The wood is lit like a dream: the peripheries smoke in a bright mist. I enter it at Carie and start to walk south west up the slope away from the loch. I gain some height and then turn west along a track through pines frosted in lichen. It is the faintest of paths, sometimes just a dent in the moss where deer have pressed.
I am heading for the Dall burn which marks the eastern boundary of the Black Wood, a fragment of old pine forest that hangs below the south shore of Loch Rannoch like the keel of a boat. The wood is a remnant of the pine forest that swept across much of the Highlands over 5000 years ago. Only a few pockets of the forest remain, like dark sun-spots on the map. But the roots and stumps of this great sea of pines are still preserved in the peat bogs that spread and smothered these northern pinewoods as the climate moistened and warmed. These ancient roots appear along the beaches where storms have woken them and they emerge from the peat bogs like splinters working themselves free from skin. They lodge in the land like broken harpoon tips inside a whale.
I pause to examine the lichen that seems to cover every branch and twig. It is pale turquoise and verdigris and gives off a delicate light so the trees glow very faintly. I pick a handful of lichen and hold it up to my nose. It smells of leaf litter but the smell is drier and less earthy. It is the trace of a scent, like an old spoor.
There is someone I have followed into the wood. Seventy years ago the writer and naturalist Seton Gordon drove his car west from Loch Tummel dropping down to the village of Kinloch Rannoch. It was late September 1938. That morning, Gordon wrote, ‘a thin cap of mist clothed the summit of Schiehallion and as the mist rose and fell it showed at times a faint golden gleam as the sun lit up the fringes of the cloud’. In Munich the major European powers were gathering to discuss the annexation of the Sudetenland to Germany. Gordon remarks that it was ‘a time of the most tense international crisis, and the air was heavy with forebodings’. In the village he passed a police car distributing gas masks, the constables talking quietly to one another ‘as though they could scarcely credit this menace of imminent war’. Gordon left Kinloch Rannoch and crossed the river Tummel, travelling west along the south shore of the loch towards the Black Wood. He later wrote that, entering the Black Wood that day, he ‘forgot for a time the evil days through which Europe was passing in the strength and beauty of the old pines’.
For some weeks I had been reading about the Black Wood with the map spread out like a picnic rug over the floor. I discovered it held at least 150 types of lichen, that there were pine martin, red squirrel, black grouse, crossbill… As well as pine there were silver and downy birch, juniper, alder, rowan, aspen and willow. It seemed such a richly fascinating habitat. But what drew me most to the wood was reading that simple, dignified phrase of Gordon’s: ‘in the strength and beauty of the old pines’. It was a phrase that had a resonance, an echo that kept sounding in me. I wanted very much to walk amongst those trees, to experience their beauty. So the Black Wood fixed itself in my mind and started to draw me in. Seton Gordon would be my guide.
I am making slow progress towards the Dall. The path has dried up and the trees are thicker here. Clumps of spruce send me swerving like a hare to find a way through. I look for seams of light through the trees like a boat scanning for navigable leads in sea ice.
Seton Gordon published twenty seven books over a long life spent studying and photographing the wildlife of the Scottish Highlands. Many of his photographs are remarkable, born from cumbersome cameras; he took his first photograph of an eagle in 1904 when he was 18. His photographs of eagles on their nest published in Days With the Golden Eagle (1927) and The Golden Eagle: King of Birds (1955) are extraordinary for their intimacy and clarity. In a photograph taken in 1922 a parent bird lands on the nest with a grouse in its talons as a cloud of flies spits out from an old carcass on the eyrie, as if the landing eagle has set off an explosion there. Another beautiful photograph shows a pair of Greenshank changing places on their nest. As one bird rises from the eggs you see the dappled pattern of the shells matches the bird’s breast.
Many writers and naturalists have been inspired by Gordon’s work and followed him into the woods and hills. Above all he was an exemplary field naturalist. Attentive is the word I think of. That lovely verb: ‘attend’, to turn one’s ear to; to look after; to care for; to be in mind; to wait upon… Once, during a heat wave, Gordon scooped a snowball from high in the Cairngorms to cool the panting of a nesting dotterel. He stood behind the bird holding the snowball like a moon till she closed her bill and dozed in the grateful cold.
The writer Barry Lopez observed in his work about the history and natural history of the Arctic, Arctic Dreams, that ‘It is easy to underestimate the power of a long-term association with the land, not just with a specific spot but with the span of it in memory and imagination, how it fills, for example, one’s dreams.’ Seton Gordon’s work is like this. What Gordon sees in the land is a place suffused with memories, stories, myths… the entire span of it. During his visit to the Black Wood, Gordon found a pine at the edge of the loch that had been sawn off near its base. He describes how ‘out of curiosity’ he began to count its rings: it had lived 214 years. Only a little further along the loch side he is tacking again to the small burial ground of St. Michaels to explore the large stone there and recount its gruesome history. He spies the smallest hill burns as a robin might a worm and untangles the meaning of their Gaelic names. Over on the north shore of the loch he has suddenly spied Caochan na Fala, the streamlet of blood, and proceeds to tell us the story of the fifteenth century clan skirmish there that gave the burn its name.
