From the Forest
Authors: Sara Maitland
Table of Contents
Airyolland Wood
Thumbling
Saltridge Wood
The White Snake
The New Forest
Rumpelstiltskin
Epping Forest
Hansel and Gretel
Great North Wood
Little Goosegirl
Staverton Thicks
The Seven Swans’ Sister
Forest of Dean
The Seven Dwarves
Ballochbuie and the Forest of Mar
Rapunzel
Kielder Forest
Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf
The Purgatory Wood
The Four Comrades
Glenlee
Dancing Shoes
Knockman Wood
The Dreams of the Sleeping Beauty
Also by Sara Maitland
A Book of Silence
For Mildred Lee Watson – the true princess.
(No green vegetables were hurt testing this hypothesis.)
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March
Airyolland Wood
I
t is dark, a soft, rustling night and not too cold. Adam, my son, and I are sitting on a moss-covered rock eating baked beans. He has pitched the small tent with the grace that goes with experience; I have heated the baked beans on the camping stove with the clumsiness that comes from lack of practice. It is dark now, and above us the branches of the trees are darker still, patterning themselves against the clouds. There is not much wind, but enough to make the branches a little restless. We can hear the burn and the branches and some other unidentifiable night noises, but it is quiet and calm. Airyolland Wood is a magical place for us and we are enjoying ourselves.
Airyolland is a tiny triangle of ancient oak wood that clings to the side of a steep valley in Galloway. It is a little fragment of what was once a far more extensive forest and we are lucky to have it still. A small stream, crystal clear and fast, rushes down towards the river in a series of sharp little falls; each sudden drop has a miniature deep pool at the bottom of it and the sides of the pool are rich with ferns, even this early in the year. The oak trees are old and tangled, many multi-trunked from long-ago coppicing, and they are festooned with epiphyte ferns, with moss, and with epicormic twigs sprouting whiskery from the rough bark. Their buds are fattening now, but there are no leaves, and the moon, slipping out from the filigreed clouds, occasionally breaks through the bare branches. The ground is both steeply sloped and complexly humped and carved; it is scattered apparently casually with erratic boulders – some as large as garden sheds and some much smaller – pushed here by a glacier and left when the ice retreated. Immediately to the south, abutting this wood, just across the stream, is a fairly typical patch of forestry plantation, huddling up against the little wood; above it is a well-greened field with a farmhouse just out of sight. The Southern Upland Way runs through here, and – totally incongruously – the single-track railway line from Glasgow to Stranraer cuts through the bottom edge of the wood. And still Airyolland is a magical place for both of us and we are enjoying ourselves.
As we came down from the high moor where I live earlier this afternoon, I could sense the spring pushing up the valley to meet us. There were daffodils out in the village and new lambs in the fields along the river. The hawthorn in the hedges is showing bright, pale green buttons of buds, and a wych elm on the edge of the wood is covered in tiny red-gold balls which will flower before the end of the month. In the grass on the slope as we enter the oak wood itself there are the first primroses, and underfoot the darker green shoots of what will be ransom – wild garlic – later on.
But the trees themselves show fewer conspicuous signs: oak leafs out later than most trees, except ash,
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and the moss here is so thick and the rock so near the surface that there is surprisingly little undergrowth. The spring is coming nonetheless. Although it is still nearly ten days before we move the clocks forward, the evenings are getting longer and there are hard, pale little nubs down by the burn which will push up into fresh fern fronds over the coming month. Some of them are visibly beginning to do that exquisite fern thing: pushing up straight, sturdy stems and then uncoiling the tight spiral at the very top, so that briefly they look like Gothic bishops’ crosiers. Earlier, while it was still light, there was a new twitter of birds, and there has been no frost for over two weeks.
We are here to catch the early sun tomorrow morning as it rises over the moor. The sun will spill light, colour and long shadows through the branches and across the green moss. That is what Adam wants to photograph. We are also here trying to learn how to work together as adults. So far so good, except that I demanded that we brought a cafetière with us, and he can hardly be expected to approve of such foppish ways, especially as he does almost all the portering.
‘So,’ I say, into the dark, ‘which fairy stories do you know? Do you remember?’
‘Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow-white. Jack and the Beanstalk.’ There’s a short pause, and then, ‘The one with the swans and the shirts, Rumplestiltskin . . . the princess with that long hair . . .’
I am quite impressed. But it is somehow easier to remember these stories in this wood, as though the wood itself was reminding us.
‘Where did you learn them? Who told them to you?’ I ask.
‘You,’ he says. Then, ‘School perhaps. I don’t know really, I just know them.’
We expand our list of stories, dig for the details, re-run the plots and laugh a bit at some of them – for some reason, ‘The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage’ pleases us immensely, and we chant together, giggling, a suddenly mutually recalled snippet:
The bird encountered a dog and learned that this dog had considered the sausage free game and swallowed him down.
