The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  I looked at it all, a long and lingering look, felt the landscape gather round me and claim me for its own, and I felt a helpless love for that moment in that landscape, in that circumstance. I spoke a verse of Kathleen Raine out loud:

  Though all must pass

  There will never be a time

  When I will not have been

  This here and now

  Of clouds moving

  Across a still night sky.

  It is a landscape I know quite well, not well like the stag or the raven knows it, but well enough to navigate its advancing dusk with confidence, intimate enough with its rise and fall and darkening curves where the wood reached up with a beckoning embrace, or down to the distant road home. I stepped into the trees and new snow followed me down. There seemed then to be no end to the trees, as if they were there forever, and undefeatable.

  The thought lodged in my mind like a hook in the mouth of a salmon: is that what unsettled the Romans? Such a conspiracy of wildness on such a midwinter night? On top of everything else? They were not nature writers in love with the landscape after all, just young soldiers too far from home.

  *

  I have another view of trees. If I get up from the desk and go outside, turn my back on Balquhidder Glen and face east, the world is closed in by a long, steep hillside that wears the characteristic working clothes of the Forestry Commission, what the writer David Craig called ‘the dark trees of government’. The principal shade is spruce green, enlivened here and there by larches – the springiest of pale green in spring, the fieriest of gold and amber in autumn, brittle-bare in winter. We tend to like the larch, yet it is as ‘alien’ as the Sitka spruce, although you could argue that 400 years is quite long enough to be regarded as native. I so argue. And so for that matter is the 200 years or so that the Sitka spruce has been growing here.

  But this is an uninspiring view of trees. It’s too slabby, the treeline is too inflexible; the effect is essentially contrived, designed on a piece of paper then implemented, unnatural. A first glance takes in a mile of such unnaturalness, but it actually extends almost to the very southernmost edge of the Highlands ten miles away, and a couple of miles further north to Loch Earn, a rampart of the Strathyre Forest. Here and there along that rampart there is – there always is – a new area of clear-felled forest, a new area of replanted clear-fell in its cheerful infancy, so that over decades the forest is a shifting patchwork of young and middle-aged trees. It is tempting to argue that such a forest has no old trees at all, for the Commission does not permit old age, but that is not quite true. It is true that there are no old trees of the harvested species, but if you were to study a planting map of the forest you would see that here and there throughout its length there are compact knots of native trees, mostly Scots pine or oak, the unlikeliest of survivals, protected oases of age. I draw a bead on one such from the back door and find its tousy fringe with difficulty, for it breaks no skyline, and its own shade of green is not so different from the massed and straight-backed ranks of the spruces – a little bluer, perhaps, but only in the bright light of midsummer, and that is not now. Now is still winter. Now is new snow, a great deal of new snow that still hangs heavily on the trees. I find the Scots pines I am looking for because they widen at the top and the spruces narrow, so they wear their snow differently from the spruces. They do everything differently from the spruces.

  The forest road passes the door heading south, climbing, then it hairpins up the east slope and doubles back to a long and almost level north-south terrace. It is a surprisingly open thoroughfare. Verges and ditches and scrubby corners accommodate an equally surprising variety of growing things in spring and summer, from early purple orchids, butterwort, wild hyacinths and bluebells to honeysuckle, brambles, blaeberries, wild strawberries, foxgloves and rowans. Birch trees try to get going everywhere, and here and there it is permitted and here and there it is not, and I have never been able to reckon the why and the wherefore. In winter the ditches run with water or thicken with snow or ice or both, and on the road and its banks and ditches you can read the passage of fox and deer and pine marten and red squirrel and sometimes an otter trying to cross watersheds; wildcat if you’re very, very lucky. One day, perhaps, a wandering wolf, for wolves can – and do – live in commercial forests.

  You walk by huge larch trees, and these too have been spared from felling the last few times this hillside was cleared of its spruces. They lay an orange carpet on the road in October and November; snow and winter winds banish it. Then you reach the pines and all is briefly changed. The pines stand on a steep hillside below the forest road, in a cluster. Clustered trees that widen at the top make a canopy, so the light changes as well as the shape of the trees. Sunlight and shadow suddenly have something to say. And a canopy, if it is old enough and undisturbed enough and not overgrazed, creates conditions in which the trees’ preferred understorey can thrive.

