The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  As these oakwoods rejuvenate and expand, the scope begins to multiply year after year for pine martens and much else besides – including orange-tip and the much rarer chequered skipper butterflies. People are learning something else in the benevolent climate of such thoughtful restorations. It is that creating new opportunities for nature – or restoring old ones – creates new opportunities for people too. Expanding oakwoods for nature does not mean that we cannot use them too. The people who live and work within the Sunart Oakwoods are learning that at first hand. I was reading about some of the initiatives while I enjoyed good coffee and a bacon roll in the craft centre at Ariundle, and the spirit that it all evoked reminded me of Alistair Scott, once a senior manager in the Forestry Commission, and the author of a likeable little book called A Pleasure in Scottish Trees. Its introduction, which he described as ‘my credo about trees in Scotland’, concluded:

  Finally, I like wood. Wooden houses, wooden barns, oak roofs, pine telegraph poles, cedar shingles, clinker-built boats, picnic tables, chairs, axe-handles, chopping boards, bowls, spoons, spurtles, totem poles, Morris Travellers, Russian dolls. I delight in the way that every culture has put trees to appropriate uses. It is a universal pleasure. How satisfactory, if we could reconnect the trees growing out there with the wood that pleases us in here. And start to innovate for our own twenty-first-century needs. Hence my admiration for the Wood School at Ancrum, Jedburgh – half a dozen young designers and craftsmen in wood, sharing the expensive machinery. If we are going to be better Europeans, could we not be Scandinavian in our use and appreciation of wood?

  I found the huge tree I was looking for and remembered it anew. It seemed to have grown to a new dimension – of immensity – since I had last seen it, about three years before. I won’t insult it by guessing its size or measuring its girth, but Alistair Scott mentioned totem poles, and this is how I like mine. The totem poles of Native Americans held rituals of the tribes that made them. The tribes of Highland Scotland – the clans – drew many of their rituals and traditions from nature: everything from the letters of the alphabet (named after trees), the clan crest (a flower or a tree leaf), to the golden eagle feathers that adorned a clan chief’s bonnet. The oak, being the most massive native tree in the Highland landscape, the wood of choice for roof beams of the great castles, and therefore symbolic of supreme strength, was a natural emblem for one of the strongest clans, Clan Donald. But there is more to it than that. If you were to ask me to symbolise the Great Wood, I would bring you here. I would stand you before this oak tree in this wood of oak trees and ask you to marvel. For this is what nature is capable of when we allow it room to breathe – this workaday miracle, this routine giant. It looks exceptional to us because all across the Highlands, all across the landscape of the Great Wood, we have denied nature the opportunity to make such trees. The Sunart Oakwoods project will surely be a new beginning that redresses that grotesque imbalance.

  *

  Kinlochmoidart is one of those names that makes a kind of music on your tongue. There are Kinlochs all over the Gaelic-named landscape. The ‘Kin’ bit is a crudely anglicised ceann meaning ‘head’, and almost every Kinloch you ever saw stands at the head of a loch, in this case Loch Moidart. There is another Kinloch at the head of Loch Teacus that opens into Loch Sunart, another on Loch Morar, another on Loch Hourn, and so on all the way up to the Kyle of Tongue on the north coast of Sutherland facing Orkney (for the Kyle is a sea loch despite its name, and Kinloch at its head proves it). So Kinlochmoidart is also one of those names that does what it says on the tin as well as making a kind of music on your tongue. I had a spell in what now feels like an earlier life when I used to wash up at Glenuig a few miles up the road, where I had found a perfect, sheltered ledge a few feet above the high tide with room to pitch a tent, where I grew accustomed to falling asleep and waking up to the sound of Arctic terns. Like Ariundle, Kinlochmoidart was a name on a signpost that meant the familiar journey was almost over. Now, it too means oakwoods.

  The transformation in my awareness of the place came about thanks to a week in a small, old and isolated cottage in a grassy clearing in the middle of an oakwood. The atmosphere of the place was unlike anything I had ever known. There is a self-containment in such places that discourages further travel once you arrive. Something like it must have impressed itself on the earliest settlers and encouraged the very act of settlement. It is an introverting place; the trees shut out the mountain landscape beyond, and, although you could walk to the shore of Loch Moidart in less than half an hour, it is a narrow stretch of water, enclosed by the bulk of Eilean Shona, and the oaks wander down below the highest tide line.

  If you just sat around outside the cottage, sooner or later all the wildlife of the wood would come to visit. A pine marten jumped onto the kitchen windowsill. An entry in the cottage visitor book exhorted me to ‘feed Bobbie’ with bread and jam, and while I felt inclined to add a footnote to the effect that its name is pine marten, not Bobbie, and it does no tribe of nature any favours to be treated like a pet, I put food out for him and watched quietly from the kitchen while he ate a yard away on the other side of the glass. Roe and red deer were daily visitors to the clearing, especially in the early morning. The list of bird species made impressive reading but the one that surprised me turned up on the second afternoon while I sat outside with a coffee and a notebook. A thrush had just crossed the clearing calling loudly and flying with unusual haste so I gave it a second glance, and was just in time to see a buzzard-sized bird swerve between two trees at the edge of the clearing and follow the thrush back into the trees with a similarly deft swerve not six feet off the ground. It was the behaviour not of a buzzard but a goshawk. I saw it almost daily after that, sometimes in the edge of the clearing, mostly slipping through the trees with the agility of a bird a tenth of its size; one more workaday miracle for the watcher in the oakwoods.

