1.
The Zombie Forest
Pinus sylvestris, Scots pine
GLEN LOYNE, SCOTLAND: 57° 04′ 60′ N
As the ice retreated to higher ground at the beginning of the current interglacial period, the boreal forest set off in pursuit. Plants that had not been seen on the islands of Britain for thousands of years began, gradually, to return. Ice persisted on the uplands of north Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, but in the valleys and the plains, lichens formed a crust on the exposed rocks. Then came mosses with their creeping fur, laying the ground for grasses and sedges first, soon to be followed by the pioneer shrubs of hazel, birch, willow, juniper and aspen. This boreal system worked its way north, across the land bridge where the English Channel now is, a sweeping tide of green on the heels of the ice, the cocktail of early seeds dispersed according to the natural cycles of wind, rain and the migratory patterns of animals, including humans.
Ten thousand years later, I follow. Pointing the car north from Wales, I head to where the map says the treeline has come to a halt at its present position: Scotland. Driving to Fort William through the spectacular soaring valleys along the west coast of Scotland, the rocky outcrops of the peaks appear stationary, like the roof of a cathedral merging with the sky. The rich green slopes roll back and forth with every bend in the road; scree tumbles in long runnels like waterfalls from hidden lakes of rocks high above. Sunlight shears the view, one minute blinding, the next revealing a promised land.
It is not until I am actually there that the contradiction strikes: I am searching for the upper limit of the forest, but where is the forest? Scotland’s forbidding hills, rank upon rank of shadowed slopes rising out of the mist, are such a durable a sight in collective memory and culture it is almost impossible to imagine them otherwise, and yet Britain was once, briefly, an island of trees. Caledonia, as it was named by the Romans, means “wooded heights,” but its “great wood” has become a mythical thing. Scotland’s bare hills are both epitaph and warning: this is where the commodification of nature leads.
To ask what is happening to the treeline in such a ruined landscape is a profoundly political question. On paper, Scotland is held to be the southern and western limit of the Arctic treeline in Europe; estimates based on temperature and growing seasons suggest that here it should be at 2,300–2,400 feet.1 Stumps have been excavated at 2,600 feet dating from a slightly warmer era four thousand years ago.2 But how the treeline is responding to warming now is hard to say because nearly all the trees were cut down. Efforts to restore Scotland’s great wood are under way, “re-wilding” the hills and planting trees, partly to allow them to find their level and re-establish a natural transition zone between the forest and the moor. But such changes are controversial. How we see the present and the future often depends on our understanding of the past. What is natural? What is being restored? Meanwhile, as humans debate ecological history, global warming gathers force, threatening to render our meager response irrelevant.
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The treeline’s first wave, or primary, vegetative cover after the last ice age resulted in a patchy forest that the foremost historian of British landscape, Oliver Rackham, calls wildwood.3 This was a dynamic shifting community of plants—at its southern end connected to mainland Europe by the land bridge, and at its northern frontier petering out into the moorland tundra of the “flow” country in the far north of Scotland and the scattered rocks of the Hebrides, where the dry cold of the Arctic polar vortex wrestles with the Gulf Stream for influence.
This wildwood was rampant but precarious. Birch was quick to establish but transitory, giving way to other, bigger and bolder trees. As the evolving society of the forest worked out its own logic, a steady state would emerge with a particular tree or trees dominant. In much of southern England this was lime, in the north and Wales it was a mix of hazel and oak. In the Highlands of Scotland the apex tree was originally oak. But the steady state of the wildwood could be upset and tipped into another cycle by an influx of a new species or a change in the weather. The introduction of the pine was one of these.
Around 8500 BCE pollen records show Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) arriving suddenly across Britain, colonizing a corridor up the west coast of the British Isles, nosing its way into the inlets and fjords of Scotland and then across the straths and valleys and up into the mountains. Pine out-competed the birch and oak that had generously worked up sufficient soil for it to flourish. So successful was the pine that the birch disappeared almost completely for thousands of years, surviving only in a remnant zone in the flow country north of what is now the city of Inverness.
This pine wood spread across Scotland, reaching its apex of around 80 percent of the land area, according to Rackham, around 4500 BCE. Recent archaeology, pollen analysis and even the 7,000-year-old bones of pine trees preserved in bogs have fed debate about the scale and the fate of Scotland’s once magnificent wildwood.4 Conservationists are seeking a record to guide their attempts at “ecological restoration.” Opponents are seeking evidence that the trees were eliminated through natural causes and that the current status quo of grouse moors and deer parks is just as deserving of the designation “natural.” At issue, it seems, is one vision of nature over another, neither of which attributes much influence to humans for creating the shape of the landscape in the first place, and yet the history of humans and the history of the forest is deeply entwined.
Before driving north, I read a scientific paper by Lithuanian researchers demonstrating that the DNA of the Scots pine in the eastern half of Scotland came from a refugium—a place where species survived the last ice age—near Moscow around 9000–8000 BCE.5 Previous DNA analysis has shown that the surviving pines in the west of Scotland came from the Iberian peninsula in modern-day Portugal and Spain. In both cases the seed migrated to Scotland on timescales hundreds of times faster than is possible through natural succession. The most likely vehicle for such rapid migration was humans.
