The Great Wood

by Jim Crumley

  Late in the afternoon I was wandering through the pinewood on the south shore of Loch Tulla, eyeing the comparatively extensive wood on the far shore, when my binoculars drifted past two birds that gleamed vivid white in the hard and sunless afternoon light of late March. It was cold, the loch and mountains were a forlorn grey, there was fresh snow on the summits of the higher hills, and nothing about the scene said spring at all. But I steadied the binoculars on a low limb of the nearest pine and watched the two white bird shapes until I could make sense of them, which is another way of saying until I could confirm my suspicions. They were far across the loch and only that gleam of white gave them away where they drifted close together on the water. Then I realised they were dozing; they had their heads turned back to face their tails, and that delayed the confirmation process. Then a scattered flotilla of goldeneye purred across the loch in flight, and their passing disturbed the drifting pair so they raised their heads and fully righted their bodies and became what I thought – hoped – they might be, which was a pair of black-throated divers.

  Then, having stirred themselves, they gave voice. If you have not heard the duet of a pair of divers in a setting like this you have not heard the national anthem of our wilderness. If nature had invented the pibroch it would have sounded like this, and perhaps nature did and perhaps a man with music in his head a few centuries before Alasdair and Donnchadh listened to two divers newly arrived from their winter waters in the east coast firths, and made the first attempt with the feadan in his hands to make music of nature.

  A small moral of the story is that open water is – was – part of the Great Wood too, and the hordes of forest grazers came down to the shores of lochs like Tulla to drink in the evenings and to cool off in the brief heatwaves of such a land. Watersheets affect the life in the forest too, and reflect it on the still days so that your eye never falls on a familiar landscape and sees it twice in exactly the same way. And the big lochs like this one, or Loch Tay or Loch Ness, were accustomed to freezing over from end to end in colder eras than ours, allowing the wolves to use them as highways. When this one froze it was a land bridge between Glen Orchy and Rannoch.

  Even today, what’s left of the pinewoods helps you to navigate back through a few millennia, so I sat on the shore among lightly scattered trees with a thick and climbing pinewood behind me and the long sprawl of the pinewoods of Victoria Bridge on the far shore. The divers called with voices that cut the cold air like sabres with a haunting downturn at the end, and I made what I could of the old forest of Glen Orchy and Inishail. The pinewood at Strath Fillan lies at the foot of the north-facing slopes of the first great mass of Highland mountains if you come up through the middle of the country from the south. There is another, smaller wood at Glen Falloch at the north end of Loch Lomond. And these belong to each other. Going east, there is Glen Dochart of the oaks then Loch Tay, whose southern shore in particular continues the theme.

  Glen Orchy is the centre, a power base of nature and people, a Great Wood of which Glen Falloch, Strath Fillan, Glen Dochart and Loch Tay were a southern rampart. Most of the glens as far west as Loch Etive and the top of Loch Awe were wooded, and bear old names that prove it. Loch Tulla was surely surrounded by pinewoods, and from there and all the way to the Black Wood of Rannoch – another miraculous survival of the old order – there was a single forest, with, at its heart, the high and primitive wilderness of Rannoch Moor. It is tempting to look at Rannoch Moor in its beleaguered 21st-century condition and scoff at the very idea of a forest. But trees are everywhere on the moor, or at least the bones of them are. Carbon dating puts many of them in the second millennium BC, yet Fraser Darling speculated that it was still wooded when the Romans came 2,000 years later. The authors of A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland point out that something catastrophic wiped out almost all of our Scots pine around 4,000 years ago, and I wonder if Rannoch Moor was a victim of that climatic onslaught and simply never recovered, perhaps because of the extreme nature of its climate.

  The moor was pivotal in the shaping of the south Central Highlands, a towering ice cap that spawned the glaciers that carved the glens and defined the mountains of all that land, the last ice to melt and so the coldest, wettest land least equipped to sustain good trees.

