The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  In half a day the thing was done and Ardnamurchan re-emerged as the rain stuttered and fragmented into soft showers and a warm wind blew through evening rainbows. Every cottage storm-porch reeked of dripping oilskins. Ben Hiant ran white with temporary waterfalls that were gone by dawn. The morning after, the first passengers off the ferry found the place enchanted and wondered at the fuss the natives make of the weather.

  Being a late twentieth-century poet, Alasdair Maclean was from a generation accustomed to entering and leaving this land by a car ferry that connects one part of the mainland to another. Even though the Ardnamurchan peninsula west of that neck of land between Salen and Kentra feels more like an island with a land bridge, the place presents such an out-on-a-limb aspect to the rest of the world because it takes such a long overland journey from almost anywhere to get there. It was not always thus.

  The long Atlantic inroad of Loch Sunart made this one of the most accessible of lands among those countless eras of seafarers who variously explored, exploited, settled and sold out the Highlands’ western seaboard, and it did so for all those eras until the most recent chapters of Scotland’s long history. Travelling overland to Ardnamurchan was an absurd proposition to them all, none more so than those who may have summoned to their homesick imagination the notion of the Great Wood. And here was a kind of ceremonial gateway to such a place – miles and miles of shoreline where the trees descended to the shore in waves and displayed themselves there like defiant armies, wading out among rocks into the shallows at high tide, or here and there standing as densely packed as spears in a schiltron around the landward edge of a sandy beach, and even clothing some of the sea cliffs. If there was a single frontier of the Great Wood calculated to intimidate the weary, the unwary or the susceptible minds of thousands of years of seafarers, perhaps it was this one.

  The oakwoods still wade into the Atlantic today but it is a toe-in-the-water frontier of the Great Wood now, for as with all great expanses of our ancient native woodland, most of it has gone. But it is our very own era that has resolved to give the oakwoods a future, to put them back at the heart of community life, to forge a new pact with nature, to give back where so much has been taken from nature for so, so long, to restore as much old oakwood cover as is humanly possible, to raise from the last gasp of its own seedbed a remnant beyond price of the temperate rain forest of many tree species that once grew all along the western Atlantic coasts of Europe. To see its like now you should go to the south-east panhandle of Alaska where you can walk for days in trees, then come on a huge, dead-still lake, only to be started by the sudden emergence 50 yards offshore of a humpback whale – the ‘lake’ is an arm of the ocean, a Loch Sunart of the Pacific.

  The potential of Sunart was identified by a system of Special Areas of Conservation established under the European Union’s Habitats Directive. Local and national Scottish agencies formed the Sunart Oakwoods Initiative at the beginning of the new century and the Great Wood breathed again. The local community has devised ways of managing the woods that are both generous to nature and still permit the use of timber for houses, fuel, fencing, crafts and boat building. The local tourism industry is emphatically green, and there is nothing quite like it the length and breadth of the Great Wood. But then there is nothing in the Great Wood quite like the Sunart Oakwoods either.

  Ariundle, just north of the likeable lochside village of Strontian, is the Shieling of the White Meadow, apparently a strange name for an oakwood, but then there have always been meadows in the Great Wood, and from the times of the very earliest woodland settlements there were areas of cultivation. More prosaic is the Norse Egadale – the Oak Glen. Interesting: the alien invaders saw a land of oak, while the native Gaels distinguished between the local character of individual shielings.

  I paused here to walk knee-deep in my own memories, for I have a personal history with this land west of the Corran Narrows. I first got to know the name of Ariundle as a sign that my journey to a particular destination was almost over, except for the worst part of it, which was the single-track road beyond Ariundle over a wicked hill pass and down the far side to Polloch whence it degenerated into a forest track along the shore of Loch Shiel. The purpose of the journey, which I made three or four times, was to meet wildlife writer Mike Tomkies who would boat across the loch from the home he called Wildernesse on the roadless, trackless far shore. My great friend – which he was in those days – was generous, hospitable, amusing and instructive company whose work on golden eagles in particular was – and I believe still is – unequalled in Highland Scotland. The best of it all was the time I helped him with his work at an eagle eyrie at the far end of what he called ‘the Killer Trek’, which I have written about before,* and which I still often recall when I walk the eagle hills of Balquhidder. Much of what I put into practice now on these home hills I learned from listening to or just watching Mike Tomkies at work. And over the years I saw him regularly my admiration for golden eagles became a love of golden eagles, and that was his lasting gift to me.

