by Jim Crumley
So it has come to this. The single living reference point to the so-called Great Wood of Caledon, the only living thing that can claim with all honesty the right to say ‘I was there’, has become an advertising hoarding for the National Grid. Whatever the Great Wood was, this is its one miraculously alive survivor. By what preposterous arrogance does anyone get to sponsor a plaque to tell the world that such a tree is ‘great’? And what on earth has it got to do with the Queen?
If the National Grid really feels the need to pay tribute to the greatness of trees let it sponsor the means to return to nature arguably the greatest of all known trees by virtue of its age alone. Pull down the walls and let it breathe, let it bow to winds and warm to suns. And yes, let the woman standing next to me touch it and take home with her whatever it is that she would take from a moment of intimacy with a living organism whose very life is so far beyond mortal comprehension.
So, I told myself, understand that first: it lives. The cowering, shadowed creature still lives. Then what?
Then consider the potential of yew trees. This one is very probably upwards of 5,000 years old and very possibly nearer 10,000 than 5,000. No one knows, not even to the nearest thousand years, how old it is. You need the heartwood to acquire such knowledge, but old yew trees are hollow and where the heartwood once grew there is now a gap almost 60 feet wide. What does grow there now is a pair of unlovely thin trunks on the outskirts of the tree that was.
The Great Yew stands in the village of Fortingall near the mouth of Glen Lyon and a few miles west of the Highland Perthshire town of Aberfeldy. Whether or not it is the oldest living thing in Europe or the whole world, it will certainly be the oldest living thing I will ever rest my eyes on, you too if happenstance or pilgrimage cause you to pass this way. So when you consider the potential of yew trees it is almost disappointing how quickly you become nonchalant about a thousand years here or there, how casual you become with your ‘probabilities’ and your ‘possibili-ties’ and how interchangeable they suddenly seem. Science pronounces its best guesses, then qualifies them with an embarrassed shrug, then disagrees with itself in the face of some new theory. Science does not always like to own up to what it does not know. Specifically, it does not like to be defeated by a single tree. This is something from which I draw considerable comfort.
There again, whether it is 5,000 years old or 8,000 or 9,000 hardly matters, for it is in any case a number far in excess of anything you and I can comprehend when applied to the lifespan of a single organism. Even 500 is nebulous enough, and 500 years old is the point at which (in the event that it survives that long in the first place) a yew tree begins to grow again. It’s a sort of second childhood. So 5,000 years old should be like being born again ten times, living biological proof of reincarnation. But in order to reincarnate you must first die, and the Fortingall Yew has not died; except that somewhere along the line reincarnation gives way to deterioration and the thing begins to die, bit by bit. Science’s determination that it should apparently be kept alive forever by means of taking cuttings and replanting them seems to me to suggest a lack of faith in the immortality of trees. Shame. Yet also, bit by bit, it begins to live again, even from its ever-depleting resources. There is a green canopy above the mysterious darkness, above the stone walls and railings. New sprigs of green still reach eagerly towards the south-facing gate, for that way lies sunlight, and every living tree, whatever its predicament, strives towards the sun. Seeds still grow in their due season, fussy seeds like tiny acorns life-belted by a red berry-like flesh, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 harvests, an incomprehensible fecundity.
Here then is an invitation to consider a different definition of time from the one we routinely use that recognises days and hours and minutes, and when it considers years at all it thinks mostly in terms of human lifetimes. The Fortingall Yew invites you to dare to consider the possibility of immortality. Fred Hageneder, an American tree expert, wrote in his 2001 book, The Spirit of Trees: ‘While the heartwood inside the hollowing trunk slowly rots away, sheaths of new growth encase the old dead wood to strengthen and protect it. Thus yew renews itself from the outside in . . . A yew that appears to be a hollow, decaying wreck is often at the beginning of its self-regeneration process. Yew can resurrect itself from complete decay. There is no biological reason for a yew tree to die – it can virtually live forever.’
But immortality in trees is not a new idea, even among nature writers, and especially among the pioneers of the American nature writing tradition. Some cite species other than yew. John Muir had the Sierra juniper in mind when he wrote: ‘Surely the most enduring of all tree mountaineers, it never seems to die a natural death, or even to fall after it has been killed. If protected from accidents, it would perhaps be immortal.’ And Donald Culross Peattie wrote of the giant sequoias: ‘Those who know the species best maintain that it never dies of disease or senility. If it survives the predators of its infancy and the hazard of fire in youth, then only a bolt from heaven can end its centuries of life.’ Or not; witness the Scots pine I passed on my St Andrew’s Day walk.
We know now that Scots pines can live for three or four hundred years, and that in places like the Cairngorms and the hills in and around Glen Affric there are populations of pines whose lineage can be traced directly back to some of the earliest known forests in the land. We can walk in such forest remnants now and something reaches out to us that is outwith the scope of plantation forests in which great age is routinely missing. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘in the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith.’