  I learned something else in the course of that memorable week, and it had to do with a recognition of Don MacCaskill’s observation about ‘the people of this country, in whose history there is so little of a forest background’. It is so true; so few of us live in the woods, as deeply immersed in the woods as that cottage, so that every hour you spend there is an hour in thrall to trees and all nature that keeps them company. That is what we lost over the last 5,000 withering years. I had the briefest glimpse, the most tantalising taste of how many of the earliest of Highlanders must have responded to their surroundings, although of course at any moment I chose I could get in the car and drive beyond the reach of the trees. Yet I felt disinclined to do that, and for quite a while after that week was over I missed the company of the woods and the sense of living in a clearing that someone had made long ago so that they too could keep that kind of company.

  I was back in that same wood a few months later in the snow, en route to Mallaig and Skye. I didn’t stay in the same cottage but I breathed in the same atmosphere, and there were foxes barking at night and that deep, deep contentment, that suddenly remembered self-containment, settled on my shoulders again.

  Quiet Tonight

  Quiet tonight, not silent

  – sideways snow

  made hasty whispers

  at the window, not still

  – rummaging winds

  ballooned the flakes

  and rattled the black oaks.

  What made it quiet

  was the pallid darkness

  of the snow-stuffed sky

  and the shy lull

  that followed fox bark

  after fox bark

  after fox bark.

  * See Among Mountains (Mainstream, 1993)

  * Feadan – the chanter of the Highland bagpipes. I was unclear if his use of the word in the original meant literally the playing of a chanter, or if he was using the word to indicate nature’s music on such a morning, so being a poet I chose the latter, because being a poet he did too!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Strath Fillan


  The track looks old and well made. It is stony, but with a strip of grass up the centre and along each edge. Think carts, towed by horses, think clansmen in sandalled feet. Oh, go on then, think stalkers’ Land Rovers if you must. I like how the track rises and falls and leans in and out over the small contours, how it has been hand-made to fit the land. It skirts a primitive tract of bog and glacial moraines. The River Fillan is what remains of the glacier in question; Strath Fillan is its spoor, defines the breadth of its passage.

  A small and furtive watersheet lies amid the glacier’s heaped footprints. It is called Lochan nan Arm. If you happen not to be blinking and if you happen to be looking at the precise moment in precisely the right direction, you might catch a glint of gunmetal grey or (much less likely in this rainiest of airts) of reflected sky blue, and puzzle over what might lie there. In which case you would not be the first, for its name means the Lochan of the Weapon and it is the last resting place of a sword belonging to Robert the Bruce who came off second best in a skirmish here and ditched the sword to facilitate a hasty retreat. Or so they say, dismissive of the obvious riposte that such a fighting king throwing away his sword sounds a touch unlikely, a touch like surrender, and the Bruce did not get where he is today with a taste for surrender in the face of adversity. Anyway it was all a few years before he became the master strategist who turned a little-known lowland stream called the Bannock Burn into a torrent at the heart of the psyche of every Scot from that day to this, and finally united his fractious kingdom.

  It may be that he always intended coming back to retrieve the sword, but there is no evidence he ever did. On the other hand, there is no evidence he ever threw it in there in the first place, not that that has stopped many a treasure hunter from dredging the place from time to time. In any case, I imagine that the Bruce had more than one sword, being king and all that. And anyway, he was more of a battleaxe man, wasn’t he?

  The track has been jacked up abruptly to cross the railway, beyond which it dips again then curves, then breasts a rise. You then stop dead at the sudden, deep green blessing of an old pinewood, one more souvenir of the march of time since that long lost day when Strath Fillan’s glacier gave up the ghost. One way or another, great age comes at you in waves hereabouts.

  The wood is one of the larger living souvenirs of the post-glacial period, perhaps a square mile, large at least by the standards of most remnants of the Great Wood in the southern Highlands. It catches your eye at once and commands it to linger simply because it is such a rarity in the landscape you travel through, simply because it is a landform that belongs, simply because it is a glimpse of an older order, a much, much older order. Yet nowhere within are the trees darkly dense enough to blot out the surrounding mountains the way that a wood like Rothiemurchus (which is ten times its size) can mask the entire mass of the Cairngorms from time to time. The thing is, both these pinewoods are relics. Five thousand years ago, give or take a thousand either way, Strath Fillan’s pinewood probably sprawled all the way to Glen Orchy, rolling round the ends of the hills, and Glen Orchy was the centre of a more or less continuous forest that extended from Glen Etive in the west to Rannoch in the east, clambering over and round the lower slopes of many a mountain; Rothiemurchus would have been a component part of a greater forest that swaddled the lower slopes of the whole Cairngorms massif. Now it’s the other way round, and the mountains swaddle the isolated relics.

