The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  I grew accustomed to walking up to the dyke and sitting there and watching from a discreet distance the male osprey flying in across the treetops carrying a fish for its mate. There was a time when that must have been one of the most common rituals of nature in the wooded Highland landscape. But today, that is the view of ospreys that most people don’t see, the long haul that follows the familiar much-televised spectacle of the catch. If you could retrace the whole of that flight, you might see this:

  The bird has just heaved itself upward and forward from the water, a ponderous beginning for such a graceful flier. The first few wingbeats are about extracting the bird from water, where it is awkward and ill-at-ease, and into the habitat for which it is supremely designed. As soon as it clears the water and gains the first few feet of height it performs an undignified aerial shudder that frees its plumage of a surprising amount of water. Then the fish has to be secured, preferably in both feet, arranged one behind the other, preferably aligned with the fish head facing forward. The fish is not dead at this point, and is often still thrashing its tail. So head-first is aerodynamically more efficient and avoids a slap in the face by a convulsive fish tail. Some birds are fastidious about this arrangement, others less so, and you do see the odd one holding the fish by the head alone so that it dangles like a limp sock.

  The loch has trees and hillsides all around, so the bird must gain height, which is easier said than done, especially if it has bitten off a bit more than it can chew in the matter of the fish. I have heard of – but never witnessed – accounts of ospreys catching a fish that is too heavy to lift from the water, and ‘swimming’ it ashore using its forewings like paddles in the manner more commonly observed in American bald eagles. The fish is ripped apart on the shore, a chunk of it is eaten, then the osprey heads for the nest with something more manageable in its feet.

  The rising bird begins a series of widening circles, gaining height with each lap. One eyrie I know is two miles away from the main source of fish and requires the fish-carrying bird to climb about 1,000 feet before it can cross the intervening range of hills at the lowest point. That’s a lot of climbing circles before the bee-line for the distant eyrie tree begins.

  If you’re lucky, you catch a gleam of sunlight in the white underwings as the bird banks round a hill shoulder half a mile away. Then you lock the glasses on to its flight and you watch it skim the treetops. Sometimes it flies between two of the tallest trees – Douglas firs – and I wonder if that is an example of the bird using trees just as people have done for millennia, as landmarks.

  If it has been a long hunting expedition the bird on the nest will start calling while its mate is still a few hundred yards away. A neighbouring mistle thrush occasionally causes consternation because it has learned to mimic that call perfectly, fooling both the sitting bird and the watcher with the binoculars. The home stretch for the osprey is surprisingly indirect. The line of approach often wavers, sometimes stops short where the fish-carrier perches and eats before flying onto the eyrie tree and handing over the rest; even then, there are several passes and circles around and above the eyrie before it lands. The sitting bird’s calls acquire a strident edge . . .

  If there are still unhatched eggs in the eyrie, the sitting bird takes the fish and heads due north (I have never seen it go any other direction) out across the top of the wood and in a long shallow climb until it reaches a row of disused fenceposts high on the open hillside about half a mile away. There it perches and eats, while its mate settles on the eyrie. Wherever you have a view of a good wood from above, watching such things are possible again and again. You see buzzards, sparrowhawks, woodpeckers, red squirrels, and – if it’s the right kind of wood – capercaillie, black grouse, goshawk, even golden eagle. It works best with ospreys because they are such confirmed treetop nesters.

  Old habits die hard; I still climb up to the old dyke and look at the osprey nest, scanning the top of the wood in case they have come back and nested elsewhere, but none has shown itself yet. On the other hand, the red kites have moved in, and a wandering young sea eagle turns up from time to time. It will always be a good idea to watch the top of a wood.

  I had followed the hill track above Strath Fillan until I got a good view above the pinewood. Here I spent a quiet hour incubating my thoughts with a flask of tea, a pair of binoculars, a camera and a notebook. Then I wanted the embrace of the wood itself. I headed down for the sanctuary of the pines. Crossing the bridge (the lower of the two, the less tricky to negotiate, and the one blessed by a grove of aspens at its east end) is something akin to Alisdair Maclean’s Corran Ferry moment, for beyond the far end is a place whose embrace has always felt hospitable, so that I can never quite escape the sense of arriving in the shoes of the prodigal son.