  We were sitting on a hillside on that trek having a bite and a breather when he told me that he didn’t care what ‘they’ said, he was utterly convinced that mountains like these (he indicated with a broad sweep of his arm the bare peaks to the north of us) were never wooded, that there never was a ‘Great Wood of Caledon’ in such places. It was the first time I had heard the old orthodoxy challenged, and challenged at that by someone whose relationship with wild country was more instinctively true than that of anyone else I ever met, as if he possessed some ancient landscape wisdom. Perhaps it had come down to him through his Islay mother.

  Until that moment, I had never thought that much about the Great Wood of Caledon. It was a phrase that people of a certain age used in a certain way that implied a halcyon time of forest Nirvana. Frank Fraser Darling, once widely regarded as the greatest of twentieth-century naturalists and a founder of the Nature Conservancy Council, even wrote in 1947 that ‘the imagination of a naturalist can conjure up a picture of what the great forest was like: the present writer is inclined to look upon it as his idea of heaven’. As late as 1991, the great wildlife film-maker Hugh Miles made a TV documentary on pinewoods and collaborated with Sunday Times journalist Brian Jackman on a companion book which exclaimed that ‘there was hardly a glen that was not roofed with trees, the high hills rising like islands from the blue-green canopy’, and here at around the same moment was Mike Tomkies denouncing the idea. So, more or less from that day forward, I went in search of my own ideas about what the Great Wood may or may not have been. Historians have been disagreeing about it for 150 years since it was branded ‘a myth’ by Cosmo Innes, a noted Victorian authority. I had decided soon after my chat with Mike Tomkies in the mountains above Loch Shiel that I should have an opinion but that I would take my time forming it. Wherever I travelled in my constant and characteristically restless explorations of my native land I would look out for what survived that was demonstrably old. I would try and read the land as well as those history books I trusted, and see what rubbed off. I wanted an opinion because I was sure that sooner or later the question would come up; twenty years later, it did, and I was asked to write this book.

  *

  So I had crossed the Corran Narrows and headed west, turning aside at Strontian for Ariundle to walk in its oakwood and to renew old acquaintance. The thing about mature oak trees – or one of the things about mature oak trees – is that they insist on their own space. Size does not always matter in my appreciation of trees (I love aspen, birch and rowan, for example), but sometimes I like to be reminded of the sheer presence of a truly colossal tree, not tall so much as massive, with limbs like tree trunks and a tree trunk the girth of a thicket. I remembered such a tree in the Ariundle wood but I had no memory of how to find it.

  It was the first day of spring and the oaks were bare and fat-budded. Limbs, branches, twigs, twiglets and buds were deep black against a pale and tattered blue, white and grey sky that fired icy
squalls down on the morning with short, deceptively sunny calms in between. Looking up at a big hillside oak (big, but not massive, not that hillside oak) from below the level of its roots was like looking up at a stained-glass window, albeit one whose artist had worked with a limited palette – just these three shades, all of them pale, none bold, none vivid. The teeming tracery of the twigs was the leaded tracery of the window. If stained-glass windows were like this, I thought, I could be persuaded to go to church. Nature writers have often reached for the analogy of a cathedral over the years when they tried to write down a forest, with the tallest, straightest trunks as the pillars. I think the notion is back to front; the cathedral is like the forest. Surely a stonemason with big ideas in his head but lacking the means of their execution walked into an ancient wood one day a thousand years ago, looked at a pair of tall, straight trunks and thought, ‘Hmm, pillars’. And another (or the same one on a different day) looked up at a big oak on the first day of spring and saw the sky through its thousand branches and thought, ‘Hmm, stained glass’.

