A crowd in the woods

I had another day in a quiet place yesterday with lots of people. It wasn’t really a crowd, though it felt busy. I went to Treswell Wood nature reserve with Rob and his volunteers to work for the day, mostly burning brash from trees that have been felled this winter. There were seven of us plus three other veteran volunteers who like to go at their own pace. Then there was a little posse who came up from the Notts Wildlife Trust head offices in Nottingham to have a look around, a couple of professional woodmen who were working in the coppice and at least a couple of dog walkers, including one old man who had known the wood for at least seventy years. I’d travelled down from Scotland on the train a couple of days before and I saw no-one in the countryside, apart from the occasional dog walker. There’s not much to attract people into the arable lands of Eastern England but there’s plenty to bring them into a wood like Treswell. And some of them are making a living by being there. Yesterday was a good example to me of how a well-managed wood can be much more socially, economically and environmentally valuable (in its way) than an intensively farmed field.

Books, collies and a Marilyn

Saturday felt like spring, just as well for an outdoor book launch. My friend Linda Cracknell has just published a wee book, ‘Following our Fathers’, featuring two essays about her journeys following fathers. One was her friend’s Ule Somme, whose father Sven Somme was a Norwegian hero of the resistance during World War II and made an epic trek across Norway to escape from the Nazis. The other father was Linda’s, who died when she was small, but climbed in the Alps on a momentous expedition as a student. Linda followed in the footsteps of both of them, across Norway and up the mountain and wrote about them, beautifully.

The book launch was at a shed on a piece of community owned land called Dun Coillich. Linda is a trustee of the charity that owns it, Highland Perthshire Communities Land Trust, and I was involved when it started ten years ago and will be coming back as a trustee next month. Dun Coillich is a hill (a Marilyn, the definition of which I do not know, but it’s smaller than a Corbett, if that means anything) that sits above the confluence of two burns and guards the top of the pass that connects straths Tay and Tummel.

Linda read from her book, and distracted us with pass the parcel, and then led us all up the hill. It was great to be there with so many people, I’m used to be on the hill by myself, and having collies look after us was particularly poignant, since my hill collie died a couple of years ago and I’d forgotten the reassurance they can bring on rough ground, constantly on the watch to make sure we’re all together.

Taking responsibility for land is not easy and all of us at HPCLT are learning, but it is still a special place, if you can get there. It’s not the easiest place to get around either, hopefully something will be done about that, but it’s worth exploring. Whatever a Marilyn is (well-rounded I guess), it’s a good height to view the landscape, without the slog of trekking up a Munro.