Hmm, maybe. It is said that John Knox liked to preach under yew trees; if he did, he just rose in my estimation. But that was a tradition already old when he would have taken it up. It may also have been a nod to a still older and undatable Celtic tradition (but certainly one that was already old when Christianity was born) that associated yew trees with sacred sites.
All the writers quoted above were moved by trees much younger than the Fortingall Yew. The more you consider it, the more extraordinary its survival seems, and the less sceptical you become about the possibility of an immortal tree. Consider, for example, the discovery in 1991 of the Ice Man in a frozen glacier in the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria. His preserved Stone Age body was accompanied by an equally well preserved axe handle and a bow stave, both made of yew. Apart from anything else, there was never a more telling demonstration of yew wood’s capacity to resist rot and damp. We already knew about that, but what about ice? If the wood can emerge intact from millennia of incarceration in a tomb of ice, are there yew trees out there that survived the ice age, whether as seeds or even living trees? Was this at Fortingall one of them? Just how old is the idea of an immortal tree?
Yew bark, foliage and seeds (but not their berry-like coverings) are known to be poisonous, and the potent darkness within the cloistered space created by the drooping curtains of a mature tree’s foliage creates uneasiness in a susceptible human mind. In fact it is unarguable that the yew, of all tree species, has resonated uneasily in the human mind for as long as the two species have cohabited in the same landscape. It still does. Here, for example, in a brief interview for the book Flora Celtica (Birlinn, 2003), is Peebles-based bagpipe maker Julian Goodacre on the subject of his raw materials: ‘Different woods evoke different feelings in me. I love yew. We use a lot of yew. It has strange associations though, and is a curious wood. Like the tree, the timber imparts a sense of foreboding. It contains poisons and mysteries, and I feel uneasy about breathing its dust.’
Is that sense of foreboding what John Knox had in mind? Was his liking for a congregation held in the round embrace of a yew’s drooping canopy a psychological trick? If he preached ‘I am the Light’ in the pervasive gloom and the uneasiness of the yew’s dust, was the congregation only too willing to lean towards the Light he had to offer?
However far back you go, you find yew trees
in high places. A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland by Smout, MacDonald and Watson (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) notes: ‘Irish Brehon Law of the eighth century classified trees into four classes with seven species in each: the classes were termed nobles, commoners, lower orders and slaves, reflecting both the Gaelic sense of hierarchy and the economic importance of each group . . .’ Needless to say, the yew was a noble.
And there is another potent hint from within the Gaelic sense of hierarchy that appears to elevate the yew’s sacred symbolism. In the Gaelic language’s 17-letter alphabet each letter is represented by a tree, and the letter I is Iogh, standing for Iubhar, the yew tree. And in the wake of St Columba’s decision to set up camp on Iona, the island acquired a one-letter name – I, and the name lives on in the island’s single conspicuous hilltop, Dun I. It may have nothing to do with the yew tree, of course, and Iona is hardly the first place you would think of in terms of woodland, sacred or otherwise. Or it may have everything to do with it.
Much earlier sacred sites than Iona were beside landmark yew trees, and it is at least plausible that before sacred buildings, the yew trees themselves were the ‘churches’, such is their capacity to create a small curtained space where people could gather and shelter and their rituals were screened from view. In time, burial mounds and other pagan structures were built beside the sacred trees, then the Christian ones were built on the site of the pagan ones. Whether your Christianity leaned towards Columba or Knox or something in between, the yew tree was the easily recognisable symbol, and its earthy enclosure was – still is – as moving and affecting a space as a wee kirk or the chapel of a great cathedral.
So when you pause in your 21st-century travels by the Fortingall Yew and feel it manipulate your mind and invite you to consider the power of trees, perhaps it is presenting you with the key to the padlock. Perhaps it is asking you to consider the historic place of trees in the landscape, and, in the context of Highland Scotland, that means grappling with the concept of the Great Wood.
Ah, if only I might interrogate the Fortingall Yew, I could untangle a few strands of truth from the thorny understorey of the myth-makers, let in light to illuminate history’s shadows. But the yew is a husk of the tree that was, and husks are poor conversationalists. The two ragged trunks and sundry twisting tendrils crouch by the compound’s furthest wall. There are too few crumbs of sunny comfort to relieve the elegiac gloom in which the yew passes its days.
I wanted to write something that gave me a clearer idea of the Great Wood, one that an exploration of the landscape might sustain, so I started here with this singular tree and the idea in my head of its un-walled stance on a south-facing slope before the church-builders set to, a tree with an extraordinary girth (strange: no one ever seems to have taken the trouble to measure its height), and a reputation as old as the hills for hundreds of human generations among whom it was both a landmark and a symbol. For whatever the scope of the Great Wood may have been, great trees within it would be known and revered by all the tribes of the land.
