The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  *

  I wonder about aspens. The aspen is one of those trees that seems to have got under the skin of the natives for a very long time, a bit like yew and hazel, although for different reasons. With the aspen, the whispering conspiracy of its constantly restless leaves was the cause of widespread unease. In old Scots the tree is the quaking ash, in Gaelic critheann or critheach, from crith meaning tremble, and its Latin classification is Populus tremula, the trembling poplar. In some parts of the Borders there is a local name, ‘old wives’ tongues’ (the leaves are tongue-shaped, and they do gossip), and a more mysterious one in Ardgour – sron a crithean – trembling nose.

  The implication in the folklore of many countries where aspen grows is that there is a sinister aspect to the restlessness of the leaves. Alexander Edward Holden wrote in his book Plant Life in the Scottish Highlands (1952) that ‘the old Highlanders believed this was so because the Cross of Calvary was made from aspen wood and for this reason its leaves can never rest’. In Glen Strathfarrar on a high autumn afternoon I would have thought that old Highlanders with religious axes to grind might have found that the imagery of the burning bush might have better suited their cause than Calvary. In any case, and with the significant qualification that the nearest I have ever been to the Holy Land is Switzerland, I understand it to be a hot, dry and dusty place (the Holy Land, not Switzerland), whereas the aspen tree’s extensive shallow roots send up suckers to create small thickets, a technique that requires cool, damp conditions. I doubt if an aspen tree ever grew in the Holy Land, and if it did it was so rare and shrunken that it would never have been the material of choice for the local carpenter when he was commissioned to make three crosses.

  I was about to embark on a piece of clinching research on the subject of trees in the Holy Land when I discovered that Alistair Scott had already done it in A Pleasure in Scottish Trees, and that his research propped up my best guess: no aspens, ever. He also observed that ‘aspen needs a fertile mineral soil which is one reason why you will often see it by a burnside’, and now that I think about it, so you do. He also wrote that ‘frequently it will be a clump deriving from root suckers. The individual stems are short lived; the clump is, I suppose, immortal.’ Interesting choice of words in the circumstances.

  Yet the Calvary tradition endures. The ancient source of it is lost but its modern manifestation stems from a much-quoted passage in Alexander Carmichael’s nineteenth-century Carmina Gadelica: ‘Clods and stones and other missiles, as well as curses, are hurled at the aspen by the people of Uist because it was used to make the Cross on which Christ was crucified. No crofter or fisherman would use aspen wood for any purpose.’

  The Carmina Gadelica, a collection of Gaelic hymns, poems and other utterances, ran to six bilingual volumes. Many entries referred to the place of the native flora in the Gaelic oral tradition. A hundred years after his death there is still controversy about just how much Carmichael tampered with the fruits of his huge research. But why Uist of all places was so militantly anti-aspen is not explained. Scott adds a telling aside that the aspen grows well in the Western Isles. Maybe the islanders’ aim with the clods and stones and other missiles was indifferent, likewise the potency of the cursing.

  Alistair Scott’s most intriguing revelation is rather more reliable, and follows late twentieth-century research that ‘holed below the waterline’ the belief that seed production of Scottish aspens was very rare and that its presence could only be expanded by propagation: ‘It is now clear that aspen does produce seed from time to time, more in some places than in others. At long intervals, after very warm summers like 1995, it can produce spectacularly large quantities. The seed is as light as a dandelion seed and will be blown as far. It has a short natural life and will only germinate and grow if it falls on a suitable substrate, where competition is sparse or absent. Here is now a satisfactory explanation of why aspen was so successful in the early post-glacial.’

  What Scott did not explain is why there are no big aspen woods in the landscape of the Great Wood. There are expansive miles of aspen woods in North America where the natives drive all day in the fall just to stand and stare at the spectacle of trees aflame. The aspens and the maples are the superstars of the show, and the people hurl nothing more ominous at the aspens than admiring glances. They call it ‘leaf-peeping’.