  Any old wood that accommodates big oaks will also be an open wood, because the nature of oak trees insists on it. Besides, people have been working these woods to some extent or another for 8,000 years, and ‘working’ means felling trees, creating spaces (for settlement, for cultivation, for charcoal-burning that was an essential part of iron-smelting), and think of it – an oakwood on the edge of a long and sheltered arm of the sea – what a gift for repairing and building boats.

  Nature, of course, had been working the woods for rather longer, and changes wrought by climate, fire, storm and flood all manipulated a forest like this, discouraging some species, washing up new ones, readjusting the ground cover, the insects, the birds, the mammals. The oakwood I walked in on the first day of spring is a much-tampered-with piece of ground, for all its aura of timelessness, and the tampering goes on to this day, although ours is arguably the first of all this wood’s eras to approach it in a mindset of healing.

  The only oak leaves not on the ground were a few bleached and wrinkled souvenirs of last year that, for reasons I don’t begin to understand, clung to their parent tree through a long, turbulent and particularly cold winter. It is a feature of oak trees, and especially young ones, that when the new spring’s leaves begin to unfurl, they are briefly outnumbered by last year’s tenacious dead. Yet even on 21 March the big trees are green – the north-facing curves of the trunks and the great limbs are simply plastered with moss. Moss grows here in a swaddling electric-green fur. Many of the biggest oaks at Ariundle have rooted among rocks. The moss has a particular liking for them, has coated them with such a depth of green fur – six, seven, eight inches – that they all have the same smoothed-over shape, and these rocks look more like broken pieces of tree than broken pieces of mountainside.

  Sometimes oaks rooted in old drystane dykes. The growing strength of the tree first prised the stones apart, bursting open the dyke, then simply grew over it on both sides. The dyke fell into disrepair or perhaps its stones were recycled to build a house or a barn, and the tree simply grew and grew among the few scattered traces of its birthplace until the moss finally moved in and united them in a common oakwood uniform of electric green.

  There is a second shade of green about a big old oak on the first day of spring, or a midwinter oak for that matter – ferns. They grow in and around the forks, and out along the big limbs in loose clusters, and they wave in the wind and soften the huge, eerie, bare blackness of a living oak seen against the sky, for all the world as if they were the foliage of the tree itself instead of – well, parasites, albeit benevolent parasites.

  I found a tree that offered a comfortable backrest and sat. I like to write where my raw material is raw. The best place to be when you write down an oakwood is in an oakwood. It is hardly a new idea. Hereabouts, there was an eighteenth-century Gaelic poet, a contemporary of Burns, called Alasdair MacMhaigstir Alasdair, otherwise known as Alexander MacDonald, though I much prefer the unadulterated original. For obvious reasons, one of his woodland poems graces the Sunart Oakwoods Initiative literature. It is called ‘Oran an t-Samhraidh’, ‘Song of Summer’. It celebrates the first day of May, and is reproduced both in the Gaelic original and an anonymous English translation I didn’t much care for. Anyway, I had scribbled it down earlier and now I pulled out the notebook in question and frowned at the offending page from my throne at the foot of the oak which prodded me between the ribs and said, ‘Go on then, you do better’.

  Song of Summer

  (after Alasdair MacMhaigstir Alasdair)

  The feadan* of the woods

  woke me early, the sun

  brightened even this shady hollow;

  the rocks warmed to sweet vapour

  the dew, echoed

  with an elegant rebound

  the Piper’s threnody;

  the dew-lit buds echoed

  the dance of a thousand suns.

