From the Forest (43 page)

It is ruined now, but you can still see that it was once a tower house, the defensive square keep of medieval Scotland. One corner is still standing nearly as high as the trees around it, and it is possible to pick out the plan of two ground-floor rooms, the base of a turnpike stairway, window lintels and a keyhole gunloop, but even the most solid section of the wall is being broken up now by bright moss, dark ivy and small aggressive rowan trees. The stone frame of the grand fireplace remains; once it carried a mantel frieze carved in relief with swags of foliage springing out of the mouths of human heads. Outside the main block of the castle are the remains of a courtyard and ranges of buildings now reduced to heaps of stone, much of it buried in bright moss. It is very silent in the winter woods; although it is still early afternoon there is already a sense that the light is dimming and the cold waiting to pounce. It is beautiful and very sombre. It is hard to believe that the wood or its enchanted princess will ever wake up.

There is something haunting about ruins in woods. They often feel to me as though they came straight out of the fairy stories. Castles like this and little cottages with their gable-end walls still intact despite the trees pushing up against and into them are reasonably common and fit easily into the stories, but something takes root deeper in the imagination because often the buildings cannot have any association with the tales except the simple fact that they are in the woods.

I find myself thinking of the magical loveliness of the lime wood on Welshbury Hill in Gloucestershire. Limes were once the commonest tree in Britain (and one possible positive effect of global warming might be that we get more of them as they seem to need hotter summers to germinate than we now have). At Welshbury the prettiness of the ancient limes is transformed into something more weird and magical by the fact that they share the hilltop with an Iron Age hill fort, growing over and between the still-visible earthworks, huge ramparts and ditches hidden among the trees. No one knows which came first – the pretty trees or the massive earthworks; whether the trees moved in after the fort was abandoned, or whether this was one of the defensive hideouts in the ‘impassable forests’ to which Julius Caesar complained the Britons were escaping.
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Whatever the origins of the fairy stories we now have, we can be pretty certain they did not come from Iron Age Britons, and were not told in the Welshbury hill fort, but still you would not be very surprised if birds spoke to you there, or a bold Little Tailor bustled up eager to trick you, or a merry third son came striding by in pursuit of his true love and fortune, or a witch enchanted you for no reason other than malice.

The ruined farm at Laggangairn, high on the Southern Upland Way, was abandoned and turning to ruin well before there were any trees there at all; it was desolate open moor before it was all converted into the least romantic, least ‘natural’ forestry plantation imaginable, but it still has an atmosphere of fairy story about it.

Perhaps such places remind me that there was once a far more intimate relationship between people and forests. The forests were busier and more inhabited – but at the same time, lonely and perilous lives were lived there. The atmosphere of so many of the stories seems to emerge out of lives lived deep in the woods – scary, optimistic, beautiful and cruel. Agreeable safe strangers came seldom, and people must have made merry when they did, sung songs and told tales, and both stories and forests flourished in such a relationship to each other. I want very much for this connection to continue somehow.

So I pause at Garlies Castle and I start to ask myself what I think should happen next to keep this alive. I remember Will Anderson saying to me years ago that you cannot get people to ‘act well’ in ecological matters out of high moral imperative alone. There has to be beauty and love. Beauty and love and, I would add, knowledge. They may even all be part of the same thing.

So, as I have argued in Chapter 4, I think we need to change the way we teach children about ecology. We have developed an approach which presents human beings as the ‘baddies’ and nature as a delicate, fragile little thing that our every action will damage and endanger. Additionally, nature is increasing located ‘far away’ in the rainforests and the deserts, rather than here and now, just round the corner. We need to give children a stronger sense that we are forest people. Our first ancestors followed the forest north as the ice cover retreated. The woods are our home. We need to give children confidence in their own roots, to remind them – and ourselves – that northern European deciduous woodland
likes
human beings; it flourishes best in relationship with human beings, and it rewards human beings who go into it and get to know it. This is what the fairy stories tell us and it happens to be true.

Stories and woodland are alike in a particular way – they are specific. Stories have lots of things in common with other stories, but they are different from every other story; woods are the same – of course they have things in common, but each wood is different too. Stories and woods are actual, not abstract: you cannot learn about stories or woods by reading books about stories or woods – or by watching films about them, or hearing lectures on them. To know about woods you have to go into woods. So if we want healthy children in healthy forests we need to get the children out into the forests, and to do that, we need to see the forests as friendly, generous places, but also as tough and determined. Germans and Austrians are typically better at this than we have been in Britain, partly because forests are frequently closer to towns and cities in those countries, but also because the tradition of family walks in the woods has remained stronger there. In 1975 Germany established a long-distance (600-kilometre /370-mile) walking route – the Fairytale Trail – from Hanau to Bremen to enable this sort of connection to be more readily made. On the whole, British long-distance routes are more about ‘wilderness experience’ and less child friendly.

This is an additional argument for keeping the management of amenity forest, and particularly the management of ancient forest and woods, local. There needs to be a real and continuing practical connection between woods and local primary schools – ideally, there needs to be some sense of ownership, which entails both gains and responsibilities. I believe this is more likely to happen when the wood is near to hand and ‘belongs’ to individuals a child might actually know.

After a little while I start to feel cold, and the moss has proved rather wet to sit on, so I continue with my walk. Rather than returning along the path I came by, I push further into the woods, north of the castle. Here there is no path at all and a real sense of being in a wild place; there are gaps between the trees in places – wide meadows with fine ancient maiden oaks standing free and on their own; there is a low-lying and faintly sinister-looking patch of bog, all long grass and willow scrub too wet to push through; and a shallow pond that in summer is packed full of yellow flag irises. But there are particular winter pleasures too: I come upon a vast sprawling willow whose branches have fallen and re-rooted and regenerated to form a tangled web partly growing in a small burn, and every branch and root bright green with moss: once it has leafed up it will be impossible to see how very ancient it is – it will look just like any sallow tangle; the fact that it is a single tree will disappear.