  A few years ago I was in Alaska to make two radio programmes for the BBC’s Natural History Unit with producer Grant Sonnex. We stayed a couple of nights at an inn near Gustavus in the Alaskan south-east – an inn in an aspen wood. We had got my voice piece down on tape and Grant wanted to record the ravens that haunted the woods and whose voices were the unending anthem of that place. But the comings and goings of float planes, dogs and pick-up engines were too intrusive. So he decided to get up at first light before the people were up and about. His alarm went at 5 a.m. He woke to the sound of heavy rain – and the unadulterated cries of ravens. He liked that combination so he dressed from head to toe in waterproofs, protected his recording equipment as well as he could, and stepped out of the door – into a morning of quite breathtaking beauty lit by early morning sun. What he had thought from inside the building to be the sound of heavy rain proved to be a vigorous breeze blowing through the leaves of thousands of aspen trees. The characteristic leaf-whisper of a Highland copse was magnified to something like a hoarse roar – a soft, hoarse roar – by the sheer numbers of the trees. But he made a beautiful recording of ravens, laved by the windsong of aspens. When he told me the story over breakfast a couple of hours later, there was still an edge of wonder in his voice.

  One way or another, the aspen tree has never lost the power to impress susceptible minds. Twelve years after Alaska, where the radio programmes were about the relationship between people and wilderness, I startled myself out of a kind of spellbound trance induced by a copse of honey-gold riverbank autumn aspens in Glen Strathfarrar, and what startled me was the sudden memory of Grant in Gustavus telling me how he stepped out of the inn on a late-August morning just as the sun hit the aspens, a morning he greeted swathed in Santa-Claus-red Goretex. I was in Glen Strathfarrar to write a book about the Great Wood of Caledon, or to put it another way, the relationship between people and wilderness. Now that I think about it, my response to both events was identical; it was to wonder why – and to regret – there are no big aspen woods within the Great Wood.

  In Glen Strathfarrar, the trees relented briefly and the view widened over a flat and grassy floodplain where hordes of mallard and wigeon grazed around the great black feet of eight whooper swans (five cygnets, their parents, and an adult hanger-on) and two very strange looking swans indeed. The woman who had unlocked the gate had mentioned the swans, and in response to my eager inquiry (swans have had a hold on my writing and my imagination for half my life) she imparted exciting information. In the normal course of events, whoopers migrate from Iceland for the winter, and usually arrive in Scotland in October and November. I asked when they had turned up. Oh, they don’t leave, she had said.

  It seems one of the adults had been injured a few years before, and been unable to make the spring migration home, so its mate stayed too. They nested in the glen instead of in Iceland, and they had been there ever since. I have encountered similar situations before, and there is a handful of nesting whooper swans scattered across the north of the country, some for just a year or two, for the migrant urge is the strongest force in the natural world, but others fight it for various reasons and try and settle. What was odd about this little gathering was the two extra swans that kept the whoopers company. They looked like mute swans except that their beaks were neither one thing nor the other, as if someone had botched a repair job, run out of mute swan parts and used whooper parts instead. They were hybrids. It seems that one of the whoopers had mated with one of the local mute swans, and these were the result, the very rare offspring of a very rare set of circumstances, nature catching itself out and correcting its own mistake by producing creatures
that could not reproduce, thereby halting the hybrid line in its tracks.

  It is possible that in colder eras than this one, when Iceland was altogether too icebound to offer summer sustenance to birds like these, the whooper was a resident in the Great Wood, and that what I was watching was a glimpse of the clock rewinding. Bring on the aurochs, the bears, the lynx, the beavers, the wild boars, the wolves.

  Glen Strathfarrar’s skinny little locked road climbs purposefully towards the dam, and the trees begin to fall back and thin out. I sensed finality. The end of something was in the air. But there was to be one last gesture, a final unforgettable flourish of the Great Wood, a crowning glory, a somehow symbolic arrangement of the glen’s landscape elements into a distillation of all of them, and designed to linger long in the earth-eye of the beholder. Just where the river emerges from a dark and rocky gorge below the dam, and wheels away south into a sudden glimpse of sunlight, a cluster of about 20 big Scots pines thickens a corner of the hillside, and in the ancient tradition of Highland pinewoods sends a few outlier trees capering away up the skyline. A handful of birches clings to the shady slope beneath but they are poor trees struggling to hold their own. Yet the pines thrive, even here, for there is no soil too poor, too thin, too acidic for them; no terrain is too rocky or too steep. The Scots pine’s success in the Highland landscape is the consequence of a perfect and very primitive design. The species is much, much older than many of the native trees that clothe our landscape today. It is sustained by a root system that both powers deep underground to find moisture on such well drained land and also sprawls horizontally amid the humus of the surface of the land. So it is well anchored too.