  I suspect that all this was the greatest tract of the Great Wood, that it was wilder and much more pine-dominated than the oak-and-birch-laden woods of Menteith, which we are now inclined to call the Trossachs. In The Last Wolf I voiced the argument for the reintroduction of wolves into Highland Scotland. I chose Rannoch as the first release site because the largely undisturbed land of the Black Wood, the Moor, and Loch Tulla is of an uncompromising wilderness character that matches the wolf’s, and because being a part of that greater forest of Glen Orchy and Inishail and Breadalbane, it lies at the centre of the Great Wood itself. That in turn offers an emergent population of wolves the opportunity to expand both north and south if it chooses. An ancient darkness would be banished, for the wolf is a catalyst, an enabler, a creature that creates endless opportunities for nature in all its guises, and like aconites appearing through frozen ground they scatter the land with new points of light.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rothiemurchus

  Old books say the name means The Broad Plain of the Firs. Modern revisionists say that the phonetics invalidate that idea and that it derives from Rat Mhurchais, The Fort of Murchas. I side with the old books.

  The long-forgotten Fort of Murchas was far too inconsequential a footnote to the history of Strathspey and the northern Cairngorms to have given its name to such a defining tract of ancient woodland and mountain. This is a landscape named for its natural features. The more obviously translatable Gaelic hill names include the Hazel Hill, the Yellow Hill, the Promontory of the Pass, the Black Crag, the Black Peak, the Pale Hill. There is even a Hill of the Clump of Pine Trees. If the ancient namers of the landscape thought it appropriate to single out a group of trees to identify a hill, it is hardly likely they would have ignored the massive impact that the Scots pine forest of Rothiemurchus makes on its landscape setting when viewed from even the slightest of elevations, nor for that matter the psychological impact it must have made on the earliest travellers. The Broad Plain of the Firs it surely is.

  They used the word ‘firs’ in eighteenth-century books when it was still a generic name for conifer trees. In the case of Rothiemurchus, they meant Scots pines. What Seton Gordon called the Scots fir in the early twentieth century is what we now call the Scots pine, and in Rothiemurchus the Scots pine is an omnipresence. If you walk the Gleann Einich track from Coylumbridge you are immersed almost at once in a depth of trees such as you will not encounter anywhere else in Scotland – trees to darken a sunny day.

  I cannot walk here without thinking of bagpipe music, and with pibroch in particular. I made the association in my head long before I knew what underpinned Fair Duncan’s ‘Beinn Dorain’, and much longer before I had even heard of Alasdair MacMhaigstir Alasdair. The pines hold the ground – the urlar – and the variations, the birches are the grace notes, while the bass drone is the work of junipers that stand around under the pines like bloated, foggy-fleeced, grey-green sheep.

  All these crowd round. An atmosphere of trees bears down. You look left and right and at first all that happens is that the forest moves past you, tree by tree by tree by tree. You hear your own feet, your own breathing, and these move to the rhythm of the pibroch in your head.

  A foot stamps.

  You startle, whirl towards the sound, freeze.

  What the . . .?

  At the end of your gaze a roe doe is watching you from between two junipers 20 feet away. You remember to breathe out. She is unafraid. You relax and then you enjoy her. You take two photographs, five minutes apart. Later study of the images will teach you that in those five minutes the only part of her that moved was one of her ears. She was trying to tell you something about the worth of stillness in the company of nature, in the
company of trees.

  You walk on and the pibroch resumes. You try and walk more slowly. You remember the piper who showed you how to do this, his slow, slow march, his timing, his timelessness. Time was, that roe deer could have been a wolf curiously watching your passage, head on one side. Twenty or thirty years hence, such a time could return. Oh, we should be so lucky!

  Sunlight and wind are up in the canopy of the pines. Down here they may briefly dance around you like butterflies, the pibroch with a jig in its step, then abruptly all is measured and woody again and your own footfall is the loudest sound in the world.