  The tight-packed planting regime of commercial spruce obliterates understorey. Penetrate ten yards into such a plantation and the floor of the forest is simply bare under a mat of spruce needles, and dark as the trees strive for the distant sun. But this canopied acre of Scots pine is knee-deep in heather and blaeberry and crowberry, among others. It is as different from everything around it as a coral island is from the sea. The one prerequisite for such a habitat is the passage of time. These trees are old, or at least this pinewood is old. The Commission is a newcomer to this hillside – about 60 years. People and deer and sheep would long since have reduced the old woods to scraps by the time it moved in, and the brave-new-world zeal of the early Commission planters doubtless accounted for a few more precious but commercially inconvenient souvenirs of the wildwood.

  But Don MacCaskill became chief forester of Strathyre Forest and Don was a friend to the old woods. The example he set and the legacy he left for his successors have been a thrown lifebelt for woods like that small pinewood, woods within woods where people can pause and admire and look and learn, and where, if the Commission and the Scottish government were ever to unite in common cause behind a single benevolent vision, this very forest, this very national park, might blaze a trail whose destination was something like a reconvened Great Wood. Almost all the ingredients we would need are already in place. It’s just a matter of adjusting the balance. The wolf is still missing though.

  * See this book’s predecessor, The Lost Wolf (Birlinn, 2010)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Glen Finglas

  Let me return to that other view of trees, the view from the window where I write. Over that hill to the south-west, there is an old way through quiet hills beyond. It climbs at last to a watershed whence it descends to the true heart of the Trossachs and the village of Brig o’ Turk. To reach that watershed today, I must walk through hills made bare by the familiar conspiracy of too many deer and sheep and too much human indifference. The riverbanks and a few crags and gullies beyond the reach of the grazing hordes betray the once-wooded nature of the place, for birches, alders and rowans still gather wherever they find a safe haven. But the hills are browbeaten bare. Yet as I cross the watershed and begin to descend the sunny, south-facing slopes beyond, the land begins almost eerily to transform. For there has begun the work of a project called ‘Return of the Forest’. Welcome to Glen Finglas.

  I like watersheds, like how they organise the landscape, build bridges between mountains and command rivers where to flow. I like how they lift deer, fox, wildcat, otter and me from one glen to another (they also used to lift bear, boar, lynx, wolf). I like how they give my wandering footsteps cause to pause. They are edgy, exposed places. Breast a watershed – what’s next?

  But the slow march of trees rarely crosses watersheds this high. A watershed is a precarious stance for a tree, the soil worn thin first by the long, slow, punishing drag of ice, and forever after by the weight of wind and the pull of contrary waters. Perhaps a mischievously blown juniper seed will crash-land on a watershed and take root there, because h
aving landed it does not know how to do anything else or be anywhere else. Such a juniper has the springiness to confound winds. It grows flat and low, and it grows slowly too, for watershed soils are either thin or absent. Black pools in peat hags, rocks that burst through the skin of the land, stag wallows – these are the raw stuff of Highland water-sheds, and none is conducive to tree growth. Anything that grows there and that hasn’t crash-landed like the juniper is a specialist: dwarf willow (a tree of a kind but about as tall as a rug), sundry saxifrages, cloudberry, bog-cotton and other grasses remarkably adept in the matter of extracting blood from a stone . . . that kind of anything. Any creature that lingers there through the winter has an Arctic inheritance: ptarmigan, snow bunting, mountain hare. Golden eagles and ravens cross watersheds for fun, but very little else does.

