Both otters and polecats, native to Europe, appear to drive American mink out of their territories.75 In the Finnish archipelago the white-tailed sea eagle, now recovering from near-extinction, also seems to be reducing the mink’s range.76 This great eagle, recently reintroduced, could have the same effect in Britain.
Even so, invasive species challenge attempts to defend a unique and distinctive fauna and flora. Certain animals and plants have characteristics that allow them to invade and colonize many parts of the world, and there is a danger that ecosystems everywhere come to contain a similar set of species, making the world a blander and less surprising place. Even if they are suppressed by predators, grey squirrels and red signal crayfish will continue to destroy their competitors (red squirrels and white-clawed crayfish) by exposing them to the diseases they carry. We should try to prevent them from spreading further, but accept that they cannot be eradicated: grey squirrels, mink and signal crayfish now belong to ecosystems from which they used to be absent, and the best we can hope for is that they are firmly sat upon by other species.
On the day after our foray into Dundreggan, Alan took me to Glen Affric, which is said to contain the least altered large area of woodland in Britain.77 It was a bitter, wet day. From the road along the valley of the river Affric the old forest looked like a giant tray of broccoli. When Scots pine is young, it is slim and pointed. But the mature trees spread out into a broad, rounded canopy. The road wound round bluffs to which the ancient trees clung, their crabbed and twisted shapes reflected in the fissured rocks.
We stopped above a waterfall whose cool breath I could feel while standing on the rocks over the gorge, and whose spray I could taste on the air: mossy, halogenic. The peaty brown water stretched dark olive over the sill before plunging and pluming down the long series of rapids. The gorge was a Japanese painting, knotty pines bristling on crooked rocks above the water.
On the far bank, preserved from grazing, the boulders beneath the trees were carpeted in moss and lichen, through which cowberry and bilberry grew. Around them the heather sprawled in deep drifts. The trees too, in the perpetual mist raised by the falls, were bearded and maned with outrageous growths of lichen. The hazels and rowans in the understorey scarcely emerged from their shawls of moss. This, Alan reminded me, was rainforest.
The road took us past Loch Beinn a Mheadhoin, whose waters looked like brushed steel. On its islands and bluffs grew umbrella-shaped pines. Beneath them, inaccessible to the deer, young trees spiked towards the light.
Glen Affric is one of the few parts of Britain in which the work of the Forestry Commission has, from the beginning, been largely benign. Since a sawmill was built in the valley in 1750, the old trees had been under siege, while the sheep grazing beneath them prevented almost all recruitment. The commission bought most of the glen in 1951, and, neglecting its customary duties, decided to preserve it rather than to wreck it. In the 1960s a young forester persuaded his bosses to let him fence 800 hectares of the glen, arguing, against the received wisdom of the time, that the trees could regenerate without being planted.
The results were spectacular, an unequivocal rejoinder to those who said it was impossible. We could see them on the brae on the far side of the loch: stockades of pines a few decades old, their spiky profile broken in some places by the great humps of older trees. This experiment was one of the factors that had inspired Alan to found Trees for Life.
He parked the car at the head of the loch, in a patch of birch and pine wood. Here, by contrast to the fissured grey bark in Glenmoriston, the trunks of the birch trees were mostly white and smooth. Beneath them he pointed out something that fascinated me. The ground was covered in hummocks, which I might have taken for anthills. Alan explained that they were growths covering rocks and old tree stumps. Springing between the humps, he showed me the successional process. After a rock rolls down from the slopes above or is bared by disturbance, lichens begin to creep over it. They dissolve some of the mineral content, breaking down the surface and creating organic matter. This allows moss to move in, displacing the pioneer lichens. The moss in turn creates a habitat for leafy plants such as bilberry and cowberry. The process can take a century or more. These hummocks are a characteristic feature of old forest. They will form only under trees, perhaps because in such thin soil the plants would dry out in the open. Alan had watched one rock for twenty years and seen the vegetation it harboured shifting from one phase to the next.
After he had pledged to restore the Caledonian Forest in 1986, he spent a couple of years educating himself and raising money. He began by persuading some private landowners in Glen Cannich, to the north of where we stood, to allow him to protect pine seedlings on their estates. In 1989 he took a Forestry Commission official to a place in Glen Affric in which remnant pines were growing.
‘I said, “You’ve got the land, we’ve got the money. Let’s put them together.” It was an unlikely partnership. I was a hippy-like character from Findhorn with a beard and long hair, he was a government official. But the relationship between Trees for Life and the commission has been going strong ever since.
‘We’re more radical than they are. They can’t take a position on wolves, for example. Nor are they ready to embrace the removal of roads and tracks–yet. We can be bolder than them. I know the glen better than many of their staff, and I can see opportunities which sometimes they haven’t yet spotted. About three-quarters of the trees we’ve planted are on Forestry Commission land, on many of its estates across the Highlands. We’re working with their neighbours as well. The idea is to connect the new forests all the way to the west coast.’
