by Jim Crumley
So that, I believe, is the true nature of a historic forest that has come down to us through the ages as the Great Wood of Caledon. I believe too that the long human occupation of the landscape that predated the Romans is much likelier to have invented and sustained the notion of a Great Wood than Tacitus and Ptolemy. I think it is more likely that the nature of legend suited the Romans’ purpose when their nerve finally failed them, and they turned their back on the unconquered forest of legend. And because it was in their nature, they wrote it down, and it may be that the first formal recognition of the idea of a Great Wood of Caledon arose then. But by then the wood that they encountered had been greatly reduced from that high point 3,000 years earlier by natural events – climate change, flood, fire, and mysteries we have yet to solve, such as the drastic decline in Highland Scots pine across its whole range around 2000 BC. Why just pine? Why so widespread? In any case, the Great Wood of Caledon was not half the wood it had once been, and the Romans were going anyway.
But these Great Woods, or at least what is left of them, have a future as well as a past. What are we to make of them, we who profess to understand the concept of conservation, we who support conservation charities in our millions, we who have invented national parks, national forest parks, sites of special scientific interest, national nature reserves? Must we do anything at all? Well, strictly speaking, no. Ours is a wooded country. Trees will grow if we let them, so why formalise the process to make some kind of accommodation with an ancient notion of a Great Wood of Caledon that never existed in the first place?
There again, it was actually quite a good notion, and even if it was only ever partly true at best, and only in some parts of the country, and thousands of years ago at that, it is an idea that is worth trying to live up to in the twenty-first century. Biodiversity is a new idea, or at least it is new to people, no more than a hundred years old, and perhaps John Muir was among the first to give it a voice. But if you can come to terms with what I might call nature’s mind, biodiversity is actually the oldest idea on earth, the one that makes sense of everything around us. (‘I believe in God but I call it nature.’) We now profess to embrace it as a species. If we are serious about advancing its cause then the thing to do is plant trees. If we increase tree cover we also increase and diversify habitats, and therefore species. A native forest, once it is established, regenerates itself and expands to fill the land available to it. It matches tree species with soil conditions and determines the density of tree growth. Birds, beasts, plants and insects follow. Unless they are being reintroduced following extinction you don’t need to put them there. They just turn up. Word gets around. A few years ago I spent four days camping on Pabbay, a couple of links down the chain of the Western Isles from Barra. Back in the 1870s a huge sand-blow had inundated about a third of the island. Now, two thirds of the island is rock and bog and rough grass, and the other third is deep sand and marram grass. In spring and early summer the sandy end is drenched both in primroses so thick that you can hardly walk there without treading on blooms, and in the song of dozens and dozens of skylarks. No one told them about the sand-blow, about the sudden change in conditions on a tiny island in the Atlantic. They just turned up, and every year the primroses still bloom and the larks still sing. If it can happen there, it can happen in four great mainland woods where it is in our gift to make them better woods, and more hospitable to more tribes of nature.
Besides, we owe a debt in this regard. From the moment we began to walk in our post-glacial land about 9,500 years ago, we became accustomed to taking from the land, to exploiting nature. Over the millennia we have become extraordinarily inventive in this particular endeavour. Native woodland is infinitely renewable, but only if we let it be, only if we are prepared to give it space, only if we are now in a frame of mind to give back to nature something of that which we took away. It is happening now in a small way, but the pace of change and the scale of change are a long way short of significant. What we do have is hundreds of square miles of spruce-dominated forest that is routinely clear-felled and replanted with an industrial mentality whose effect on the ground is often loathsome to both people and nature. Yet a simple change of philosophy, a rethink of the national forest strategy and the role of the Forestry Commission within it, could quickly begin to transform the landscape while the restoration of native woodland proceeds at its own essentially slow pace. The Scottish government has a policy of increasing Scotland’s woodland cover to 25 per cent from something like 17 per cent at present. It is a laudable ambition, and it may be argued that the target is too modest, that a third rather than a quarter of the land should be wooded – but only if it is the right kind of wood. Working within those four Great Woods the opportunities exist now to consolidate, conserve and expand the purely native elements within them, but also to blend well designed commercial plantations with native trees, natural spaces, grassy clearings, standing water, wetland, and open hillsides to create a new kind of Great Wood, one that reflects the realities of the tree species available in Scotland in our own time. We will never eradicate non-native trees from the entire country, nor should we waste our time trying, although there are worthwhile local endeavours like Glen Finglas where they have been removed to make room for native woodland. And nor should they dominate so many Highland glens the way they do.
Alistair Scott had some wise words on the subject:
Scotland has one of the best climates on earth outside the tropics for growing a wide range of trees. In essence this is the Gulf Stream effect. Scotsmen roamed the world throughout the last two centuries sending home seeds and plants from everywhere. The consequence is that there are, growing happily somewhere in Scotland, well over 1,000 introduced tree species.