  My ‘earth eye’ (I have taken Thoreau to heart, as you see) still beholds that small gathering of trees, still remembers their natural grace, their elegant stances – straight-trunked, broad-limbed, wide-crowned. I remember too how the land seemed to enfold them in a kind of possessiveness; how they dominated the whole landscape view from the middle ground; how a single, distant, sharply etched mountain summit was somehow ennobled by them.

  Beyond the gorge the road crosses the dam and dwindles to a dead-end. Then, after a short walk among the hills surrounding Loch Monar, sitting hunched over a sandwich, an apple and a flask of tea that cooled too quickly, I thought of that group of trees as a signature. The Great Wood had signed off.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Great Woods

  The people were few and they clung to the coast. They had come in boats, creeping up the outermost edge of Europe. Five thousand years ago, the land we now call Scotland was still hinged to the landmass of Europe by a land bridge, but even so they saw it as an outpost of that edge. Its every coastal mile glowered at them, bared its wooden teeth at them, for the trees grew down to the high tide line and seemed from the sea to swarm over the low hills and halfway up the highest mountains. The trees were pine and oak, birch and hazel, willow and rowan, juniper and alder, aspen and ash. The people understood wavefall and whale, not woodland and wolf.

  There seemed no end to the trees. But it was an illusion, a seafarer’s misconception of the lie of the land. In Scotland of all places, both geographically and historically and now as never before, there has always been an end to the trees. This land was never jungle. Trees never covered the land. Even if the land was capable of sustaining trees in its every acre – which it palpably is not – the many grazing tribes that have thrived here needed grassland and wetland, and the tree-felling tribes like ourselves and the beavers began making inroads almost as soon as there was a forest to fell.

  Nevertheless the reputation of an infernally hostile Great Wood was whispered among seafarers and grew from there, probably over several thousand years. There were great firths we know now as Tay, Forth, Clyde, and these gave access to gentler lands, fertile ground on the floodplains and a low-lying, eastern coastal plain, woodlands that did not daunt. But in the Highlands of the north and the north-west all was hostile and defended by a Great Wood. They may have used those very words or something like them in their various tongues, and these sprang from mouth to mouth, crew to crew, expedition to expedition, country to country, and the legend of the Great Wood was born. When you walk through the landscape of the 21st-century Highlands, you walk in the footsteps of that legend. The remnant woods are its footprints.

  In some ways, the Great Wood is like the wolf. Its reputation was forged by generation after generation of storytellers, and it was rendered all but extinct by people who believed the legend. That reputation is like a cairn of stones, and each generation added its own armful of stones to the cairn. And the reality was buried under a mountain of stones and lost in the fogs of the gathered millennia. Yet historians, archaeologists, biologists and silviculturists are all more or less agreed now that there was a time about 5,000 years ago when the native woodlands of Scotland reached their greatest extent. It is reasonable to assume then that given the general difficulty of the Highland terrain, especially a Highland terrain without roads, that any extensive tract of Highland forest would be especially troublesome to travellers. I had begun this book with the idea that I might try and pin down what such a forest might have amounted to, and for a while I was thinking of a single forest entity. But by threading together the remnants of native woodlands, by looking again and again at the lie of the land, by cashing in on the accumulated detritus of a lifetime of watching and wondering about the ways of nature in such a landscape as Highland Scotland, and especially by remembered conversations with people whose judgment I trust and by consulting the published works of people like T.C. Smout, Alan R. MacDonald and Fiona Watson (A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland), Alistair Scott (A Pleasure in Scottish Trees), Don and Bridget MacCaskill (Wild Endeavour, Listen to the Trees) . . . after all that I have come to a different conclusion of my own. I think there never was a Great Wood of Caledon. I think there were four Great Woods.