It seems to me that the way to honour this of all trees would be to make space around it instead of walls, and to plant a new wood around the church and the burial ground and the neighbouring land, using the species that would have been the yew’s natural companions, then let nature make of it what it will. Because that is the way that we – and nature – have treated woodland forever: we have worked with what’s there and the way that it grows, we have adapted it to suit our purpose and nature has adapted what we have adapted. And sometimes we have introduced trees from beyond Scotland to try and improve on the native mix, and nature has adapted these too, and worked with them, and so trees move back and forward across the face of the land as they have always done.
CHAPTER TWO
A Lament for the Trees
The first nature writers sang the praises of the land and sea and sky and all that moved there – fish, deer, cattle, horse, lynx, boar, beaver, bear, badger, skylark, swallow, swan, eagle, wolf. They sang the praises of mountains where their various gods made love and war, fire and ice. They sang the praises of trees. Nothing they made is signed. We don’t know who they were. Whatever they wrote is wreathed about by the cold, corrosive patina of millennial dust. But then as now (and whenever ‘then’ may have been and whoever ‘they’ may have been), their themes were the preoccupations of their age, and trees provided them with shelter, boats and oars, bows and arrows and spears, ploughs, fruit, nuts, and the makings of fire that changed everything. Trees mattered to them. Some were landmarks, some sacred, some both. The first ‘churches’ were trees: nave, chapel, cloister and spire in one ready-made kit. An early bard might have written:
The trees of the Great Wood, they were as clustered and prolific as stars in the midwinter sky, they had ascended to the mountains’ shoulders and they would soon have conquered the stars too, softening the profile of Venus herself, smothering the Red Star with the green of pines, had not the mountains suddenly begun to shrink to accommodate the capricious demands of the gods, their volcanic fire, their glacial ice; begun to shrug the trees from their lowered shoulders with every new upheaval of granite, gabbro, sandstone, gneiss. The gods had grown anxious at the forest’s advance, fearful that the trees might smother their realms, and then how would they see the earth beneath, how watch over and manipulate the land and the sea and those creatures they hade made in their own image? How find the North Star that made sense of all their heavens if their view was impaired by a thick screen of branches?
So before the trees grew so dense that they shut out the view of the Milky Way and made a darkness of the aurora, the gods shrank the mountains with their fire and ice, and the trees slithered away downhill. The gods commanded the grazing tribes – the aurochs, the deer, the boar, the horse, the goat, the sheep, the beaver, to put the trees in their place. They equipped the beaver with the instinct both to graze and hew, the people with the instinct to hew and burn. All that not only put the trees in their place, it also made their place smaller and smaller and lower and lower down the mountainsides so that they dwindled the way a flood tide abates to a low ebb. For of course the gods overdid it, the way gods do when they get the bit between their teeth, leaving the impoverishment of lone and level sands and salted mud, and all of that was as naked and cold as Venus in the winter sky.
Those first nature writers had begun by praising the trees for all their gifts. Then they saw how it was between the trees and the gods, and they began a new work, and that was a lament for the trees.
Woodland That Was Not
Scent the distilled whisky of the land.
Scan the sheep-shorn glen.
Toast the woodland that was not.
Drink:
To every willow
that never wept with the joy of being.
To every silver birch
that never found its crock of gold
at summer’s rainbow’s end.
To every rowan
that never raised a green banner over an eagle’s throne
and to every eagle eyrie never built
and every eaglet
that never fledged and never
flew from a rowan-bright nursery.
To every hazel, oak and alder
that never shadowed the burn
and every trout and salmon
that never lingered in pools never shaded.
To every songbird
that never pierced each silent May Day dawn
and never lived to die in the fast clutch
of every sparrowhawk
never weaned in nests that never leaned
by tall pine trunks that never grew
in the woodland that was not.
To every tree-creepering, wood-peckering, owlhootering thing
that never clawed bark that never wrapped
all the ungrown wood,
and every roe and stoat,
badger and bat,
squirrel and wildcat,
> four-legged this and that,
that never stepped into clearings
all across the whole unwooded glen.
To every woodland moth
and mite and moss and tree-thirled lichen,
a health to you wherever you prospered.
It was not here
in the glen grown barren as a hollow tree.
*
So the greatest days of the Great Wood began to unravel, began to evolve into a series of disconnected smaller woods, although the final shape of that land we know today as Scotland was still a couple of thousand years away; it was no more than a few millennia ago that the seas rose and smothered the last vestiges of our land bridge to mainland Europe. Something like those smaller woods still survives, or at least their impoverished direct descendants do. A frail but crucially unbroken thread of ancestry remains in place, perhaps 5,000 years old (and a handful of isolated and even more hoary remnants of six, seven, eight thousand years), and they are as haphazard and thin on the ground as pearls in a stream. But it is from such as these that old Scotia’s grandeur really does spring, and a 21st-century nature writer must cast about among them for an admittedly inadequate sense of their great strongholds. A lament for the trees is his task too.