We set off along the track on foot, then soon plunged into deep heather and struck up the hillside. The great pines here, none younger than a century, looked like the acacias of East Africa, flat-topped above the dun savannahs. Some were wider than they were tall. Each had a distinct growth pattern. Some trees had a single straight trunk, unbranched until it spread into the canopy; some had branches all the way up; some possessed multiple trunks; one or two grew almost horizontally. Their trunks were elephant grey, their branches dragon-scaled in sunset pink, crowned with a haze of shrubby needles.
‘I call it the geriatric forest. It’s like an old people’s home. The deer come down here in the winter. As soon as the seedlings reach the height of the heather, they get eaten.
‘The problem is not deer. It’s the stalking industry, which ensures that the deer are overpopulated. The Forestry Commission has sporting tenants. They don’t live here, they just come to shoot the deer, but they hamstring us. Their attitudes are very traditional. One of them, an Englishman, threatened to burn my house down.
‘Red deer in Scotland are about two-thirds of the size of those in continental Europe, and of those preserved in peat bogs here. They are woodland creatures. On open ground they have less to eat. The deer in the Highlands are the runts of the glen. When settlers in North America saw the red deer there, they were so much bigger than the British specimens that they assumed they were a different species and called them elk. It’s been a source of confusion ever since.’ (It now appears that, though very closely related, they are a different species: the North American red deer (or elk) was reclassified in 2004 as Cervus canadensis. Another possible reason for the reduction in size is that hunters tend to select and kill the biggest stags.)
I later read that The Monarch of the Glen, painted by Sir Edwin Landseer, who also sculpted the recrudescent lions in Trafalgar Square, was set in Glen Affric. (The location is hotly disputed, however. Other accounts suggest that it was painted in Glenfeshie, Glen Orchy or Glen Quoich.) Completed in 1851, the painting became the emblem of the ersatz culture, the Balmorality, created in the newly cleared Highlands by Victoria and Albert at Balmoral Castle and by the aristocrats who mimicked them. This mythologized re-enactment of the lives of the vanished Highland peoples–all tartans and claymores–was the narrative with which those who had expropriated the land and expelled its inhab
itants justified and eulogized the new dispensation. It was the Scottish equivalent of Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine, at Versailles.
The painting depicts a magnificent stag, overfed and splendidly pointed, eyes raised imperiously to the hills: both the idealized quarry of the new lairds and their own imagined embodiment. It stands on a mountaintop surrounded by bare hills. The pose, gaze and setting bear, to my eyes, a striking similarity to Franz Winterhalter’s 1842 portrait of Prince Albert. There could scarcely be a greater contrast with either the squalid reality of dispossession and seizure or the weedy, stunted deer living there today.
As the freezing rain worked its way through my thin coat and worn-out boots, we came to a high fence, and passed through a gate which seemed like a door to another world, so great was the contrast between the vegetation on either side of it. This was the fence which, in 1990, the Forestry Commission agreed to erect around fifty hectares of brae, using the money that Alan and the Findhorn Foundation had raised. On one side the grass was nibbled low and covered in deer droppings. Apart from a few small saplings buried in the heather, and one or two growing out of reach of the deer in the crooks of fallen trunks, there were no young trees. On the other side was a mosaic of habitats of the kind that, Alan said, we could expect to see regenerating across the Highlands if deer numbers were reduced.
The wet ground was thick with bog myrtle, which in the summer would fill the air with its drowsy scent. Here the pine seedlings had crept up, agonizingly slow. Young conifers are easy to date: each star of branches growing from the trunk denotes one year’s growth. These trees, no higher than my chest, some below my waist, turned out, when we counted the layers, to have germinated when the fence was erected. Apart from their size, they looked like the mature trees on the other side of the fence: they had developed, in miniature, the same range of growth patterns.
‘They’re bonsai trees. The Japanese mimic nature: growing trees in adverse conditions like these.’
But on the drier ridge just a few yards away, the trees had been growing as fast in two years as some of those on the boggy ground had grown in twenty. The highest was now twenty-three feet tall (Alan told me that this specimen had been the focus of his affection, and that you could see the difference this made). They grew straight and sharp; it would be several decades before they began to acquire the hunched and spreading individuality of the bonsai bog trees. Among them were rowans of twice my height and more, and regenerating birch and juniper. An orchid rare outside the exclosure–creeping ladies’ tresses–had proliferated here.
The old trees within the fence were now dying quickly. Several had collapsed and would be left where they fell. The resin they contained would prevent the trunk from disappearing for around a century. Others had died in their boots and were now shedding their leafless twigs. The dead trees would provide habitats for species which cannot survive on living wood: fungi, certain lichens, beetles, pine hoverflies, birds–such as owls, woodpeckers and crested tits–and bats, which nest in holes in the rotting wood. As they decay, they release a steady trickle of nutrients which other plants can use.78
‘I like to think the trees know they can go now, as they’ve done their bit, and their children are growing up around them.’