  About the piper. His name is Finlay Macrae, he is a Skyeman, a Mod gold medallist (which places him among the hierarchy of pipers), and once I heard him play in a pinewood. It was not here in Rothiemurchus, but in Glen Affric west of Loch Ness, and if there is a single pinewood, a single souvenir of the Great Wood anywhere in the land that might justly claim to rival Rothiemurchus in grandeur, it could be Glen Affric. Finlay Macrae’s day job was that of a forester, and sometime in the 1970s he had won an international award for his restoration work among the pines of Glen Affric. I was a newspaper journalist at the time, and just beginning to flex my muscles as a writer about the natural world. Shortly before his award I had written something critical of the Forestry Commission – Finlay Macrae’s employer at the time – in the Glasgow Herald. I was invited to join a party of journalists to meet Finlay Macrae in Glen Affric.

  We duly met on a Friday evening in a hotel at Cannich. There was a ceilidh and whisky and he played the pipes, and although I was no authority I know a good musician when I hear one and a very good one when I’m standing in the same room.

  The next day we went out to the pinewood in Glen Affric and he played the pipes again, but this time he played pibroch, and his slow, slow march as he played had something of the strut and the omnipotence of the cock caper-caillie about it. The music rose and hung in long sinuous clouds on the still air of the morning and eddied among the pine trees, and its pulse was like golden eagle wingbeats. Suddenly I wanted to be alone with the music and the trees and to try and fathom why it was they belonged so utterly each to the company of the other; that morning I formed the habit of a lifetime which is to put landscape and music together in my head and make of them something indivisible. Such was the mastery of the piper, such was the piper’s love of the landscape where he played that it infused and further elevated the music, such was the power of the landscape. It was the first time in my life that music moved me to tears.

  So pibroch became the voice of great pinewoods, and because I was born in the east of the country in Dundee and found my way into the wild places of the land through the native’s tradition (a northwards progression by way of the Sidlaw Hills, the Angus Glens to the promised land of the Cairngorms), Rothiemurchus has always reigned supreme in the hierarchy of Highland forests and of pinewoods in particular. So I packed something of Finlay Macrae’s music when the weekend was over and it has been my good companion ever since.

  Rothiemurchus is unique among the landscapes of Highland Scotland. I have known it for more than 40 years, and I have walked the Gleann Einich track for as long, and always, always, that sudden and so-deep immersion takes me by surprise. It is a bit like high-altitude climbing in that it requires acclimatisation, demands of me that I walk more slowly, have more care about how and where I place my feet, think more deeply about where I am and what I am trying to do here. Perhaps if I lived nearby and walked here two or three times a week instead of once or twice a year I might accustom myself to it, but even then I am not at all sure. Nan Shepherd, poet of these mountains, wrote that ‘the thing to be known grows with the knowing’ and if there is a single philosophy more appropriate to this of all landscapes I cannot imagine what it might be.

  The first time I came here I must have been about 19 or 20, so all of ten years before Glen Affric. I was besotted by nature, by wildness, and energised by my first encounter with Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell’s book redefined what my relationship with the natural world would become. I had read it and thought: ‘I want to do that.’ I didn’t want to live with otters in my living room and my bed, but however my relationship with nature panned out, I knew that I wanted to write it down. The height of my ambition became that I should write my own Ring of Bright Water. That was the mindset of the young man who took to the Gleann Einich track for the first time, somewhere around 1967.

  Almost inevitably, I romanticised the Highlands then. Almost inevitably, I romanticised Rothiemurchus. My first impression was that everything was ancient. This was surely the living, breathing Great Wood of Caledon which I had read a bit about in books and magazine articles by the likes of Seton Gordon, Tom Weir, and Frank Fraser Darling who, you may remember, had written of it thus: ‘the imagination of a naturalist can conjure up a picture of what the great forest was like: the present writer is inclined to look upon it as his idea of heaven.’ So elevated was Fraser Darling’s reputation at the time that he persuaded me among many, many others to be likewise inclined. So if Rothiemurchus was heaven, then these trees were surely ancient and immortal and the fruits of a celestial lineage.

