The Great Wood

PROLOGUE

A Walk in the Woods on St Andrew's Day

It was St Andrew's Day and I went for a walk in the woods. Autumn had been long and lingering and mellow and mild and extraordinarily beautiful. Waking to the first hard frost, I opened a window, smelled the change, shivered, closed the window. Over breakfast I looked out at foreground trees and wooded hills furred with ermine and blurred by low mist and sang to myself a line of James Taylor: 'The birches were dream-like on account of that frosting . . .' I decided that St Andrew's Day to celebrate trees. I know a place . . .

The sun rises cloudlessly on a whitened land, defeats the mist, but slowly. The land has the sudden pallor of winter. Grasses, smoky orange in October, have bleached to all the shades of straw, and there are not many of those. Bracken has collapsed and darkened to all the shades of unburned toast, but with none of the allure of toast. Trees are battening down and all but bare - oaks hold a few wan, clustery leaves all the shades of cold tea, birches manage a smatter of old gold, palest green willow leaves thin out and whiten, drifting earthwards even without a wind to urge them down. An old hazel wood, crowded out by its own blackened, writhing limbs and looking like so many ancient dancing Masai tribesmen, whispers and spits and bristles at me as I pass, as if it didn't like me to bear witness to its secret dance. Even on a windless day, hazel woods don't believe in stillness.

I fancy that small covey of aspens just heaved a sigh; their heart-quickening autumn flames, the brightest light in any Highland wood, are dowsed beyond recall, and there is no leaf to work their tremulous sorcery. Spring is suddenly far off and unimaginable.

At this moment in the year, the dark green of Scots pine deepens, glows and ennobles. Here is a good one, not particularly tall, perhaps 50 feet, but the trunk is broad and hefty and reddish and round, the bark grooved like tractor tyres, the canopy wide and airy and smoky green. Such a tree is called a granny pine. God knows why.

Few things so ennoble a Highland hillside as a pine-wood spiced with birch and juniper, and every pinewood has its outlying sentinels, stoical stand-alone trees of all but indestructible tenacity. Here is one I have known for 30 years. It is quite alone on its hillside; the pinewood is over there, quarter of a mile away. Fifteen years ago lightning rearranged its handsome presence. A direct hit cleaved its downhill, north-facing limb from the parent trunk, almost but not quite severing it. The limb collapsed into the ground and was quite withered away within two years. But the tree still stands. In fact it thrives to east and west and south. The withered limb still clings to it, and if anything it has strengthened the tree by buttressing it against the steep fall of the hillside to the north.

Seton Gordon, one of the founding fathers of the modern Scottish nature-writing tradition, who spent much of his working life in the Cairngorms and their fringing pine-woods, noted a characteristic of the woods' solitary outliers like this one: 'I do not recall ever having seen a forest outpost or sentinel uprooted by wind; they stand, undismayed, against gusts which send their fellows farther in the forest crashing to the ground.'

He wrote about one such tree in particular in his matchless 1924 book, The Cairngorm Hills of Scotland:

. . . a very old Scots fir grows beside the burn. It is called Craobh Tillidh, or the Tree of the Return, and received its name in the old days when a summer population lived at the head of Gleann Einich, and when the stirks and the cows with their calves were driven up a few days before the people themselves went to the shielings. The herdsman accompanied the animals as far as the Tree of the Return. From here the beasts, knowing the road from former summers, were able to continue the journey by themselves and the herdsman returned to Rothiemurchus.

I found the idea of a Tree of the Return an affecting one, even though I never owned a herd of cattle to drive that way. In my own explorations and writings about Gleann Einich, I first identified another conspicuous solitary pine where I have always paused on my way into the glen, then christened it the Tree of the Beginning. Its story is written down in my own Cairngorms book, A High and Lonely Place (Cape, 1990; Whittles, 2000), but my many memories of it are jogged by this wounded pine much nearer to home. Both stand near old tracks, old ways through the hills, old ways into very old pinewoods. Both are recognisable at once and at a distance. The thought occurs suddenly: such trees were always landmarks. Whatever the greatest extent of our native forest may have been, there were always outliers - conspicuous, solitary trees that wandering or settled tribes acknowledged and celebrated; others that stood alone in clearings or at the confluence of rivers or at a meeting of old ways through the land; others that became meeting places, sacred places, churches without walls; others that marked the sites of great events, great lives lived, epic battles, love trysts . . .