The bird was furious and accused the dog of highway robbery, but it was of no use, for the dog maintained he had found forged letters on the sausage and therefore the sausage had to pay for this with his life.
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This is a totally absurd little tale from the Grimms’ collection about some improbable housemates who fall out over the division of the domestic chores, and it has nothing to do with forests or magic. God knows what the psychoanalysts, or the universal folklorists, or the academic textual deconstructers, or anyone else for that matter, would make of it. It is important to remember how many of the fairy stories we do not remember; and it is worth thinking about which ones. A large number of them are funny and silly, but these do not tend to feature in the modern canon.
Later he says, ‘OK. Tell me about the book.’
I say, ‘Once upon a time it was all forest . . .’
It was all forest before the last Ice Age.
‘
Don’t call it the Ice Age
,’
he says
, ‘
call it . . .
’
It was all forest before the last
glaciations
, which is why we have coal mines – every coal seam is a dead forest, but we aren’t going there now. We’re going to begin about 10,000 years ago, when the ice began to retreat. For tens of thousands of years, in places up to 3,000 metres thick, it had pressed heavily on northern Europe and America; the sea level had dropped as more and more water was frozen up in the Arctic Circle and high in the mountain ranges; glaciers had pushed down from the mountains, carving new valleys with flat bottoms and steep sides. Now, gradually, it began to retreat, leaving behind a stripped land, ground down and naked.
As the ice retreated, living things moved in from the south, opportunist as always, and greedy for space. First lichens, those great pioneers that break up land, build soils, prepare the way; and then, gradually, mosses, fungi, ferns, and, last but not least, seed-bearing plants – low scrub, flowers, and eventually, trees. It takes thousands of years to make a good forest – but they did well in this wet northern land, and flourished and spread out. And so, once upon a time it was all forest. Forest enough to be lost in it for ever.
To be honest, this itself is a fairy story. It was never ‘all forest’. Once upon a time, before people knew how much of it had been forest, the wide open down lands of southern England and the bare hills of Scotland and the wide flat fens and the rich green shires were all thought to be ‘how it was’ – natural, timeless and somehow pure. People tended to like it, rather in the way they liked the idea that the statuary of the classical world or the interiors of the great medieval cathedrals came in pure stone, pristine and restrained, and on the whole were rather sorry to learn that originally they had been gaudily painted. More recently we realised that these open spaces had once been forested, and we took that story on board instead. Our forests grew deeper and denser – fertilised by Arthurian romances and the Wild Wood in
The Wind in the Willows
and tales of Robin Hood – until we knew that once it had indeed been ‘all forest’. And forest became the pure place of primal innocence, where children could escape from their adults, get away from the order and discipline of straight roads and good governance, and revert to their animal origins.
But it is more complicated than that really. There was more forest than there is now, but not as much as we like to think. Oliver Rackham, the leading academic of woodland history, believes that less than 7% of Scotland was ever ancient forest and that the great Caledonian Forest is as much a story as the Merlin who ran mad in it. More importantly perhaps, large swathes of this ‘forest’ were never the untrodden tanglewood of the imagination, but were inhabited, worked, used. Much of the so-called forest was what is more properly called ‘wood pasture’ – trees more widely spaced out, standing independently in grass, like savannah, cropped not just by deer and wild boar and aurochs, but later by cows and sheep and pigs. The wild animals followed the trees and grasses northwards from Europe easily enough, because Britain was still joined to the continent by a broad band of dry land until about 7000 BCE; and by the same route, Neolithic people followed the animals. There had in fact been people in Britain before the last glaciation, but they seem to have retreated southwards, fleeing the ice and the bitter cold. Now they returned, and almost as soon as they were established they started to manage and exploit the forest – for hunting, for grazing, for fuel, for food.
The same pattern was repeated across much of northern Europe, and indeed the people were much the same, too. The ice shrank back towards the polar regions, the forests chased it northwards as far as they could, and
homo sapiens
followed the forest. Right from the very beginning, the relationship between people and forest was not primarily antagonistic and competitive, but symbiotic. Until recently people could not survive without woodland, but perhaps more surprisingly, woodland flourishes under good human management – coppicing, for example, increases the amount of light that reaches into the depths of the forest, and so encourages germination and new growth and increases biodiversity. This was not wild wood that had to be ‘tamed’, but an infinite resource, rich, generous and often mysterious. The forests were protective too. Of course you can get lost in the forest, but you can also hide in the forest, and for exactly the same reason: in forests you cannot get a long view. In his history of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar comments that the Gauls defended themselves in forts within ‘impassable woods’, although they were clearly not impassable to the Britons, whatever the Roman military made of them.
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