  In this of all woodlands that I know, I feel somehow recognised, acknowledged by the very wood itself. I have known it for thirty years, but for five or six of those I lived just a few miles away. It was then that I began to connect with the place in a quite different way; a connection born of intimacy, the sense of a place with an identity as real as my own. This is difficult terrain for a nature writer for it lays him open to charges that vary from ‘elitist’ to ‘precious’ to ‘holier-than-thou’, and I have been called all three. So let me be as honest as I know how. This wood, and a couple of other places within what I think of as my working territory, impressed me in particular because the more I became familiar with them the more I sensed their store of mystery and a kind of natural wisdom that underpinned every aspect of life there. There is an order, a discipline, a rhythm, and it is nature’s doing, existing quite outwith the world of people.

  None of this dawned on me quickly; there was no bolt of lightning, but rather it grew on me in layers, like moss, over years of going back again and again, working and reworking what I had assumed were the same set of circumstances, only to find that the details within changed all the time. I reached a point where I became frustrated that so much was out of my reach because I thought I was not good enough at tuning in, not accomplished enough at taking notes and turning them into biological fact, not nature enough for nature. But then I grew out of that feeling and grew beyond it to a place where I value the mysteries of nature beyond all else. Nothing in all nature knows all nature, understands all its mysteries. Nothing is immune to the changes nature constantly imposes, but ours is the only species that fights the changes, that upsets nature’s order, and the effect of that over time has been to put distance between our species and nature. That distance is what I try to shrink, and the best way I know to try is to work within my territory, to become intimate with a few places, to understand as much as nature is prepared to offer, and to marvel at and treasure the mysteries.

  If you were to ask me about the places where I go to strive for that intimacy I would tell you about the pinewood, about a mountain, about a high, alpine-like glen where golden eagles nest, about a reed bed at the head of a loch where swans nest, and about a stretch of slow, alder-lined river and its floodplain. And you can draw a single line that connects all of these places and it will not be longer than 20 miles.

  There is also this: the things you learn from such places, the sense of nature’s order, the patterns that repeat and slowly evolve, the aloof mysteries . . . all that knowledge is transferable; and if it has been honestly won and if you carry it with you wherever in the wild world you travel, then the same principles apply. And you may be surprised to find that you sit by a strange river in a strange land watching a beaver at work on a cottonwood grove under a strange mountain and suddenly you become aware of that same sense of nature’s acknowledgment that you first felt in a pinewood in Strath Fillan 5,000 miles away.

  So I greeted the aspens, crossed the bridge, and stepped into the pines, and if you adhere to the philosophy of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright – ‘I believe in God but I spell it Nature’ – then you might think of such a place as sacred, and you walk more softly than before (although you stop short of
taking your boots and socks off, what with the fallen pine cones, the harsh heather and bog myrtle stems, the holly, the sudden bogs, the hidden rocks, the ants . . . especially the ants). I try and empty my mind of everything other than an openness to where I am and what passes here. I climb first to a high narrow ridge that rises above the middle of the wood just to watch the rise and fall of the trees from within. It is also where natural regeneration is most prolific; pines like the dry, well-drained knolls, and the lower, wetter ground is the province of bog, moss, bog myrtle, alder, willow, birch, aspen (that mostly cling to the burnsides). The higher up the corrie, the better the regeneration, a self-evident truth that makes the uphill commercial plantation all the more misconceived. The pines are held in check several hundred feet below what would be their natural treeline.