In Arctic Dreams Lopez writes that ‘the Eskimo travels somewhat like the arctic fox, turning aside to investigate something unusual.’ This is how Gordon writes, twisting through the history of a place, doubling back on himself to investigate an alpine plant, a summer snow-field, to count the rings of a fallen tree.
I reach the Dall burn and cross on the forestry bridge. The trees here are all forestry plantation with the occasional solitary pine, relics from the old wood. They loom out of the mist like great beasts grazing amongst the smaller trees. Their bark is fissured and gnarled like an elephant’s skin. Crossing the burn I start to drop north along a muddy track back towards the loch. I pass stacks of timber piled up on either side of the path. The trees are stacked in the shape of an upturned boat like a great ark. It’s as if the loch had suddenly drained and left this giant boat stranded on the high ground.
West of the Dall the forestry starts to give way to the old wood. It is a movement into a different stratum, a fading through shades as birches begin to dilute the lines of spruces. Heather and blaeberry bushes grow beneath the trees and the huge pines wade amongst them. It is a movement too into a more breathable space; the wood here does not choke the light. As Gordon observed about the Black Wood: ‘in these natural-grown pine forests the trees do not grow so densely as to destroy the lesser vegetation, and the heather this day of late September, was purple beneath the old pines’.
Seton Gordon can strike a lonely figure. As the great authority on Gordon’s work Hamish Brown points out, for the first three decades of the twentieth century Gordon was the only full time practising naturalist in Britain. This at a time when attitudes to Britain’s wildlife, and in particular its birds of prey, ranged from the callous to the brutal. As the writer Jim Crumley (who has also walked with Gordon’s ghost) notes, Gordon stood apart as someone who looked at eagles ‘through camera and telescope rather than along the barrel of a shotgun’. Gordon was a pioneer: he observed behaviour in eagles that no one else had recorded. His work, to quote from Lopez once more: ‘pried the landscape loose from its anonymity’. But it was work that was borne by him adrift of prevailing attitudes. The acknowledged authority of birds of prey Leslie Brown reminds us that even the 1954 Bird Preservation Act had not the slightest effect in checking the abuse of golden eagles in Scotland. It is interesting to note that in 1946 Gordon along with the respected naturalist Frank Fraser Darling argued against a proposal to survey the eagle population. Their point was that ignorance on the subject was beneficial to the conservation of the birds, that any figures would simply fuel a call to reduce the population. Leslie Brown estimated in the 1970s that 80-90 pairs of golden eagles were destroyed or failed to breed every year throughout Scotland. Brown proportioned this as ‘forty pairs deliberately destroyed or disturbed by gamekeepers and shepherds; about thirty due to casual or unintentional human interference; and the rest to egg collectors and natural losses’. In the last decade of his life Gordon would have also been aware that the use of Dieldrin in sheep dips in the 1970s was dramatically reducing the breeding success of eagles in the West Highlands. The roll call of eagles trapped, poisoned and shot on his watch must have cut Gordon very deeply. When he published one of his most admired books The Cairngorm Hills of Scotland in 1925 he notes that the wild cat, raven, polecat and kite had vanished from those hills. Gordon was born at the end of a century in which golden eagles, wild cats and pine martins where bagged as vermin in Victorian game books. He turned 32 the year the last white tailed eagle was shot in Scotland in 1918. Two years earlier the last known pair of ospreys bred on Loch Loyne. Starting work as a naturalist with that bleak legacy, Gordon can seem like a lonely custodian of the wild places, a figure as isolated as the old kite’s nest he describes in the Cairngorm woods: ‘Another bird which the old trees must have known in their youth was the kite. It is now sixty years since the kite nested in the pine forests of the Cairngorms but one of the nests remains where it was built, in the fork of an old Scots fir.’
But even as he is cataloguing those species that have been driven out of the Cairngorms he is reminding us that ‘the golden eagle, fox, and falcon remain’. Above all the eagle, a bird he draws and redraws in his photographs and observations, as if to etch its survival into us:
‘When, for a minute, the storm lessened I saw the eagle perched on the hill-top opposite. On a knife-like ridge the great bird stood, seemingly indifferent to the bitter wind, then, as I watched, she (it was the hen bird) sprang magnificently into space and mounted on her broad wings on the frosty breeze.’