  So often, when you walk alone, deep into a wild landscape, and then find a quiet place to sit, and if you have the gift of sitting quietly and still for a while, and especially if you are wearing clothes that are something like the colours of that landscape . . . so often the natives of that place treat you like a piece of the landscape. I had been still for a while wrestling with the mindset of the eighteenth-century poet and enjoying the company of the trees, when I lifted my head to follow an instinct, the kind of instinct which is born from innumerable hours over many years in just such a situation as that one. I had followed a skinny and intermittent path before I turned aside to sit at the tree, a tree about the same girth as a roe deer. The instinct that now demanded all my attention was that something had just changed. I had yet to register whether sound or movement or a stray hint of wind-blown scent had effected the change, but it had nudged me away from the feadan dilemma and demanded that I be alive to every nuance of the moment. One of the virtues of sitting still in front of a restricted view is that you very quickly become intimate enough with its broad brushstrokes and many of its details to notice when something is not exactly as it was the last time you looked. So, without moving, I worked my way through the close quarters of the wood, then the middle distance, then the furthest extent of what was visible, which at that moment covered less than a hundred square yards. Nothing.

  I tried again. The only obvious movement was an orange-tip butterfly crossing a patch of sunlight, and I watched it for a few yards of its wandering flight about a yard off the ground. But I knew that was not the source of the change. The butterfly dipped towards the path then suddenly and apparently decisively changed course away from it, and as it did so I caught a new movement, dark and low down. I focussed binoculars on the spot, and all that showed that was not there before was what looked like a couple of mushrooms stuck to a fragment of dark wood that caught the sunlight, except that you don’t get mushrooms on the first day of spring and there was a glossy hint to the dark wood. Then the dark wood moved and rose a few inches, the mushrooms materialised into ears and the dark wood into the deep brown face and black-eyed stare of a pine marten at 20 paces. The wind was briefly in my favour, but in woodland like Ariundle it can bend anywhere as it seeks a passage through different densities of trees. The marten moved forward with the stealth of a hunting cat. As he moved he climbed a short slope on the path, and his peach-coloured throat and creamy shoulders and upper forelegs caught the sun and made him splendid. I think he knew that, and I think his new stance was calculated to impress. Because I have seen that stance before.

  The building at Balquhidder, where I have had my writer’s eyrie for a few years now, has a back door that opens out onto a long back garden, mostly grass, with a birch and spruce wood beyond. I was standing there one day deep in conversation with a friend when a pine marten appeared at the far end of the garden and advanced on springy legs to within four or five yards of where we stood. At that point it decided to pay attention to us, and it did so by fixing us with small black eyes, advancing a yard
out of shadow into sunlight and (I can think of no other image to describe his action) flourishing himself for our benefit. He was making a show, and he was as unintimidated by two men as any wild animal I have ever seen. Having made his point (whatever it may have been), he dived under a hedge beyond which lay his probable destination – the nearest rubbish bins.

  So now, with my back to a venerable oak in Ariundle on the first day of spring, there was a swaggering familiarity about the blatantly struck pose of one more pine marten. I realised I was grinning, and I felt as if I should applaud. Instead, I said out loud,

  ‘Hello stranger.’

  Then the orange-tip was back, and it flew down to within a few inches of the pine marten’s nose, and the animal’s eyes followed that instead, but it danced upward and away, and vanished among the trees, and the pine marten gave me one more unconcerned glance and ambled quietly in the direction of the butterfly. And there was one of the oldest encounters of the Great Wood – the man and the pine marten; we have been meeting each other in circumstances just like these for thousands of years.

  It is not so long ago that the pine marten was holed up in a desperate battle with extinction on the Sutherland coast and nowhere else in the land. It is not so long ago, either, that the Sunart Oakwoods were similarly pinned down and apparently doomed. But our species pulled out of both offensives. The pine marten was given a surreptitious and wholly unauthorised helping hand to colonise other Highland woods, an invitation it has responded to with great eagerness. Its recovery has been astonishing.

  It can also become very tame. Once, at Mike Tomkies’s cottage, I sat a yard away while he coaxed one into the room through an open window and watched with disbelieving eyes as it gently took a piece of bread and strawberry jam out of his mouth. I cannot say I enjoyed the spectacle, but it taught me something fundamental about this extraordinary creature: it is utterly fearless. It also punches far above its weight. My car headlights once illuminated one on a quiet back road in the Trossachs. It was trying to drag the carcase of a young roe deer from the road into the undergrowth, and very slowly, a few inches at a time, the carcase was moving. When I returned a few hours later, there were only bloodstains.