Jim Crumley looks for the roots of our history in The Great Wood
Nature writer, poet and columnist Jim Crumley's new book The Great Wood explores the past, present and future of Scotland's forests.
Native forest near Glen Feshie in the Cairngorms.
- By Helen Brown
- Published in the Courier : 21.12.11
- Published online : 25.12.11 @ 11.14am
If there is a symbol of the landscape of Scotland, its story, its history, its character — and the mysticism that surrounds it — it would have to be the Fortingall Yew.
The amazing, ancient — 5,000 years old, so they say — and strange tree that still lives and grows in the churchyard at Fortingall, west of Aberfeldy, exercises a powerful influence on the imagination.
Dundee-born writer Jim Crumley acknowledges that it has come to mean something special to him.
"I'd visited it before but when I thought about doing this book, I went again and I found it astonishingly moving. You can go there and eyeball it and read up what there is about it — not too much, actually — but it's the fact of this poor wretch of a survivor that has been there 5,000 years or more, a shadow of what it was," he said.
"But still there, still existing and still giving us the kind of perspective on nature and man that we rarely get the chance to experience at first hand.
"I defy anybody to go and sit even for half an hour in front of it and not have their thoughts turned upside down.
"The little white markers round it show where the trunk once was — but no one ever mentions its height. John Muir [the Scottish-born naturalist and wilderness preservation pioneer] and others dropped suggestions in their writing about trees being immortal and this is living evidence of something approaching that.
"There must have been or must be others but this one stands out. It's an amazing thing to get your head around, these trees, these literal landmarks outlasting human influence and time.
"People before us used trees in ways we don't now — as religious symbols, centres of activity, having a meaning beyond the obvious practical or aesthetic uses. The significance of them has been lost or distorted but it's still there."
Once described as "the best nature writer working in Britain today", as well as being a popular regular columnist with The Courier, Jim has come to this latest book via his previous work The Last Wolf. In it, he explored the place of the wolf in Scotland — real and mythical — and reckons that The Great Wood really emerged out of that book in a natural, organic way — the very antithesis of not seeing the wood for the trees.
"By travelling around the country looking at the old strongholds of the wolf, by definition I was looking at old forests and they began to fascinate me for themselves. I'd long had an interest in native woodland, and opinions about it, and it seemed the next essential thing to explore."
The Great Wood — Caledonia Silva, as the Romans called it — existed long before those particular empire-builders reached our shores but it is through the prism of their experience that we tend to see the story of Scotland's forests.
Its image in myth and legend is of a vast, impenetrable, almost jungle-like area, wild in name and nature. But although Jim reckons that there were huge forests across the country, he eventually pin-points for very different characters of wildwood across the length and breadth of Scotland, he also thinks that the Romans had, by that stage of their international existence, bitten off a little bit more than they could collectively chew.
"Scotland was at the outer edge of empire and it was probably useful as propaganda to come up with the notion that this area was untameable and unapproachable, too dangerous even for them.
"Now, whether they invented that notion or wee painted men whispered their myths and legends in their ears is hard to tell. But the idea of this other world, where humans were ill-advsied to venture, was alighted on with some enthusiasm by them.
"And they never went any further. It links to the wolf story in other ways, too. The wolf's reputation was so detached from the reality of the animal and the forests are the same. Scotland's geology and conditions wouldn't have sustained the kind of non-tropical 'jungle' described by many commentators.
"A healthy population of predatory mammals, which Scotland undoubtedly had, needs the right kind of prey and that would largely be grazing animals which couldn't survive in jungle conditions.
"They'd need grassland, water, the kind of partly open country that is the exact oppostive of something dark, tangled and unreachably dense. It's not clear how these legends grew up but it's been a fascination to me to investigate all that, finding the evidence. "
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