  What I know now that I did not know then is that Rothiemurchus is a much ransacked pinewood, that it was described as ‘exhausted’ in the mid nineteenth century, that its red deer had been hunted to extinction by the beginning of the nineteenth century, that it was turned into a deer forest in 1843 thanks to a scheme to re-stock it with animals from the Mar estate, that its timber was plundered again to feed the rampant appetite of the twentieth century’s two world wars, and that when it was declared a national nature reserve in 1954 the designation was as much to safeguard and fund the improvements that future conservation efforts might achieve as it was in recognition of what it was at the time and what it may once have been. Long before any of these eras, of course, it had lost all its big mammals, the wolf being the last to go (probably later than we think, but also probably somewhere around the end of the eighteenth century), and many of its characteristic bird species, notably the capercaillie, the great stuff-strutting grouse of the pinewood (shot to extinction around the same time as the wolf). What the Rothiemurchus of 1967 was trying to tell me, and what the subsequent decades of conservation and restoration confirm, is that given half a chance it is capable of endless renewal and healing. Because if the Great Wood of Caledon is anything at all, it is a continuum.

  Some of the characteristic elements of the forest simply go on and on, endlessly renewing an ancient pattern. The first among these is the golden eagle, which survived even the Victorian killing fields when a hooked beak was practically an invitation to slaughter. Naturalist and golden eagle authority Roy Dennis explored an intriguing theory in a contribution to Rothiemurchus: Nature and People on a Highland Estate, 1500–2000: ‘I actually think that some landowners just liked golden eagles because they were involved in their history, in their relationship with the land, going right back into time. It is a great pleasure that the eagles are still here. Their nesting eyries are historic places, the same places being used for centuries. The nesting sites on Rothiemurchus which I first studied in the 1960s were the very same that Seton Gordon visited in the early years of the century.’

  Some of these very nesting sites are in pine trees, for here and there in the eastern Highlands, the golden eagle is a tree nester. Seton Gordon once described a tree where golden eagles had nested to his certain knowledge for over 50 years. The tree contained several eyries and had been completely reshaped by the eagles. In The Golden Eagle (1955), the second of his eagle books, he described an eyrie in the crown of a ‘Scots fir’ at 1,800 feet: ‘Although the tree was old, it was of no great size and the eyrie was so large that it covered the whole of the crown of the tree. The nest was nearly eight feet in diameter, and its depth may be judged by the fact that when I climbed the tree and stood (I am six feet one inch in height) on a branch at the base of the nest I was unable to see into the cup . . .’
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  The solitary observations of the naturalist and nature writer go on, and they too have their place in the pageant, gathering knowledge and – hopefully – wisdom, and furthering the understanding of our own species. So when I walked the Gleann Einich track for the first time my footprints were the first in my personal history among these distant echoes of the Great Wood. Two or three years later, I went to the Sleat peninsula of Skye for the first time, and together these two landscapes – and the literature they had spawned – became the foundation stones on which I would eventually build a writing life. They taught me the worth of reworking the same landscape circumstances again and again, comparing notes, making judgments, talking to older, wiser heads with wisdom to impart, and questioning everything I had not seen and learned for myself. And when I finally became a nature writer for a living in 1988, I had already established a core working territory on my own doorstep in the southern Highlands with Loch Lubnaig and Balquhidder at its centre. There I was able to practise on a daily basis the lessons I had learned on Skye, and especially among the pines and mountains of Rothiemurchus, one more graduate to emerge blinking in the sunlight from the shadowy halls of the Great Wood.

  The track burrows deeper, creeps beneath the densest part of the forest then begins to climb. You become aware as you climb with it that you crave air, light, a breeze on your face, sun on your face. Sure enough, the façade of trees begins to crack, then to break apart. There are fissures in the canopy, then spaces, then quite suddenly the track is at the edge of the wood rather than the heart. There are still trees to your left but a void has opened to your right, a thing of space and light and sunlight, a gently climbing slope of heather, grass, rock, bog. There is no denying the relief. But then you notice that there are trees above and beyond the space, then that even this space nurtures trees – a thin and twiggy smattering of saplings from knee-high to head-high, some old and weary and withering, some new and green and eager, some birches in the wet bits that don’t appeal to pines, some small clumps of juniper like tumbleweeds that have run out of steam and simply stopped tumbling.