Eventually I come to the boundary wall again; here, in places, it is over ten feet high, and I notice something that I could not have noticed a few years ago, because I would not have known what I was seeing. In this wood there is very little evidence of coppicing – almost all the oaks grow on single straight trunks. But right along the wall there is a remarkable number of multi-stemmed trees. They must have been felled right to the ground in order to build the wall and then thrown out new growth as though they had been coppiced. Since this was presumably done only the once, they do not have wide boles.

Although my walk loops round, it is not in fact entirely random. Without haste but with purpose I am making my way to one of my favourite woodland places. The burn that charges down the scarp beside the castle and crashes through the oak trees to the bottom of the valley meets two other burns descending just as fast from different directions; all the descents are steep and the water leaps down carved gullies and miniature chasms, over cascades and falls foaming around rocks, but at the confluence itself the land flattens abruptly and all the water slows down. Over the years it has flattened out a green moss dancing floor. Although at this time of year it is far too waterlogged to do any dancing, I love the sudden coming together of all these waters into a calm and secret place. I think that it is like the fairy stories, collected from all sorts of places further up the hills, shaped by the slopes it tumbles down, but also shaping them, and coming together in a deep, serene pool.

I walk through this very particular bit of wood on this cold February day and I find myself thinking about all the woods I have walked in during the last year and how they have all been lovely and at the same time so very different. Not just the woods in this book, but all the other woods too.

I think about the fairylike birch woods that dance down the mountainside to Loch Hope on the tiny road between Tongue and Altnaharra in Caithness, perhaps the most northern forest in Britain, and totally unexpected as one leaves the wild, empty coast and drives south into the wild, empty hills.

And about the oaks growing right down on the seashore and trailing their branches in salt water in the Sunart Forest in Ardnamurchan; the sweet chestnut groves of the Blean in Kent where the last armed battle in Britain was fought in 1838; the soggy-bottomed alder and hazel woods around Weymouth; Grizedale in Cumbria with its sometimes bizarre sculptures, including Goldworthy’s wonderful ‘Taking a Wall for a Walk’; the magnificent distortions of the ancient pollards at Burnham Beeches; the deep sweet silence of the Hammer Wood at Chithurst Buddhist monastery where the monks and nuns practise in the tradition of the Thai Forest Masters; the stunted downy willow and juniper heath of the montane forest at Ben Eighe . . .

. . . and about all the woods I did not walk in, the forests I do not know the names of, all beautiful, all different. Because you cannot learn the woods from a book – they call to a different kind of learning and knowing, an imaginative and creative engagement with the actual. From
this
sort of learning comes knowledge and love and an awareness of beauty.

The fairy stories are the same: I have been endeavouring to pick out common themes, but in fact in the Grimms’ collections alone there are 210 stories – and they are only a tiny fragment of a much older and more extensive heritage (like our remaining forests).
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Each one is different, and I have picked and chosen according to my themes and my memory.

I realise why so many of the forests and woods I have been writing about have been either here in Galloway or other woods I knew and played in as a child.
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It is because they are connected in my imagination to the fairy stories that informed my childhood or that I have absorbed into that inner world through regular and intimate connection. The same can be said of the fairy stories I love best, the ones that I have retold, rather than just discussed, here and elsewhere. Suddenly I do not feel I have ‘proved’ my thesis – that we have the stories we have
because
we are people whose roots are in the northern European forests – but this is because it is about a sort of knowledge that is not amenable to, not available to, the sort of ‘proof’ we have come to accept. It is an imaginative rather than a logical connection, and none the worse for that.

What seems worryingly possible is that we will diminish, degrade and even destroy these common roots, these shared stories, leaving us increasingly isolated and without any sense of collective identity; so I think that as well as getting the children (and the adults too) back into the woods, we also have to get the stories back into the social culture. I start to have a little fantasy: when a child’s birth is registered, together with a birth certificate they should also be given a book of fairy stories – a gift from the whole community to a new member. Although it is impossible to create a ‘bias-free’ text, these stories should be from the earliest sensible version or as literal a translation as possible (they should not contain my, or anyone else’s, attempts to make them more ‘morally correct’). They should be as they were when they were first written down. There are plenty of places and opportunities for examining the presumptions and developing new versions: that is what education is for. What we need is a body of work that is shared,
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that belongs to us all, that is part of our identity. The fairy stories have a number of claims to be this text: they are anonymous – we will not celebrate their author, but their tellers and audiences; they belong to everyone, not to any educated or wealthy elite; they are comprehensible to everyone, even children; they unite us with our fellow Europeans in a democratic and non-bureaucratic way – they are something we already have in common.

And for as long as we have the absurd ‘Citizenship Test’, everyone who passes it should also receive a copy of the same book – a simple symbolic way for the community to welcome new adult citizens on equal terms with newborn ones. There are not many books suited to all ages.
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At the same time, I decide, the new citizens, by birth or adoption, could be assigned to a tract of forest. This is not a ‘plant-a-tree’ scheme. They would not be given an individual tree: trees, especially saplings, die, which could very discouraging for the sensitive. I am trying to revive the tradition of ‘common land’, not encourage the individualism of personal ownership. Everyone would have a ‘special relationship’ with everyone else who had been assigned to that same hectare or so of the forestry estate of the nation. You might never go there, though you would have to know where it was or at least what its name was, but it would be nice to think that patterns and customs of visiting would develop and it would become part of people’s identity: your own forest-piece location, like your date of birth or your Zodiac sign, would establish bonds and mutual interests.