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.

Patchwork lives

A few years ago I visited a local primary school in Kinloch Rannoch and the head teacher at the time showed us an old quilt that had recently donated to the school. It wasn’t very beautiful, crude red and white squares patched into a checkerboard. But each square had a girl’s name embroidered on it and there was a central medallion with the initials IFC. The teacher, Simon Calvin, had done some research and found that IFC was Isabella Christie who had taught at Kinloch Rannoch in the 1890s after starting her career in the Western Isles. She left her home near Elgin at the age of nineteen to teach on Heisker (aka the Monach Isles), a windy bit of Hebridean machair marooned off the west coast of North Uist. Heisker is deserted now but then there were over a hundred people living there and they needed a teacher. Isabella Christie had got the girls there and in her next two schools to sign their own square. The quilt was a record of her teaching.

Three of the girls’ names were Macmasters, Katie, Gracie and Bella. I knew Angus Macmaster, who lives in Aberfeldy, and he told me that they were his aunts. Gracie, the youngest of seventeen, emigrated with her mother and two of her sisters in 1908, abandoning the family home at Saunich over the hill from Rannoch in lonely Glen Errochty and moving to Saskatchewan, Canada. So the quilt held stories of people who were the last to live in some of the remotest parts of the Highlands and Islands. These were stories of lives shaped by the landscapes in which they lived and recorded in a quilt. As someone who looks at landscape as a storybook that can be read if you look closely enough, and as an occasional quilter, I couldn’t help being fascinated by it.

Sadly the quilt has disappeared and I didn’t manage to take a picture of it before it vanished. The picture here is taken from an article that appeared in the Perth Courier in 2007. But I’ve been able to do more research and I’m planning to produce a wee book, sometime soon I hope. Watch this space.

Being Rook

A soundtrack of cawing and mewing crows, rooks and jackdaws accompany winter dawn and dusk in Aberfeldy. I often see a trail of crows, which can take half an hour to pass, flying to roost in a wee plantation just over the river. It’s not just a few birds passing at a time either, there are clouds of them. They mess about as they go, especially the jackdaws who seem to do their best to stir things up amongst the other crows. They don’t seem to be in a hurry to go to bed, perhaps because the nights are so long at this time of year. When they get to the roost there are often crowds of birds birling around in tight formations before they settle on the spruce branches. I hear them at night, bickering quietly, but by then the roost is calm and only a few birds are active. They all seem to get up at once in the morning. Just the right amount of light and they’re off to their daily business.

There was a piece in this Saturday’s Guardian Review by John Burnside, who has just won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize for his latest poetry collection, and who was my tutor for a short while, until he took a sabbatical to finish his prize winning collection and a novel, which was short-listed for the Costa. As well as all that he managed to find time to write about creatureliness, i.e. imagining being another creature, in his case a hyena. It was a strange piece, especially in such literary pages, but it got me thinking. Rooks are the animals I think about most in creaturely terms. They seem to enjoy themselves in a stately sort of way, strutting about on fields, poking about for worms. It’s not too much like hard work and they have a good social life. They think too, if birds can be said to think. They’re certainly intelligent and can live a long time, if the gamekeepers don’t get them. You could do worse than be a rook. I did the lino cut after watching a rook annoyed by blowing leaves.

Falling Trees

Gales have been a feature of this winter. There was one this weekend, although it was fairly calm compared to the one in mid December, which caused havoc in out local forests. I went to the Hermitage near Dunkeld to see its impact. Walking in from the car park to Ossian’s Hall there is a huge shard of wood standing out of the shattered stump of a Douglas fir and many trees in the grove below Ossian’s Hall are lying flat, roots in the air. The tallest tree in Britain (is it still?) is still there though. The effect of the wind seems random, one tree is felled its neighbour is still standing. Conifers are particularly prone to wind. The beech trees on The Gallops near Kenmore are mostly still standing after the gales, even though they are elderly now. Their sinewy looks reflect a stronger woody musculature than the conifers. A couple of beeches had been caught, but it was easy to see why they went, they were full of rot and hollow at the base. But the conifers toppled or broke without any obvious weakness. Some fell right over with their root plates pulled clean out of the ground, others snapped or twisted to leave a mangled stump.

The path to Pinecone Point, a great viewpoint over the Tay valley, was closed because so many trees were down. In places it looked like forestry machines had been out, laying the trees in neat ranks and leaving few survivors. The wind must have blasted from the west, down Strathbraan and swirled around the base of Craigvinean crag, felling the trees as it went.

It’s exciting to see the results of powerful weather but it would have been terrifying to have been there. It brought to mind the old philosophical conundrum: if a tree falls in the forest with no-one to hear does it make a sound? I’d rather not find out but it didn’t stop John Muir. He described in his book The Mountains of California how he climbed a Douglas fir during a storm in the Sierra to listen to the music of the gale and see the trees dancing in the wind. It seems insane now but it shows what a remarkable naturalist Muir was that he could judge a safe tree and have the confidence to climb it and stay there for hours so that he could not just observe, but also feel part of, the natural world.

New Blog

I’ve set up a separate blog (Thought Fox) to write about my explorations in printmaking, illustration, letterpress and poetry, starting with a little plug for my bookbinder friend Heather Dewick. Taking A Closer Look will be more about my interests in landscape and ecology, but I’m sure there’ll be overlap so I hope you will take a look at both.

Bogs and Puritans

I’ve started to investigate the Humberhead Levels, the flat lands that stretch north from Retford most of the way to York. It’s an area I’d never explored before, despite growing up on its borders. If I’d thought about it, it was to think there was nothing there. It’s not exactly a remote location and is criss-crossed by motorways and railways but it still feels like the middle of nowhere. It’s not pretty either. There are no contours on the OS maps except where island villages rise slightly above the flats. Perhaps that I am starting to appreciate flat lands is a sign I’m getting older.
I first heard the name Humberhead Levels in Catherine Caufield’s little book Thorne Moors, beautifully and starkly illustrated with photos by Fay Godwin, about the battle to save Thorne and Hatfield Moors in the 1980s and early 1990s when they were being destroyed by peat extraction on an industrial scale. They are raised bogs, great lenses of water held above the surrounding land in peat formed from millenia’s worth of bog mosses and cotton sedge. Bog in lowland England is a rare habitat, especially species-rich raised bogs like these. There's lots more about it at http://www.thmcf.org/. Thorne and Hatfield Moors became part of the Humberhead Peatlands National Nature Reserve in 1995 but, incredibly, peat extraction didn’t stop until 2002. Now it has, English Nature and its partners are trying to get them back as healthy raised bogs. They’re getting there but there’s a long way to go. It was a shock to see bare peat stretching to the horizon.
The Humberhead Levels were splashy, isolated and independent until the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden started his massive drainage works in the seventeenth century. The locals rioted frequently after the drainage started, not surprising since it led to villages flooding, and the farming of land they’d previously hunted and fished was an imposition by foreigners and big landowners. It was also a place of religious independence. Charles and John Wesley, founders of Methodism, came from the island village of Epworth and several of the Pilgrim Fathers came from villages to the north of Retford. And Robin Hood was said to hunt on Hatfield Chase: an odd sort of place that gave birth to outlaws and Puritans. We ended our day at Crowle, where we passed the time of day with a man pushing an old bike and balancing a bag of wood gathered from the moors. It was a perfect conversation of its sort. He thought through every word he said, and every one was a gem. Maybe there was something about the place that gave time and space for thinking for yourself.