  I like, too, to get down into the hollows so that the trees crowd round and above, and to see the further reaches of the pinewood as skyline tiers. The sense of a truly big pinewood is almost tangible. Oh, but how I long to see pinewoods that disappear round the next hill shoulder and the next, hills robed to the waist in big, domed pines like the ones in this wood. But in this country the sight does not exist; every pinewood is isolated from the next, and nature must make what it can of the fragments. I have seen what a landscape of pine-covered hills looks like in Norway, rolling away from a high mountain summit in green waves, and it took my breath away, even though the pines were shaped more like spruces, not like our broad-crowned trees at all. But there are wolves within those forests, and brown bear, beaver, lynx, moose . . . for it truly is a Great Wood, and any Great Wood in the north of the world needs all of these to be Great.

  There is a long, wide heathery slope that climbs at a gentle angle from the heart of the Strath Fillan pinewood up to its western flank. The trees line both its edges but none grows out on the slope itself so that it looks as if nature has created a parade ground for the staging of great events. A small army of people could march up there 20 or 30 abreast. I found the slope one sunny evening with the heather at its purplest and the sun streaming down it from the west, the whole wood basked in a benevolent glow. I leaned against a birch near the foot of the slope to be part of its suddenly rarefied atmosphere. I had been still there for perhaps half an hour when a red deer stag stepped from the trees, walked out into the middle of the slope and then turned at right angles and started walking uphill towards the skyline. It was August and his condition was prime; his coat was glossy, his head was high, his antlers ten-pointed and wide, and his feet kicked up tiny clouds of purple dust. Then a second stag appeared, following, made the same turn at the same place and there were two stags heading for the skyline. Then a third, then one at a time and several seconds apart, there came 15 more. They walked in single file at a quiet, measured pace until the first stag was almost at the skyline. Then he stopped.

  The others walked up to him and stopped too, not in single file now but tightly bunched and suddenly nervous. There was a lot of movement in the group, but it remained tightly gathered. I could hear the muffled thud of restless feet on the hard, dry ground, the occasional rasp of antlers touching. Then in the gap in the trees and directly over the stags’ heads the silhouette of a golden eagle appeared. It circled once beyond the stags then came in low. The herd scattered and ran. The eagle charged down the slope not six feet off the ground then suddenly appeared to stand on its tail and soared almost vertically for two or three hundred feet, banked high above the trees and headed west whence it had come. Not one stag showed on the open ground.

  ‘And what was that all about?’ I muttered to the tree where I leaned.

  I have heard of eagles charging deer to try and drive them over a cliff, and seen one memorable film clip of such an incident in the Cairngorms, but there was no cliff here. These were all mature stags and far beyond the scope of an eagle as living prey; it would have taken a wolf to bring one down. But the eagle knew that. It also knew that safety for the deer was only 20 yards away to left and right over easy ground. So was it making mischief? Was it making a point: I am a threat and in the right circumstances I can drive you off a cliff and kill you? Was it playing?

  Every good wood is the stage for moments of drama like these. Mostly, only the trees bear witness.

  I wandered away, deeper into the wood where late sunlight lit one side of a particularly slim and tall pine from top to bottom – only that tree in all of the wood that I could see from where I stood. But the sun also caught little highlights of grass and mounds and openings in a way that revealed something I had never noticed there before – a faint, long-overgrown path through the wood. It ran for perhaps 200 yards then disappeared among trees before a cloud crossed the sun and the sense of that path just vanished. It was as if a door had opened, as if the past lay behind it, as if the door closed again. I have since stood in the same place several times and tried to recreate the trick and failed. But it was there, and I photographed it and the ghost of an old, old way through the trees was fleetingly tangible. Every good wood is the stage for moments like these too, and mostly, only the trees bear witness.

  The really surprising thing about the Coille Coire Chuilc is that although even a thousand years ago it must have been part of a forest that stretched for many miles, what has survived feels so intact. It has the feel of a big wood, with clearings, with dense regeneration, with individual trees of great stature, with standing dead trees (one of which unleashed two great-spotted woodpeckers at me in a low and direct flight that almost parted my hair), and a vigorous understorey. One of the most striking of all its trees is also probably the tallest, and this despite the fact that at ten or twelve feet up, the single trunk suddenly bends at an angle of about thirty degrees from the vertical then climbs dead straight to the crown at that angle, so that the tree looks as if it is perpetually in the act of falling over. Another has the profile and beautiful symmetry of a great oak.

