The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  I have been accustomed to trekking the hills around Glen Orchy and camping by its river for many years, and long before the notion of the Great Wood began to get under my skin. But in the 50 or so years since my father drove us – his wife and two sons – through the glen during a family holiday based at Benderloch on the Argyll coast and I fell for the place in a quite unreasoning and uncritical way, it has metamorphosed from a butterfly into a slug. It has the forestry industry to thank for this unkindness. Given the historical standing of its forest, few places the length and breadth of the Highlands are less deserving of the kind of blunt-instrument forestry that characterises today’s glen.

  Only the south-west end of the glen has been spared; some huge oaks grow by the road, and some of the south-facing slopes are lightly wooded with oak in particular, occasionally to a surprising height. From beginning to end the river flows between banks lined with alder. Beyond that native fringe almost nothing relieves the overwhelming suffocation of spruce. Yet still, wherever they can grab even the most flimsy toehold, usually on narrow patches of land between the road and the river, the old order still shows its face – pockets of aspen, handfuls of Scots pine, a few willows, birches absolutely everywhere they think they can get away with it, rowans, a stand of big ash, a few hazels. Alders sneak away from the river up the steep, dark banks of almost every burn.

  In Glen Strae west of and parallel to Glen Orchy, there is a burn called Allt nan Giubhas, and an Inbhir nan-Giubhas marks the place where it joined the River Strae. Allt nan Giubhas is the Burn of the Scots Pinewood and Inbhir nan-Giubhas is the Mouth of the Burn of the Scots Pinewood. River names are the oldest on the map, and almost invariably mean what they say. The landmark survey by Steven and Carlisle, The Native Pinewoods of Scotland, found puny remnants of living pines in Glen Orchy and Glen Strae but much evidence of substantial old lost woodlands. Steven and Carlisle make the point that because native pinewoods reach back to the ice age in 30 generations, they are ‘not the least of our historical monuments’. The pinewood at Strath Fillan five miles back down the road (and surely once a component part of the greater Glen Orchy Forest) confirms that judgment.

  Yet comfortably within living memory – or as it has turned out, uncomfortably within living memory – the beautiful Highland glen I was introduced to at the age of 11 or 12 has been sacrificed to the timber industry without a moment’s thought for aesthetic sensitivity or considerations of either natural or human history. In 1959, which is roughly when I first saw the place, it must have looked very much like Glen Finglas did in 1996 when the Woodland Trust bought it. But instead of an enlightened mission of rescue and recovery, Glen Orchy has suffered an entirely opposite fate, and it is doomed probably for decades to a relentless cycle of monoculture crops and clear-felling. I can see nothing to stop it unless the Scottish government dares to reinvent the Forestry Commission and reorder its priorities.

  Aesthetics matter. Planting new woods or restoring old ones changes the character of the landscape more comprehensively than any other influence we can bring to bear on it. Well designed planting that takes its cue from nature with a wide range of species creates all manner of new opportunities, and nature can be relied upon to take full advantage of them. It creates new opportunities for people too because it is labour-intensive; the work is reliable and produces a skilled workforce with an attachment to the land. What has been inflicted on so much of Glen Orchy by current forestry practice denies opportunities for nature by smothering the land and rejecting diversity. It denies opportunities for people because the work is done by imported squads that mass produce forests, and creates a relatively unskilled and disinterested workforce.

  But this is not a new phenomenon. A local minister, writing in 1843, lamented the demise of Glen Orchy’s woods: ‘Not so long ago, the greater part of our moors and valleys and the sides of our mountains, midway to their summits, were clothed with trees of various kinds. The braes were clothed with a dense and magnificent forest, partly of oak, birch, ash, and alder, but chiefly of pine . . . The hills are still partially clothed with oak coppice, birch, aspen, elm and holly, but these generally speaking are rapidly disappearing and our mountains and valleys and straths have become comparatively naked and bare.’