  The Gaelic name for the Strath Fillan pinewood is Coille Coire Chuilc, which would seem to mean the Wood of the Reedy Corrie, but there is not a reed in sight. It is, of course, quite possible that there were reeds in abundance when the place was named, however many thousands of years ago that may have been. The name, like the old forest core, endures, but the details of the landscape – any landscape – come and go as it ages and warms and cools, and grows wetter or drier. Maybe the reeds disappeared with the last of the beavers, for nothing manages and expands and sustains wetland like beavers, and they have been gone from here for two or three or four or five hundred years; as with the last wolf, nobody really knows.

  As you close in on the forest you begin to pass its outliers, solitary Scots pines designed by the wind (and one of them redesigned by lightning, for up there a hundred yards above the track is the very wounded pine I identified in the Prologue). These sentinel trees are conspicuously short with wide trunks, and I find them curiously affecting. I admire their stoic stance, their very defiance. These are what Seton Gordon had in mind when he wrote: ‘I do not recall ever having seen a forest outpost uprooted by the wind . . . they stand undismayed against gusts which send their fellows farther in the forest crashing to the ground.’ And it is true, you never see them felled, and you remember again Muir’s claim of immortality for the Sierra juniper or Peattie’s hint at the same quality in the giant sequoia, ‘only a bolt from heaven can end its centuries of life’. And sure enough, there is the tree that I have known for nearer 40 years than 30, one that I thought the handsomest in the whole of Strath Fillan until ‘a bolt from heaven’ split its northernmost limb from the trunk, so that over the ensuing years the bark fell from the broken timber and it turned ashen-gray and died. Yet the tree itself declined to die, and there it still stands disfigured by its useless gray claw, but its roots still dig in for immortality, and in all the landscapes of my life it is among the most precious of landmarks.

  The track dips towards the rush of a mountain burn that flanks the pinewood on its eastern edge, and which must account at least in part for the remarkable survival of the wood because it is difficult to ford at the best of times and impossible in spate. There are two flimsy, greasy and gaptoothed wooden plank bridges a few hundred yards apart, neither of them for the faint-hearted, and over the years I have found drowned sheep and deer in the burn. I imagine many come to the bank and simply don’t try to cross. The track curves away from the wood before it reaches the burn and begins to climb. Here it loses the patina of age, for at some point in its not so distant past it metamorphosed into a forestry road to service the modern spruce and larch plantation above the pinewood, a plantation that thoughtlessly precludes the possibility of the pinewood ever spreading uphill.

  As the track climbs it passes more squat outlier pines, hundreds of yards apart, each with its own stance and shape so that you come to recognise them as aloof individuals, each one with a different mountain backdrop, each one with a view out across their taller and more elegant brother pines clustered in the main wood. The curve and swoop of the wood and the wide, curving crowns of the trees set up the handsome profile of Ben Lui, and if you could train your gaze on that blithe partnership to the exclusion of all else in the landscape you would call the place beautiful. But on every other hillside and in every direction there are commercial plantations, hard-edged and unrelieved by either a diversity of tree species or open spaces, except where whole hillsides have been clear-felled. It is old-school forestry, and while in some other places it is being done better now, only the forestry industry ever learned how to make trees ugly. There is nothing wrong with the trees they plant, but there is a great deal wrong with how they are planted, with the brutal nature of how they are harvested, and with the miserable proportion of native trees the plantations accommodate.

  I had sought out this high view of the pinewood, for the view over the top of a good wood is often as rewarding for the watcher as it is rare. A couple of hillsides away to the east I know a place to perch in the lee of a broken-down drystane dyke that blunts the west wind and offers a view over the top of a wood where ospreys nested. Aesthetically it is not as good a wood as the Strath Fillan pinewood, for it is a planted Victorian thing of huge exotic firs and rhododendrons, although some of the native trees that the designer of the wood found when he went to work were allowed to keep their place. Birches, willows and alder have nibbled away at its edges, but so have self-sown spruces from a nearby plantation. No matter, the resultant mix is not unpleasant, and because it was laid out with the wellbeing of rich
pedestrians in mind, it has its share of good open spaces that must once have been manicured, but now, in its quiet dereliction, nature has moved in with a will. It stands at the mouth of a glen and just below a major watershed with old oakwood remnants to the south, scattered pine and birch to the north, and a lot of commercial forestry. All of these would be ingredients if we ever persuade ourselves to make a new Great Wood. All we would have to do in such a circumstance would be to strengthen the presence of the oaks and the pines, diminish the impact of the commercial forest, and let it swirl all around the Victorian wood, planting young pines and birches in the glen, alders and aspens by the burn, rowans on a few rocky knolls.

  The ospreys were encouraged to nest in the Victorian wood after their first abortive attempt in the top of a mobile phone mast. There was a local consensus that an eyrie with a steel ladder up to it was not a particularly sound career move for the birds. So a treetop platform was built and furnished with enough branches to get them interested. They took to it at once, and prospered there a few years until the platforms slipped one spring, spilling the contents of the nest. They hung around for a few desolate weeks, then vanished.