There is a myth in Celtic folklore—with an apparent grain of truth—that when the Celts colonized Scotland they met Ukrainians coming the other way. For the Celts, the pine was a sacred tree with a myriad of uses. The pine was ailm in the Celtic alphabet, the ogham script, and it is very likely that they brought it with them from Ireland and Wales. It was perhaps sacred too for the mysterious Ukrainians, who were part of the Celtic kingdom, “the people of the Danube” in old Irish, the only others with red hair. For humans so tied to nature and reliant on plants it would make sense to travel with your own habitat. Something twenty-first-century humans might soon wish we were able to do.
The result, in the present day, is two distinct genetic communities of Scots pine in Scotland divided by the Highlands. They have yet to cross-pollinate and conservationists are keen that they do not since the genetic and chemical distinctiveness has consequences for other species that rely on the keystone of the pine. Insects like wood ants, for example, can taste differences in resin and will choose particular trees as a result. Leaf chemistry, flower timings and growth forms are all different. The crested tit remains east of the Cairngorms, embedded in its environment. However, the conservationists needn’t worry yet. The risk of interbreeding is minimal since the fragments of surviving forest are spread out and very small. Less than 1 percent of Scotland’s old-growth pine woods remain.
Rackham argues that the pine wood never stretched from shore to shore, but it certainly covered most of Scotland until Mesolithic humans began to clear the forest for agriculture, hunting and construction. Managing the forest through felling, clearing or burning for game played a role in creating biodiverse habitats of heath and moor, but also set the stage for the creeping blanket bog that has become upland Britain’s signature landscape. The bog is, in a sense, a ruined ecosystem as tree clearance has allowed minerals and iron to be washed into the lower layers of the soil, creating a pan impermeable to water. Unable to drain, the tundra-type landscape becomes waterlogged, and plants do not fully decompose, forming peat.
The pastoralist indigenous crofters, who farmed the Highlands till the clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, traditionally moved their cattle between the lowland forest and the moor. The clearances and the subsequent expansion of Victorian shooting estates for grouse and deer are often blamed for the deforestation of the Highlands, but while heather burning and overgrazing by deer in the absence of apex predators like wolves, lynx and bears did indeed prevent the trees from coming back, much of the open upland landscape had already been formed by clearing all the trees.
Traditional custom and practice, inherited from the Celts, respected the woods. Pine was a renewable source of building materials, fir candles for light, tar and resin for tanning and waterproofing, fibers for ropes and bark for kindling, flour and medicine. Until well into the 1960s, pine sap provided tallow for candles, forest timber was used for railway sleepers and boats, and pipes were made from hollowed out trunks. Indigenous systems apportioned a host of rights to goods provided by the forest—hazel rods, firewood, timber, mushrooms and animal fodder—and there were strict moral and financial penalties for wasteful coppicing, for unsanctioned pannage (the grazing of animals in common woods) and so on. As many other more recent episodes of tropical deforestation show, indigenous use of the forest is often the most reliable form of conservation. The so-called tragedy of the commons (that humans cannot be trusted to manage a common resource sensibly) might be a problem for individualistic societies unable to restrain pollution and overexploitation, but as a historical explanation for the British landscape it doesn’t hold except perhaps as a retrospective ideological justification for the real tragedy to follow: the enclosure of common land.6
Property rights over land was originally a Roman idea resisted by both Greeks and Celts, who maintained that nature could never be owned by humans, only used. Hundreds of years after the Romans left Britain this notion cleared the path for foreign landlords and the extreme concentration of land ownership in Scotland today.7 The woods had been used by the clans. They needed the forest. Indeed the word “forest” and its endurance on maps despite the lack of any trees, is an echo of its earlier meaning as an unfenced area protected for hunting and common use, more latterly by the Crown. The shift from rights of usage to rights of ownership, seen as the mercantile spirit of northern Europe inveigled or imposed itself across the world, was, it seems, the crucial shift, as forests ceased to be seen as sacred places of wonder, mystery and sustenance and instead became a standing crop with a value expressed in pounds, shillings and pence calculated by the acre and the ton.
Scotland and Ireland and their natural resources, foremost among them their remaining timber, were the front line of that early capitalist desire that expressed itself in colonialism. English kings needing ships, houses, carts and cathedrals from the medieval period onward—well before Henry Hudson and John Davis were dreaming of the Northwest passage and Sir Walter Raleigh of the Orinoco—first looked to Wales and then their colony of Ireland. Then, with the Scottish and English Crowns united and Ireland’s woods gone, it was to Scotland that they turned.