  By that time the Highland Clearances were in full swing, the Highland people were being replaced by lowland sheep, and as far as the minister was concerned the rot was well set in for the local woodlands, and it has not stopped. But the minister’s assessment was delivered in the midst of a period of reckless deforestation that had been accelerating for a couple of hundred years, and which achieved a spectacular nadir in the 1720s and ’30s. The earl of Breadalbane had negotiated a deal with an Irish consortium in 1723, the kind of relationship that had become fashionable by that time, especially in the West Highlands. Ireland was critically bereft of timber and tanbark so squads of men formed a loose partnership and crossed the sea to buy standing timber from landowners, fell it, and transport it back home. This particular group of chancers quickly fell foul of the local people who considered their long-standing practice of making use of local timber to be an inalienable right. The deal between the hard-up Breadalbane who desperately needed the cash, and the Irishmen who desperately needed the timber, did not seem to have paused for a moment to consider that right.

  Now Breadalbane had a fair old fiefdom to oversee and when he did deign to visit it he preferred his Loch Tayside residence to Glen Orchy, and he preferred his Edinburgh residence to Loch Tayside. Two years into the contract he went to inspect the fruits of the Irishmen’s labour and was aghast to discover that ‘they have not left one standing oak tree in the country’, and were now laying waste to his precious pinewoods. The contract had been poorly negotiated, and the Irishmen cut swathes through it, and continued doing so for about 15 years. ‘Not the least of our historical monuments’ were sailing across the Irish Sea in their countless thousands.

  For many years, my favourite destination in Glen Orchy was a plateau-topped mountain called Beinn Udlaidh. It means the Dark Hill, presumably because it was named from a community in the glen that was accustomed to seeing it against the light of a southern sky, for in every other aspect my earliest memories of it are as a place of unfettered light. The long quartz rib that defines the upper reaches of its broad north-thrusting ridge is visible for miles, glittering in sunlight, and accommodates a high, secret pool of the clearest, coldest, sweetest water I have ever seen or felt or tasted. The darkening forces came later, the first tree hordes that swarmed over its eastern flank and round the northern prow, then a new hill road was carved up to the very rim of its handsome northern corrie and the invasion of trees unfurled a second wave.

  I don’t like writing about trees in terms of hordes and invasion, for trees are the most benevolent of all nature’s flora, the most generous life-givers, the most hospitable shelters, but trees like these, planted like that, achieve the precise opposite of benevolence, generosity and hospitality. To cover a hillside in trees that repel, that shun wildlife, that create a non-habitat, and all this in a glen that was the centrepiece of an ancient forest, is a grim and unworthy response to a beautiful landscape and to a responsibility to honour the history of that landscape. These first new plantations were the advance guard of an occupation of all but the south-west extremity of Glen Orchy, and really nothing excuses such brutality. The place is wrecked.

  Again, when I first began to climb in the glen, I used to daydream about living in a small white cottage that sits quite on its own beneath the mountain. Its name is Invergaunan, which is a crudely Anglicised rendering of Inbhir Ghamhnain, the mouth of the nearby burn, Allt Ghamhnain. The name also adheres to the corrie where the burn rises, and the short glen it flows through on its way to the River Orchy – Coire Ghamhnain. My less than conversational Gaelic guesses the name is something to do with young cattle, a notion which is at least sustainable given the presence of shielings in the glen. At any rate, this glen too was wooded, for over th
e years I have unearthed a few bleached pine remnants in the peatbogs, headstones to long-dead trees, the oldest inhabitants of the place.

  A hundred yards away from the front door of Invergaunan, a ruinous drystane dyke is attended by a stand of half a dozen Scots pines. There was a time in my much younger days when I ached for the bare hillsides of this place, and I romanticised the heroic stance of the pines amid the stones, greeting them as the last survivors of a lost warrior race. Now as that tsunami of commercial forestry devastates one hillside after another, obliterating everything in its path, leaving almost nothing alive but a bleak press of trees that were never intended by nature to grow that way . . . now I bear witness in a quite different spirit.