  So, if you were to walk from beneath the window where my desk contemplates a view of trees, walk beneath that hill shoulder in the south-west, and follow a furtive road through the trees until you reach a meeting place of glens by an old stone bridge and a waterfall, you would have begun to walk that old way through the hills that ultimately connects Balquhidder Glen to the Trossachs village of Brig o’ Turk. Brig o’ Turk has nothing to do with Turkey, but is named by way of a collision of old Scots and Gaelic and the historical incompetence of mapmakers, a common enough occurrence where Sir Walter Scott plied his trade, as indeed he did in this of all landscapes. Scott may even have invented the word ‘Trossachs’ itself, for before Scott’s time it was all Menteith, and after his pen had made the place famous it was The Trossachs, and no one knows for sure what the word means although many an amateur Gaelic scholar will give you a theory. But brig is just a Scots bridge and torc the Gaelic word for a wild boar, and there in the company of the ghost of that great wild manipulator of ancient forest that was the wild boar is a clue to the historic nature of this land.

  The way through the bare hills lies west above the birches and alders that thinly and briefly clothe the steep banks of the lower reaches of Allt Fathan Ghlinne. This is a hint of the old order that prevailed before that stultifying Victorian regime finally got to work and almost did for the Great Wood completely. Almost.

  The land widens at yet another meeting of glens, a flat green plain that is the centre of a fan of three glens – Fathan Ghlinne, Gleann Dubh and Glen Shoinnie – and where all their waters commingle and swell the girth of the Allt Fathan Ghlinne, which becomes the Calair Burn at Balli-more, the River Balvaig at Balquhidder, and the River Leny for a few miles between Loch Lubnaig and Callander. From here it swells into the Teith and heads resolutely for the distant Forth, the Lowlands, Stirling, Edinburgh, and the North Sea. But you would be walking against the grain of these remote headwaters of the Forth.

  The path turns south and uphill into Glen Shoinnie. You have already encountered one of the many follies of map-makers and here is another, for the meeting place is not just the foregathering of three glens, but four different spellings of the same word – Ghlinne, Glinne, Gleann and Glen occur within a couple of square inches of a large-scale map, yet they all mean the same thing. Shoinnie is another matter. There is no such word in any of the languages of Scotland, especially not in Gaelic, which is the language that named these hills. The nearest thing that makes a kind of sense is soinne, which in some parts of Gaeldom might have been pronounced soin-yu and in others shoin-yu. But it means peace, and peace is a strange name to have been attached to an old Highland glen in this historically bloody part of the world. Perhaps it was where two warring clans bartered a peace, or perhaps a clan bard simply thought it tranquil. The Glen of Tranquillity – perhaps the bard was a distiller in his spare time. Whatever the why and the wherefore, the artefacts of the glens’ lost civilisations are everywhere: broken lintels that fell from the doorways of shielings, sheepfolds, the foot-high imprint of houses in the bracken, the stones that built them long since commandeered and recycled to do the bidding of sheep farmers.

  So Glen Shoinnie rises to a watershed, beyond which the landscape slowly changes. You begin to walk downhill, not just into the widening girth of a new glen but also as if into another time, as if every few hundred yards you are greeted by an older century, then another, then another. The reason is trees. Something of the Great Wood flourished here, and then, for the usual reasons it almost died here. Almost. But a widespread and widely scattered variety of native trees somehow survived, and in these turn-of-the-century years since 1996, the Woodland Trust has taken a hand and begun to resurrect something like the woodland that was. In just 15 years the results have already begun to be spectacular.

  Glen Finglas is the generic name for a complex weave of three glens: Glen Finglas itself, Glean nam Meann and Glen Casaig, with the broad moorland back of Moine nan Each (the mysteriously named Bog of the Horse) rising to the blunt 2,200-feet mass of Meall Cala dominating everything. Finglas is another one of those names whose origins intrigue and confound scholars; hardly anyone agrees, and your own theory is as likely to be as near the truth as anyone else’s. The first thing to say about the name is that it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like a Gaelic word. But then time and scholars – aye, and mapmakers – not to mention the rampant spread of English across the face of a landscape it never understood in the first place . . . all these have long conspired to make a mongrel of the name.

  Finglas sounds like it could have originated from two adjectives – fionn meaning white and glas meaning pale or grey, or green, and it’s difficult to think of any reason why coupling two such words would amount to a defining reason to name such a prominent glen. In Scott’s time, it was written as Glen Finlas, which, if nothing else, is at least more suggestive of phonetic Gaelic. Take away the ‘g’ sound from the word and the Gaelic it begins to sound like offers one or two possibilities. The one I like best, bearing in mind the glen has a sunny south-facing aspect and was a royal hunting forest from the mid fourteenth century, is fionlois, pronounced ‘finlis’. So Glen Finglas or Finlas may (or may not) have been the Glen of the Vineyard.