Days With the Golden Eagle
When Gordon left the Black Wood that day in 1938, he drove west along the shore road and called at a small post office. He paused here a while and listened in with the postmistress on the wireless to the launch of the Queen Elizabeth. I have stopped to rest in the heart of the old wood and find myself drawn to that image of the huge ship sliding from its berth and calving into the dock. In front of me are the remains of old canals dug in the nineteenth century to float timber out of the wood into Loch Rannoch. The canals are long filled in and are covered in mosses, ferns and liverworts. They look like green bobsleigh runs winding away through the trees. I think of how those great pines must have crashed into the loch below, the tremendous displacement of water before they righted into buoyancy, the same movement Gordon would have heard as he listened to the launch of the ship.
I sit down beside the old canal. My eye is drawn again to the lichens. I reach across to touch some growing on the bark of a pine. It is tougher than it looks and feels like worn dead skin. I try to trace the different patterns: snow crystals; down feathers; a crow’s feet crease on someone’s face; knuckle dents; a map of river tributaries.
The timber that floated down these canals was destined for building projects in towns like Perth and Dundee that were expanding to the east. The idea was that the timber would be floated to the foot of Loch Rannoch and then down the river Tummel and out into the Tay estuary. Much of the timber never made it that far, snagging in rapids along the river, clogging the waterways, as if reversing the salmon’s precarious journey to its spawning grounds.
The canal scheme failed but timber continued to be taken from the Black Wood. Wars increased the demand and Gordon laments in a single brief footnote: ‘As I revise this chapter (1942) many of the finest trees have been felled in the Black Wood.’ In 1947 the wood was purchased by the Forestry Commission, deer were brought under control and the young trees were able to establish. It became a protected Forest Reserve in 1975. The wood was attended to.
Not far from where Gordon must have stooped to age that felled tree, I stop to explore a huge pine. Its bark plates the trunk in wedges as thick as my arm. Dead pine needles stick to the bark caught in cobwebs that cover its cracks and gullies. The bark flakes easily when you touch it. The webs seem to be holding the bark in place like a hairnet. Lying down at the foot of the tree I tilt my head back and gaze up the length of the trunk. It looks like a dried river bed, a parched and cracked landscape.
I continue to drop slowly north west towards the loch shore. The black pines are tinted with red along the joins of the bark and where it has flaked off like sunburnt skin. Around the pines the slender birches bend and lean to one another like a room of people. I walk back along the shore road at dusk. Woodcock spring away from me out of the reedy verge. One is so close that I can see its long beak, ashen like the pale birches at its base, bright black at the tip as if it had been dipped in ink. The rusty brown rump of its tail is the same colour as the reds that tint the pine bark.
Before I left the wood I came across a pine with a rowan clinging to it. The silver trunk of the rowan was strapped to the dark pine like an aqualung. I realise I have not so much been following him as been borne by Gordon through the Black Wood today. I have leaned on him.
There is a book that I would love to have lent Seton Gordon. He may have even read it, but I can’t be sure. Published in 1967, J.A. Baker’s masterpiece The Peregrine is an extraordinary evocation of the spirit of the peregrine falcon and of the author’s ceaseless questing after the bird. I think Gordon would have admired and recognised Baker’s reverence for the peregrine and his ability to bind the bird and its landscape together. One sentence in Baker’s book rings out sharp as a peregrine against a blue winter sky: ‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there’. For Baker, pictures of birds of prey in books are ‘waxworks beside the passionate mobility of the living bird’. To my mind, Seton Gordon’s photographs capture that passionate mobility: they are never waxworks. To borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney, when I first saw Gordon’s photographs of eagles their ‘wildness tore through me’. Gordon’s writing and photographs always strive after what is really there.
Once, after listening to the song of a Greenshank, Gordon found, like a Highland Orpheus, he could reproduce the bird’s song on his bagpipe chanter. Returning again and again to his books, his photographs, to the paths he trod through the hills and woods, I pick out Seton Gordon’s own particular song and find it still resonating.
This essay is published in Seton Gordon’s Cairngorms: An Anthology (Whittles, 2009) www.whittlespublishing.com
Bibliography
Baker, J.A. – The Peregrine (Collins, 1967)
Crumley, Jim – Among Mountains (Mainstream, 1993)
Brown, Hamish – Seton Gordon’s Scotland: An Anthology (Whittles, 2005)
Brown, Leslie – British Birds of Prey (Collins, 1976)
Gordon, Seton – The Cairngorm Hills of Scotland (Cassell, 1925)
Gordon, Seton – Highways & Byways in the Central Highlands (Macmillan, 1949)
Gordon, Seton – In Search of Northern Birds (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1942)
Gordon, Seton – Days With the Golden Eagle [Introduction by Jim Crumley] (Whittles, 2003)
Gordon, Seton – The Golden Eagle: King of Birds (Collins, 1955)
Heaney, Seamus – Seeing Things (Faber, 1991)
Lopez, Barry – Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (Harvill, 1999)
Macfarlane, Robert – The Wild Places (Granta, 2007)
Steel, Pamela & Macdonald, Sarah – The Singing Forest (Loch Cottage, 2004)