  Song for the Pines

  Stand while you may,

  while I pray to God knows

  what manner of deity, seeking

  the reconsideration of this bleak design

  that weakens Nature to its knees,

  and wondering aloud

  that if there really are immortals among trees

  then may that stand of old Scots pines be these?

  I think it might take the immortality of Glen Orchy’s handful of Scots pines and armful of oaks to turn aside the forces of darkness ranged against the natural woodland order. I look at that one-verse poem and acknowledge at once the desperate nature of its straw-clutch. Grant these trees immortality and then wait for the madness of the worst excesses of commercial forestry to abate into a kindlier era when they might be thinned and opened out to accommodate planted descendants of the immortal ones. It is, as any professional forester will doubtless tell you, a less than plausible strategy to submit to the inner sanctum of the Forestry Commission, a nature poet’s response to the real world rather than a scientist’s, or for that matter, a forester’s. I would argue that the real world is the one that nature laid down, and his is its unreal usurper. But he has a point in that, as far as I know, no tree has the capacity to tune in to a nature writer’s proffered reassurances, no matter how sincerely voiced. There again, that is only as far as I know, and there is a great deal about the art of communication between mankind and nature that I don’t know or understand, but none of that stops me from trying.

  So I have been known to sit in the midst of that little gaggle of Glen Orchy pines I have known for more than half my life, the centre of the centre as I see it, and to urge the patience of immortals on them – 30 generations back to the ice age – because I still believe (despite the evidence of my eyes) that Glen Orchy – the greater historical Glen Orchy and Inishail from Loch Awe to Rannoch – can recover, can be healed; still believe that there are better ways of both growing timber and honouring landscape and the spirit of trees; still believe that I am far from a lone voice, that there are others out there who preach the same gospel to a small congregation of Brother Pines. Once, I met such a kindred spirit in a small pinewood not far from here.

  *

  It was a soft day when the light was flat, the air moist, the sun absent, the pines emitting that melodramatic blue-green luminosity that strong sunlight would obliterate. The same flat light strikes unsuspected notes in the pine bark. The range of grey-blues, browns and reds compounded by lichens and jigsaw-piece shapes and shadows that characterise the bark can startle a seeing eye. The older the tree the more elaborate the woody mosaic. And when I first saw her she was being a piece of a tree.

  It was almost certainly the oldest tree in the wood, and I had been watching it from a distance before I realised that there was more to its great trunk than just trunk. Between five and six feet up from the ground there was a dark stain, but I could make nothing of it and it began to puzzle me. I put the binoculars on it – normally you don’t need binoculars to look at a tree – and realised at once that it was the long dark hair of the back of a human head. The rest of the human in question, I now realised, was dressed in clothes that so resembled the patterns and shades of the tree trunk that it was all but invisible. Now that its cover was blown I could see that the face was turned inwards to face the trunk and the arms were spread wide in embrace. Then the head turned sideways to put a cheek to the tree and in the same movement put me – with raised binoculars – in its field of vision.

  She let go of the tree and turned to face me. I lowered the glasses. It was the least I could do.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’

  The silence that followed was not so much awkward as wondering. We were both under the spell of trees but neither of us had any idea what the other was up to. I indicated my small backpack:

  ‘I’ve got tea.’

  ‘Oh. Ah . . . thanks.’

  She came over, moving like a fox, I thought, or maybe a wolf, but she was dressed like a tree. It was one of those flasks with two tops that make two cups. She nodded her thanks. I said:

  ‘Funny how flask tea always tastes more like flasks than tea.’

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t see you either – your clothes.’

  I saw now that she wore a dull green jacket not unlike my own except that hers was smothered in hand-painted pine-bark patterns. Her trousers and her shirt matched.

  ‘Tree bark,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Then:

  ‘You’re a stranger in my wood, watching me through binoculars. Why would I explain anything to you?’

  ‘No. You’re a stranger in my wood.’

  ‘You mean you own this wood?’

  The thrust chin and the dark challenging eyes and the tone of voice matched, the way the shirt matched the jacket that matched the trousers that matched the trees.