  Water on the move is a constant background sound. The burn that flows down the eastern flank is joined by a second that bisects the top half of the wood. These flow boisterously past the aspens and under the bridge to feed a fast and fluent river that effectively marks the wood’s northern boundary. Its banks are mostly steep and rocky, the rocks cut into horizontal ledges where both aspens and pines have rooted (and some have jumped the river to root in the rocks of the far bank). Here in fissures filled with moss a pine seedling has found enough sustenance to produce three six-inch-long stems, and this too, if it is spared the attentions of deer and spates and the worst excesses of the ill-luck that decided its seed’s final destination will grow into one of the wood’s great individualists. It won’t grow tall, but it will become a landmark, for it has a brother directly opposite on the far bank already about two feet tall. I can see them in 50 years standing 20 feet high and slim like gateposts, and other pinewood wanderers will mark them in passing with an affectionate nod of familiarity, as I do myself even now.

  These are better times for this wood than they have known for a long time. In my own lifetime I have seen the grazing pressures eased, for you used to find sheep wreaking their havoc all over the wood, and the benefits are shown in regeneration, and in the depths of the understorey. There are new trees marching down towards the river from the north, all the way from the main road, the fruits of a community planting project which, remarkably, has taken its cue from the pinewood rather than the commercial plantations that surround the village of Tyndrum at almost every turn. Thousands of native trees now swarm around stands of old birch and a few oaks that used to look only forlorn. Now they look like pied pipers gathering the young of their own kind in ever greater numbers. The result is a matrix designed by optimists who give the impression at least, that the Great Wood is a concept not just with a mysterious past but also a realisable future. And this is what it will look like, what it will have to look like – a tapestry of distinct woodland groups of different ages and species which will evolve over centuries into a blend that nature can work with and people
can live with much more easily and willingly than we do with the grubby thumbprints of the forest industry for which neither we nor nature much care.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Glen Orchy and Rannoch

  Glen Orchy is the centre. There is the glen itself which ferries the handsome but short-lived River Orchy from Loch Tulla to Loch Awe. There is Glen Orchy and Inishail, the historic name for a loosely defined sometime heartland of MacGregor country that extended from Loch Awe in the south (where the island of Inishail is a burial ground of rare distinction whose inmates include several dukes of Argyll) to Loch Etive in the west, and to the Blackmount in the north. Its influence, according to some, was felt all across Breadalbane as far east as Loch Tay and the Black Wood of Rannoch. According to some. You can never be sure when it comes to the historical record of the MacGregors, for history was rarely kind to them and historians have tended to vent their spleen on them or to sentimentalise them beyond all recognition. But their clan crest is a pine tree – a fallen pine tree with a crown lodged in the branches – and this particular reading of that particular tract of country begins with that persuasive symbol. It turns out that the pines of Glen Orchy have been falling for a long, long time.

  Whenever and wherever historians and other scribes have turned their attention to the Great Wood of Caledon, and with, it should be said, greater or lesser degrees of credibility, much as others of their kind dealt with the MacGregors, Glen Orchy rears its head. Its name crops up so often that I think that here, surely, was a forest to be reckoned with, one famed in particular for the size and quality of its Scots pine and oak. And I have wondered off and on over the years . . . was this the Great Wood, not a cloak of all Highland Scotland but a slung barrier that defended the Highlands from west to east? The Romans, if indeed it was the Romans who gave voice to the notion of the Great Wood, were accustomed to consolidating their gains and defending them by slinging barriers of their own making from one side of the country to the other. Could it be that this wall of trees was what finally turned them back, the westernmost extremity of their empire, a barrier they judged to be beyond them?