The shores of Loch Linnhe’s narrows are chalk and fragrant cheese, the east burdened with the loud and sprawling implications of Fort William and the trade-and-tourist route north; the west a sparsely tramped, sea-glittered, oak-dusted way which dawdles and dwines to the edge of the sunset . . . So for those thirled to Ardnamurchan, whether by birth or by its luring landscape, the Corran ferry’s crabwise gait is imbued with heavy significance. Alasdair Maclean, poet of Ardnamurchan, whose Night Falls on Ardnamurchan is a well-crafted milestone in the literature of the West, calls it ‘a kind of mobile decompression chamber where various kinds of pollution were drained from the blood and I was fitted to breathe pure air again’.

  It is a besotted native’s perspective as well as a poet’s, rather than, say, a dispassionate scientist’s conclusion about the relative air qualities east and west of the Corran Narrows of Loch Linnhe. It’s a crossing that does not quite last five minutes, but there is no denying the instant change in the landscape, the culture, the very feel of the journey, and yes, the frame of mind of the traveller who heads west from the ferry. And the converse is also true. Crossing back east to the rumble of the A82, the unpre-possessing squat of Fort William at the base of massive, cloud-shrouded mountains, or the dreaded psychological impact of the main road south (any main road south anywhere in the Highlands), is, I suppose, and using the poet’s yardstick, a compression chamber where travellers re-inhale all that is less desirable about the land beyond.

  But west of the narrows can be a confusing land to strangers. Signs in both Gaelic and English welcome you to both Morvern and Ardnamurchan, and if you don’t quite understand how you can be in both at the same time, well that’s just the way it is, and you’re probably also in unsignposted Sunart and Ardgour. Ardgour is the one you leave first for it lies to the north of the village of the same name where the ferry lands. As you go west, Sunart is where you start to notice oak trees. The long arm of the sea called Loch Sunart bisects the three-in-one land of Ardnamurchan, Sunart and Morvern, and it does at least drive a wedge of clear distinction between Sunart on its north shore and Morvern on its south, but it is far from clear where Sunart ends and Ardnamurchan begins. Except that Alasdair Maclean and many other natives will have you know that it’s all Ardnamurchan, and that Ardnamurchan Point with its famous lighthouse 50 miles west of the Corran Ferry is only famous because it marks the westernmost point of the Scottish mainland, whereas it is really just one more rock among Ardnamurchan’s millions of rocks.

  The only other thing to bear in mind, and it will do nothing at all to ease the confusion, is that a programme of native oakwood restoration and management and enlightened community endeavour that extends from Moidart in the north (north of Ardnamurchan and west of Ardgour) to the Sound of Mull in the south and to Ardnamurchan Point, is known collectively as the Sunart Oakwoods. Whatever you call it, and whatever the names of its constituent parts with their infinitely flexible boundaries, it is as beautiful and rarefied a land as any in the Highlands, which, at its own leisurely oaken pace, is growing woody and green again, and making something of a name for itself as a partnership between nature and people. And yes, the more you familiarise yourself with the place, the more you inhale its aura and its good air, the more you comprehend utterly where the poet was coming from. Between the village of Ardgour and Ardnamurchan Point the unfolding tapestry of landscapes has wrought more raw emotion from me than any other comparable distance of mainland Highland miles anywhere. One early autumn I watched the tail end of a hurricane –
a proper hurricane with a name – take a swipe at the lighthouse and the rocks of Briaghlann. I saw the sky fall on the ocean black as night at midday, saw the sea drain of all colour but grey and white, saw the shape of the wind slice lumps from endless queues of waves, saw the lighthouse blur as the smashed sea leaped for the throat of the banshee. And in the midst of all that two cormorants sat riding out the storm; no point in flying in this, so sit on it. Pipits, curlews and other waders hid on a leeward ledge, and two whooper swans newly arrived from Iceland hugged the shoreline of Loch Grigadale, visibly unsettled by the fury of everything. It was a long trek down the northern ocean for such a landfall.