  Their characters are so different, their geographical contexts are so self-contained, and each is bulwarked from the others by the kind of mountain barriers that preclude any likelihood that they could ever have amounted to the constituent parts of a greater whole. Their boundaries may well have ebbed and flowed, for trees rise and fall like tides in the course of two or three thousand years . . . for if the Great Wood is anything at all it is a continuum. But there was constancy at their core. So what makes sense to me are these four woods:

  One – The Trossachs, which name I use under protest and for convenience only, for since the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park was invented it has become lazy shorthand for everything from the east shore of Loch Lomond in the west to the east end of Loch Earn in the east, and from the Lake of Menteith in the south to Balquhidder in the north. With the shining example of Glen Finglas at its heart and good oakwoods elsewhere both within and out-with the Forestry Commission’s large landholding, its prospects are reasonably bright.

  Two – Glen Orchy and Rannoch are, historically, the greatest tract of the Great Wood, or as I have come to think of it, the greatest of the Great Woods, from the north shore of Loch Awe in the west to Loch Tay in the east, and from Glen Dochart and Strath Fillan in the south to the Black Mount, Rannoch Moor and the Black Wood of Rannoch in the north. Its scope was immense: the broad trough of Glen Dochart, the mountain-climbing pines at Strath Fillan, the teeming trees of Glen Orchy and Glen Strae, the great spaciousness of Loch Tulla, Loch Ba and the lightly wooded Rannoch Moor, the dense Black Wood, the water-highways of Loch Tay and the Rannoch-Tummel chain; its flora and fauna must have been among the richest and most diverse in the land. Its potential for 21st-century conservation is limitless: wildlife reintroduction up to and including the wolf (and the beaver is a natural in such a land of woodland and water); the rehabilitation of much of the historic woodland, centred on the grand gesture of replanting Rannoch Moor, and diversifying the species and lightening the commercial burden in Glen Orchy; expanding the oakwoods of Glen Dochart, the pines in Strath Fillan, and
enhancing the mix of native woods around Loch Tay (the Bolfracks estate on the south shore near Kenmore is already setting an enlightened example). If Scotland was ever minded to create and buy a national park to be owned by the nation and to manage it for nature, it should be this one.

  Three – The Cairngorms, bounded by the Dee and the Spey. Years ago, in a book about the Cairngorms called A High and Lonely Place, I wrote that ‘there is a uniformity of presence which attends every step of the way from Spey to Dee, and it is that uniformity, translated by Seton Gordon as “the spirit of the high and lonely places”, that so distinguishes and dignifies all the Cairngorms, all their moods, all their heights and depths, all their landscapes.’ I have never felt any need to revise that assessment. The native woods, especially Scots pine and birch, with good dollops of juniper and aspen, define the region as naturally as do the mountains, and the trees can be persuaded to encircle the massif as they once did, and to reclaim a natural treeline at somewhere around 2,000 feet. There is nothing else in the land like the Cairngorms pinewoods, and admittedly rather late in the day we have begun to recognise their worth and to begin at least a piecemeal restoration. But the only worthwhile task is, in the words of the Woodland Trust project’s ambitions for Glen Finglas ‘to restore native woodland across its full natural range’. In the wider Cairngorms, that is a mighty task, but it is a mighty landscape and it deserves only our mightiest efforts.

  Four – The West Highlands, from Glen Strathfarrar in the north and the other parallel glens west of the Great Glen, and as far south as the Sound of Mull; and I have no difficulty making a case for extending the Sunart Oakwoods project across the Sound and onto Mull itself, as the trees did when the Great Woods were at the height of their greatness 5,000 years ago. This is our oceanic wood, subject throughout its length to a climate engendered by proximity to the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Stream, and hung on a skeleton of long and parallel west-running glens, lochs and sea lochs. Its strongholds are at the north and south, but throughout its length there are fascinating survivals and hints of ancient woods – from the pines at Knoydart, where the John Muir Trust is harvesting local seed to restore lost woodland (the character of these trees is quite different from the pinewoods of the Cairngorms and the seeds of one will not flourish in the landscape of the other), to coastal scraps of hazel woods that are among the least disturbed patches of woodland anywhere, and may be the only places left where we can look the original wildwood in the eye.