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Along Loch Linnhe, low cotton-candy clouds scud between the peaks of Ardgour across the water. The peninsula holds the most southwesterly remaining relict pine wood, within the estate of Conaglen, a property given over to deer stalking. In a hollow between hills lies the last scrap of forest to which former generations owed so much of their wealth. An observer commenting on the huge amounts of timber being imported into Ireland from Scotland wrote in 1686, “there used manie shipps to come to that countrie of Ardgoure, and to be loaded with firr jests, masts and cuts. This glen is verie profitable to the Lord.”8
The green hills sheer into the black depths of the loch. A train rattles along beside the water heading for the end of the line. The wealth of the forest even shaped the geography of Scotland. The River Spey was dammed and altered to facilitate the floating of logs to the sawmills and shipbuilders of Speyside until steam railways put the floaters with their particular vocabulary and their currachs—a light frame boat covered with hide for the return journey upstream—out of business. On the west coast the timber came out along General Wade’s military road and then the railway that terminates at Fort William at the head of Loch Linnhe.
Beyond Fort William, the famous Road to the Isles opens up. Majestic sonorous glens beneath blue peaks fall away to face Skye across the sea at Knoydart. Instead of timeless, this landscape now appears apocalyptic to me: the victim of a catastrophe. It is perhaps a miracle that any old-growth forest has survived at all. However, due to the odd enlightened laird, far-sighted forestry official or sheer remoteness, eighty-four fragments of native Caledonian pine wood remain. These are the “granny pines,” gnarled and apparently half-dead characters that animate the otherwise blank canvas of some Scottish hillsides. The oldest known specimen is 540 years old and grows in a remote boggy valley called Glen Loyne. These are the only trees that were large enough to escape browsing after the wolves were extirpated and the deer and sheep allowed to run riot.
There is something profoundly wrong with a solitary pine. Pines are social creatures; they rely on other trees for sharing resources through fungal networks. When mature, pines transport carbon underground to support young saplings, and in old age carbon and nutrients travel in reverse, the young trees helping out the older ones. The natural lifespan of a Scots pine is up to six hundred or seven hundred years within the healthy network of a forest. Scotland’s surviving granny pines are mostly under four hundred. Major dips in the pollen record suggest this is because of the massive extraction of trees from 1690 to 1812. According to dendrochronologist Rob Wilson, “You can still see the effects of the Napoleonic Wars in the structure of the forest.” But there is another factor.
Lone trees are prone to sudden dying before the end of their normal life expectancy. Could it be that these matriarchs of our oldest forests, these stewards of our ancient ecosystems and midwives of so much industrial wealth are, in their old age, lonely? Native American stories tell of solitary trees “speaking” to humans of their loneliness, asking people to plant them neighbors. Are the granny pines missing the companionship, and the meals on wheels, provided by their children? Are they mourning the ghost of the forest?
I leave the car at the shoulder of a single-track dead-end road. The valley unfolding below holds the story of the latest iteration of Scotland’s encounter with industrial capitalism, a widescreen landscape of destruction. The hillside opposite has the camouflaged look of “muir-burn”—uneven brown and fawn stripes created by heather burned to encourage grouse for shooting. This would otherwise regenerate into woodland and looks like a roughly shaven scalp. Lower down are the scars of a mono-crop spruce plantation, a comparative desert devoid of biodiversity; the dark military-green trees planted too close together to allow any other life. The hillside has been ravaged where machines have felled trees before they have reached maturity, leaving great brown furrows down which the precious topsoil flows in boiling ribbons to the loch. Further along is a derelict larch plantation that someone forgot to thin, the trunks branchless, half the trees fallen and collapsed in on each other, wind-thrown because they have no root strength. On the loch bob pontoons, and between them the surface of the water is stitched with the floats of an intensive salmon farm. Plastic barrels of feed are piled twenty feet high on the bank. And above them steel pylons fizzing with sixty-six kilovolts march along the shore all the way to the hydroelectric power station at Kingie, a red and yellow hard-boiled sweet atop a concrete dam. Even the loch is artificial: the landscape as the ultimate resource, seen only through the bloodless eyes of an accountant. There is nothing natural in the view apart from a clutch of willows by the stream in the foreground.
A footpath sign points north, uphill. Affixed below is a warning:
TAKE CARE: You are entering remote, sparsely populated, potentially dangerous mountain country. Please ensure that you are adequately experienced and equipped to complete your journey without assistance.
On the other side of the glen begins one of the remotest stretches of wildernesses in Britain; you can walk for three days to Knoydart without sight of a road or house. It is why the granny pines of Glen Loyne are still there. Getting them out of the glen was such hard work, they were left till last, then probably forgotten.
The muddy track wends its way between a stream and a deer fence. There is one other set of boot prints in the mud. They are not fresh. Inside the fence, birch, willow and pine seedlings seem to be doing well. It looks odd, a boxed area three times more overgrown than the rest of the hill, but outside the fence are sheep and deer. This is the front line of ecological restoration in Scotland, the divide between those invested in an economy and a landscape based on commercial forestry and shooting, and conservationists committed to defending the trees from being eaten. The struggle has all the passion—and barbed wire—of a war.
Copyright © 2022 by Ben Rawlence