  But above it all, standing on the watershed between Glen Shoinne and the lands of Glen Finglas, I have a choice. The direct route is south down Gleann nam Meann. Or I can go west, contouring across the head of the Horse Bog, then south-west to meet the headwaters of Glen Finglas. However I go, it is the presence of trees in ever-increasing quantities and ever-changing degrees of spectacle that will characterise the journey. The Woodland Trust has put in a ‘walking and cycling trail’ all the way up to the watershed from Brig o’ Turk, and with a huge loop that circumnavigates Meall Cala. If you take on the whole thing, it is 15 miles long and climbs almost to 2,000 feet, a strenuous exploration that begins among some of the densest woodland on the whole estate, then crosses bare hillside above the Glen Finglas Reservoir, back into a more rarefied woodland environment where eerie, scattered survivals of birch, oak, alder and weird hazel groves populate the wide and beautiful Gleann nam Meann, back out onto bare hillside where you slog up over the highest ground, then dizzily back down into the head of Glen Finglas and back into a strange twilight world of hundreds of pollarded alders and birches that stand alone, sometimes a hundred yards from their nearest neighbours. In winter especially, with the hill grasses bleached to the colour of pale straw and the trees bare of foliage, there is something curiously insubstantial about such woodland, as if a ragged army of tree ghosts was straggling away in disorder from an epic battle. I have seen nothing like it. This is not the precursor of a great wood beyond, like the sentinel pines that prefigure the pinewood; this is a whole wood of sentinels.

  It is the legacy of long, human habitation. It is strange how much easier it is to read the imprints of our own predecessors when there is evidence of ancient woodland to work with. These pollards’ trunks are cut several feet above the ground so that the growth is out of reach of deer, and by repeated and careful cutting they provide a renewable harvest of timber that is almost literally inexhaustible. The oldest trees achieve formidable girth
s. This kind of ancient wood pasture has a spoor that is thousands of years old, a technique that did not change over countless human generations. Both visually and historically it is an astounding heritage that quite literally has outlived its usefulness, but lives on nevertheless.

  In the midst of it all, a grove of hazels suggests that at some point in the glen’s human story, the importance of hazelnuts and hazel wood even to the very earliest settlers was formalised into a kind of nut orchard, and it is that which survives here. The ancient past is – again quite literally – at your fingertips. I have always been much more fascinated by the evolution of nature in my native landscape than by the people’s story but in Glen Finglas the two are so indivisible that I am carried away by both. We have a rough idea that people were living here 2,700 years ago, but as yet we have no idea what happened before that. It is a long way inland to have been investigated by the earliest of Scotland’s post-glacial, seafaring nomads.

  Mostly, when I reach the watershed above Glen Shoinnie, my preferred route is down Gleann nam Meann, not least because it has that indefinable aura of all old routes through the hills, routes that were made possible in the first place because the passing of the ice assisted early ideas of communication between the big glens, the broad valleys, the easiest waterways. Gleann nam Meann is, a classic glacial valley where new planting by the Woodland Trust has already begun to hint at how the place will look when trees are restored to every slope and stance and niche where they would once have found their own way. I like to take it at a slow pace, leaving time for diversions up the hill burns among the alders. Nowhere is too wet for alders. They thole not just the spates that overflow the gullies but out on the open hill they face down blizzards, snowfields, landslips and the sheer volume of rain that are the inheritance of so many Highland hillsides. People have known that quality in alder wood for a very long time – two or three thousand years ago it was the timber of choice for the crannog dwellers. They had to anchor their round, timbered houses, so they drove piles cut from tall alders into the bed of a loch, built a platform on those well above the water level, and built their roundhouse onto the platform. Excavations in Loch Tay have found original piles after at least 2,000 years of immersion, and the spectacular replica crannog near Kenmore uses the same process today.