Perhaps more than anything else, that single idea - a reverence for individual trees - is the symbolic bond that is still capable of evoking fellow-feeling with those who have walked this way before, not just Seton Gordon's herdsman, but those shadowy folk who walked a much more liberally forested land several thousand years ago.

Like all symbolic bonds, its significance is perhaps overdone. Likewise the notion of that forest that popular imagination sees as something that smothered all but the mountaintops; that was reputedly prowled by slavering tribes of wolves and bears and big cats and cattle called aurochs the size of elephants, and terrifying blue-painted men; that we - or someone who walked this way before us - gave a name to, the Great Wood of Caledon.

So here is a good Scots pine, a wounded veteran of a lifelong struggle waged against this irksome climate, and if you linger like me by its tortured limb and rest your back against its still vigorous trunk and look west out across the crowns of the pinewood that soften the bulwark of mountains beyond, or north to where the low sun of St Andrew's Day has made a yellow patchwork of still more mountains, and if you let your seeing eye wander there, you will find other solitary pines to set alongside other ways into the hills, other ways into the fertile history that is enshrined in our notion of the Great Wood.

But ways into the future too, for among those solitary pines are a few that preside over new pinewoods, where something is being put back, where thousands of hand-planted head-high pines, and oaks and aspens on the lower ground, and birches and rowans that have sown themselves uninvited (but always welcome) and alders that shade the riverbanks are returning. It is happening in a small way, but it is happening here and there all across those parts of Scotland where 21st-century science tells us that native woodland once grew. I fancy I sense the weary approval of these few stalwart old trees that have borne witness to our recent past, the last two or three centuries, say, centuries that have been characterised perhaps more than any other of human occupation by crimes against the landscape, against trees, against all nature.

So I had decided that St Andrew's Day was a good day to celebrate trees. I spent it in and around the pinewood and walked out in the late afternoon, pausing again by the wounded sentinel pine, the tree of a new beginning. An old friend of mine who had been a forester near here was much in my mind. His name was Don MacCaskill. He died about ten years before I wrote this, and his philosophy seems to be finding its way more and more into my books. On the last page of Wild Endeavour, the first book he wrote with his wife Bridget, there is this:

An area of woodland is the ultimate habitat and must be saved and expanded at all costs. The forest is a complex entity, a mirror of nature, and has the desired structure wherein a balance can be achieved. The people of this country, in whose history there is little of forest background, sometimes think that trees are an intrusion into the familiar scene of smooth bare hillside, or cotton grass bog. They do not understand that the heather or bracken-clad hill are arrested habitats which, if left to nature, could well become forest once again. A good deal of Scotland is a peat desert with severe erosion problems and a very restricted species structure. Trees provide a blanket to shelter the vulnerable soil, arrest erosion, provide oxygen and give a home to a wide range of species, be it bird, animal, plant or insect. A forest is a complex world, not easily destroyed. Without trees it is an over-simplified world, and one that is very vulnerable.

So it was in the spirit of finding something in my own lifetime to act as a kind of bridge to link what has gone, what is, and what can be, that I decided to go for a walk in the woods, to celebrate those trees that were the landmarks of my country for thousands of years, and to do so at a time when we are beginning to grasp the essential truth of Don MacCaskill's philosophy.

Here and there and all across the face of the land, an old mist is rising in the face of something hopeful and enlightening, and the way ahead is slowly growing green again, and the Great Wood stirs from a long and ominous slumber and begins to throw new shadows in the resurrected sun.

Before the Resurrected Sun

Trees inhale in...