Alan told me that they would exclude the deer for a few more years, then they would reduce the height of the fence in some places, and let a few in. ‘Deer should be a part of this system, but not in such numbers.’ When deer numbers were reduced across the Highlands, the exclosures would be removed.
In places like this, where some living trees had clung on, the rewilders could let nature do the work. In others, like the bare West Affric estate, bought by the National Trust for Scotland partly as a result of campaigning by Trees for Life, they had to plant islands of forest, grown from the nearest seed sources, trying to replicate the patterns and distributions in which trees might have grown there naturally, to begin the process of regeneration. Alan’s intention was to re-seed native forests along the glens that struck diagonally across the Highlands, then to connect them through passes low enough to lie beneath the treeline.79 He described the pine as a crucial species, which creates the habitat required by much of the missing native wildlife. Some would return naturally. Other species–from the wood ant to the wolf–would have to be brought to the forests and released.
Alan already appears to have catalysed a gradual rewilding of the entire watershed of the River Affric. This will, if the plans mature, create a corridor of native forest twenty-five miles long.80 But this is just one corner of the 1,000 square miles whose ecosystems he seeks to restore.
‘One of the things I’ve learnt,’ he told me, ‘is patience. We’re talking about trees with a lifespan of 250 years or so. That’s not so long. In California, it would take 2,000 years to regrow mature redwoods. And it’s easy here compared with other places. In Nepal the soil is washing off the slopes of the Himalayas as a result of deforestation; so much that it’s forming an island in the Bay of Bengal. Here the soil is acidified and low in nutrients, but we’ve still got it, which is why rewilding will take only 250 years.’
Some of the major landowners in the region were hostile to his ideas, seeing them, correctly, as a threat to the universal application of the land use they favoured: intensive grazing by deer or sheep, supported by stalking fees or farm subsidies. But, he says, attitudes on some estates are slowly changing. Attitudes among other Scottish people are changing much faster.
‘We’ve tolerated the absentee landlords with scarcely a murmur of discontent. Scotland suffered a huge psychological blow as a result of the loss of the Battle of Culloden. It is still a psychological wound in the nation today. The Clearances happened partly as a consequence. They brought the sheep in and cleared the people off. Scotland became subservient and demoralized. We became a nation of sheep. Like all indigenous people when they lose their connection to the land, we lost our confidence.
‘But over the past twenty or thirty years there has been a tremendous reawakening of our engagement with the land. You can see it in the number of people here who have joined woodland groups or who go hillwalking. Now people know about the Caledonian Forest. It has gone hand in hand with the increased political awareness which led to the creation of the Scottish parliament. It’s a small step to recognizing that we need to care for the land. But how can we do so if it doesn’t belong to the people who live here?’
As the rain seeped through my coat, down my trouser legs and into my boots, and I found myself wishing that he would show some sign of the discomfort I was feeling and some inclination to walk down the hill and get back in the sodding car, Alan voiced the thoughts that had, over the past few months, been forming in my mind: ‘The environmental movement up till now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don’t like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope.’
9
Sheepwrecked
By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
John Clare
Remembrances
Most human endeavours, unless checked by public dissent, evolve into monocultures. Money seeks out a region’s comparative advantage–the field in which it competes most successfully–and promotes it to the exclusion of all else. Every landscape or seascape, if this process is loosed, performs just one function.
This greatly taxes the natural world. An aquifer might contain enough water to allow some farmers to grow alfalfa, but perhaps not all of them. A loch or bay or fjord might have room for wild salmon and a few salmon farms, but if too many cages are built, the parasites which infest them will overwhelm the wild fish. Many farmland birds can survive in a mixed landscape of pasture and arable crops, hedgerows and woo
dlands, but not in a boundless field of wheat or soya.
Some enthusiasts for rewilding see reserves of self-willed land as an exchange for featureless monocultures elsewhere. I believe that pockets of wild land–small in some places, large in others–should be accessible to everyone: no one should have to travel far to seek refuge from the ordered world. While I would argue against a mass rewilding of high-grade farmland, because of the threat this could present to global food supplies, we lose little by allowing nature to persist in small fallow corners and unexploited pockets of even the most fertile places.
The drive towards monoculture causes a dewilding, of both places and people. It strips the Earth of the diversity of life and natural structure to which human beings are drawn. It creates a dull world, a flat world, a world lacking in colour and variety, which enhances ecological boredom, narrows the scope of our lives, limits the range of our engagement with nature, pushes us towards a monoculture of the spirit.
I doubt that anyone wants this to happen to the land that surrounds them, except those–a small number–who make their money this way. But these few have been empowered both by their ownership of the land and by a kind of cultural cringe, which prevents other people from challenging them. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘cultural hegemony’ to describe the way in which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are universalized. They become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which shape our thinking. Perhaps we suffer from agricultural hegemony: what is deemed to be good for farmers or landowners is deemed, without question or challenge, to be good for everyone.
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