  ‘No. And you obviously don’t either.’

  ‘Why do you come here?’

  ‘I’m a nature writer. I look at trees and whatever else keeps them company. What’s your excuse?’

  Her first smile. Good smile.

  ‘Two excuses. One is to save young trees.’

  Silence then, awkward this time, and reluctant.

  ‘The other?’

  ‘To be a piece of that tree.’

  ‘A piece of it?’

  She shrugged, clammed up. How could I understand? Then she relented. She was drawn to trees. Some people saved stray cats, or whales, or white rhinos, or giant pandas. She saved trees. Scots pine trees. She had a small piece of land, a small sphere of influence. Not much, about this size, she said with a gesture of outstretched arms which may have meant the clearing or the whole wood. She came to woods like this one where the young trees had no chance . . . the deer, the sheep, the indifference of the estate . . . then she stopped, frowned, and started again.

  Did I know the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh? I did. There was a big Scots pine, a giant, over where the Henry Moores used to be. I remembered. Reclining bronze hermaphrodites, perplexing holed curves, solid holes, hard suggestive softness – how did he do that? It blew down in a storm. She saw it a few days later lying prone. Reclining Pine Tree – Moore should have made that. She walked up to it and put her arms round it. That was when she realised it was not yet dead. Her eyes filled, dark pools, and she said:

  ‘She filled me with her sadness.’

  ‘She?’ She nodded.

  ‘The most colossal sadness.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘This.’ She opened a small shoulder bag. It was full of pine seedlings. Surely she wasn’t planting young pines here where they would be bitten to death, as sure as there will be midges in August?

  ‘Not planting them. Stealing them. I plant them where I know they will grow. They would die here. I can’t help this wood, but it will help pine trees. It will help assuage the great sadness. I feel called to it.’

  ‘Called?’

  ‘Yes. An example to other people.’

  ‘Like who?’

  She looked at me directly then, the first time I felt she was addressing me directly rather than the surrounding trees.

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘But
I’m converted. I already come here for the trees.’

  ‘No, you come here for what’s left. I come for what will be. Perhaps you will write something. Perhaps someone will read it and do this somewhere else. Move trees to where they will be safe. I can do nothing for this wood. I have no sphere of influence.’

  ‘But you care for the old trees too. You were hugging the old one when I saw you. It’s not dying. I presume it’s not sad.’

  ‘She mourns. The lost generations. She shows me her grief. I was not hugging her. I was becoming a part of her. I can do that. I can reach her. She remembers wolves.’

  I looked at the tree that remembers wolves, then back at her.

  ‘She remembers. Always she.’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘She is my sister.’

  *

  North of the glen an unpromising little road turns its back on Bridge of Orchy’s two landmark mountains – Beinn Dorain and Beinn an Dothaidh – and burrows west, its destination the lonely inn at Inveroran and the savage beauties of Loch Tulla. It is a wild place of big winds, a good deal of rain, heavy winter snow and numbing cold, and the tumultuous mountain panorama of the Black Mount. This was the birthplace in 1724 of the greatest of all Gaelic poets, Donnchadh Ban Mac-an-t’Saoir – Duncan Ban MacIntyre – fondly remembered to this day as Fair Duncan of the Songs. His greatest achievement, ‘In Praise of Beinn Dorain’, was a 550-line masterpiece meticulously constructed around the rigid formalities of a pibroch, a grand and uncompromising gesture in a landscape of grand and uncompromising gestures, and it is one more set piece in the elusive jigsaw of the Great Wood. Standing by the ruinous cottage that was his birthplace I was thinking of Alasdair MacMhaigstir Alasdair and his ‘Song of Summer’ that summoned the feadan to his cause, and wondered again about the relationship between pipe music and the Great Wood, and of the pipemaker who loved yew but didn’t like to inhale its dust, and then I thought how in North America the Sitka spruce is the choice wood for many of the best guitar makers and here it is pulped to make hardboard.