The native tree flora conspicuously lacks, of the world’s great timber trees, a spruce, a fir, a larch, a beech and a maple. We have gained, or should have gained immeasur-ably from the arrival here of Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, European larch, common beech and sycamore. Between them and our native timbers we have a better resource base than anywhere in northern Europe and as good as any in central Europe . . . Which is not to argue that the effects of these arrivals on our landscape have been everywhere benign. Sitka spruce was planted in too many places where no trees should be. It was, and to some extent still is, too often cultivated like a field of wheat, not as a complex forest. Sycamore is usually best kept out of nature reserves. And so on. But we have only had a century or two in which to experience these new trees and the lessons have already been learnt, or most of them have . . .
There are many good reasons to plant more trees and to take the time and trouble to do it well. They create the most benevolent of all nature’s habitats. They create opportunities for a greater diversity of wildlife species of all kinds. They create a counterbalance to greenhouse gases. They create stable and long-term rural employment for people, because managing large forests both for nature and for timber is labour-intensive work. If local people are employed they create the circumstances that bond people closer to their place on the map, giving them a stake in the environment of that place. They create opportunities for recreation in a beautiful environment. And they matter for their own sake. And they should matter to us because of the debt we owe.
There is a place where I walk often, a walk that begins on a forest road between Strathyre and the north end of the west shore of Loch Lubnaig. There is a high point on that road at which the loch first comes into view, and it stops me in my tracks every time. I have met many people there, both locals and strangers, and not one has ever been indifferent to it. The foreground is steep, rough grazing that falls away to lower, wetter ground. It is lightly wooded with birch, juniper, hazel, oak, and as it descends the tree cover yields to willow and alder, and an area of grassy wetland becomes a substantial lochan. Beyond the lochan, the River Balvaig heads for the loch by way of something like an avenue of alders. It enters the loch between two bays thickened with tall grass and reed beds. There are oakwoods reachi
ng far down the west shore of the loch, and above them hillsides of mostly Sitka spruce and larch, some birch. The planting design has a good, open feel. On the far side of the loch there is more plantation forestry with pines and larch let into the predominant spruce, and a distant skyline where the loch vanishes round a bend is one of tall firs. The two water-sheets – the lochan and the loch – bind the whole view together. In winter especially, it looks as if you could be in Norway or southern Alaska.
There are two difficulties with what unfolds here. One is that the commercial part of the equation is too dominant. The other is that although care has been taken with the planting design, every part of both hillsides will eventually be clear-felled rather than thinned, and this in the very heart of a national park.
So there is a philosophical question to be addressed, and it is whether or not we should demand of the Forestry Commission, of the national park, of the Scottish government, that the interests of landscape and nature should take precedence over the interests of the timber industry. I think it should, but then I am a nature writer rather than a forester, and you would expect me to say that. But I also think that a forestry industry that was compelled to put the wellbeing of the landscape first would breed better foresters whose jobs were more rewarding, and that a more diverse forest would create a greater diversity of timber species as well as of natural habitats. There should be a great deal more to our timber-growing industry than an endless conveyer belt of Sitka spruces that mostly gets pulped. As Alistair Scott wrote, ‘How satisfactory, if we could reconnect the trees growing out there with the wood that pleases us in here.’
So here is a work for the twenty-first century. I think there were four Great Woods, and it may be that there was a time when they were all connected into a single entity, but if it did happen it was for a very short time, and it was long before the Romans knew where we lived. The four Great Woods should be the focal points of a new era for our native woods and for the kind of multi-cultural woods that are most likely to constitute the future of this portion of the planet. We may well argue we have got the balance right the day a few human generations hence when our descendants can point to a particular feature of a miles-wide Scots pinewood where a stupendous symbolic grove of Sitka spruce bursts through the canopy and soars 150 feet into the cool Highland air. And the example set by these four great national woods will rub off so that we create new community woods everywhere.
Meanwhile, at Fortingall, there is a stone wall that precludes the possibility of a new generation of yew trees reaching out from what is arguably the most important growing thing on earth, and I would like it symbolically removed. We owe it to nature and to all the trees that ever set foot on Highland soil to ensure that nature’s idea of succession can take place, rather than our own idea of it. We owe it to the Great Wood that was, whatever it was. We owe it to the Great Woods that can still be. And we owe it to the one tree in all the land that may well be truly immortal.
EPILOGUE
Out of the Trees
(From the painting by Rob MacLaurin, Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh)
We were long days in the trees,
Sun-snuffed, song-starved.
Eagle, owl, bear-prowl, wolf howl –
these scored the harmony
of what lived easily there,
though they noticed us and passed by,
fellow-travellers as tree-girt as we.
Yet we learned that primitive tribal fear
we thought lost beyond recall, but known
to explorers whose idea of ‘map’
was carried in their heads: they’d lap
from rivers (like bear, like wolf)
until the day they thought
to cup their hands.
One evening the trees began
to end: colour, sun, song began
to tend us from beyond,
and we saw the yellow mountain
and the tribal-ness shrank
with the shadows and we drank
boiled tea from cups.