The Great Wood: The Ancient Forest of Caledon
Jim Crumley
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: B006WBZ5Q0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Great Wood of Caledon - the historic native forest of Highland Scotland - has a reputation as potent and misleading as the wolves that ruled it. The popular image is of an impassable, sun-snuffing shroud, a Highlandswide jungle infested by wolf, lynx, bear, beaver, wild white cattle, wild boar, and wilder painted men. Jim Crumley shines a light into the darker corners of the Great Wood, to re-evaluate some of the questionable elements of its reputation, and to assess the possibilities of its partial resurrection into something like a national forest. The book threads a path among relict strongholds of native woodland, beginning with a soliloquy by the Fortingall Yew, the one tree in Scotland that can say of the hey-day of the Great Wood 5,000 years ago: 'I was there.' The journey is enriched by vivid wildlife encounters, a passionate and poetic account that binds the slow dereliction of the past to an optimistic future.
earl of Moray’s factor unearthed what he suspected was a conspiracy of local farmers to cut down trees and kill deer to create more and better farmland, and offered His Grace the maxim, ‘no woods, no deer’. And in the 1980s my friend Don MacCaskill told me ‘a forest is not a forest without deer’. And if you could have asked the opinion of thousands of years of Highland wolves they would have agreed too, for it is simply a timeless truth. Deer and trees belong, mutually, and in this of all
accustomed to entering and leaving this land by a car ferry that connects one part of the mainland to another. Even though the Ardnamurchan peninsula west of that neck of land between Salen and Kentra feels more like an island with a land bridge, the place presents such an out-on-a-limb aspect to the rest of the world because it takes such a long overland journey from almost anywhere to get there. It was not always thus. The long Atlantic inroad of Loch Sunart made this one of the most
in for immortality, and in all the landscapes of my life it is among the most precious of landmarks. The track dips towards the rush of a mountain burn that flanks the pinewood on its eastern edge, and which must account at least in part for the remarkable survival of the wood because it is difficult to ford at the best of times and impossible in spate. There are two flimsy, greasy and gaptoothed wooden plank bridges a few hundred yards apart, neither of them for the faint-hearted, and over the
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
aberration instead of just one more of nature’s species that does some things by accident and some by design), is less important than what we have since chosen to do with the ones we introduced by design, less important than whether or not we give nature its head to make the most of the opportunities at its disposal. Even as I write this, the Forestry Commission has set aside a small Scottish acreage as a plantation of giant redwoods, a Californian native, against the day when climate change may