From the Forest (39 page)

Glenlee is broadly typical of its period – a large country house rather than a ‘stately home’, with a curved drive rather than a formal eighteenth-century avenue. The area of park land around the house is marked by a collection of particularly fine trees, in a loosely mixed arrangement of deciduous hardwoods (oaks and beeches) and ‘exotic’ coniferous species; behind the house the woods crowd in, appearing more dense because the ground rises sharply and the trees behind the front rows are visible in an ascending sweep.

The whole effect is pleasing and welcoming, the possible sternness of the house softened by a pretty flagged terrace and a semi-formal garden. But the real reason I have come here is that, behind the house, running up the increasingly steep valley side, is a romantic gorge and a fairy-tale forest in the high Romantic manner, as Lugar clearly visualised it.

Cathy Agnew and I walk along a mown grass path from the drive, past the old walled garden, and begin to climb through a shrubbery and then into the wood itself. We are wearing boots; our dogs are running free and excited by proper country smells: this is definitely a wood, not a garden. As we pass beyond the grassy shrubbery and under what would in summer be the green canopy, although at present, with the trees bare, it is an open network of branches and twigs, the path changes from grass to trodden beech mast, red-gold even in the depths of winter. The trees close in. At this point the large trees are predominantly beeches, oaks, and various conifers, which of course carry their dark needles even in bottom ebb of the year, but there is an understory of rowan, hazel, holly and rhododendron. It is a small wood; at this time of year, I can usually see through the trees to the old stone wall which encloses the wood and adds to the sense of being in a secret, private little world.

At first the path leads upwards quite gently, and then, unexpectedly, we are standing looking down into a deep, narrow ravine; and at the bottom of it there is a tumble of water, dashing through and over rocks. A substantial burn has carved itself a deep, almost vertically sided chasm through which it charges, noisy and exuberant. There are two wonderful waterfalls: not little dribbles, but wide white sheets of hurtling water falling over broken black rock into deep, turbulent pools. Because of the way the burn – and therefore its ravine – twists and turns, from one side of the chasm you can look at these falls straight on, and there are rustic benches to allow you to do so in comfort. Cathy says that in the very cold weather at Christmas the water froze and the ice hung silent and motionless in glassy icicles down the great granite slabs; but on the day I am there it is fast and makes a deep music, filling the glen with a sense of mysterious energy.

The path goes on climbing to the top of the wood, winding round trees and rocks. It is laid out in a narrow horseshoe shape, running up one side of the torrent, then curling round and returning down the other side. There are heaps of dead rhododendron branches obscuring the views, where they have been trying once again to curb the shrub’s invasive progress; but because of the unusual mixture of the trees and the climatic conditions here, the whole wood is home to many rare mosses and lichens, and has been designated an SSSI. To assist in the conservation of these species, all the dead wood here is left
in situ.
In some ways this is fortunate because it means less maintenance work, dragging the old wood out and burning it. At the same time, this ‘natural’ approach of benign neglect adds a further touch of apparent wildness and romance. Down below the path, across the bottom of the gorge, dead trees that have crashed across the burn look like small bridges, thick with moss and epiphyte ferns. At the top end, the wood is boundaried by an old mossy drystone wall, and views open out onto the high moor – a startling, abrupt change in the mood and even the quality of the light. The burn enters the wood under the little road I came along in the car, but inside the wall there is a footbridge to carry the path over the burn without needing to leave the wood. It is a little wooden bridge, more rustic and quaint than the later wrought-iron one over Queen Victoria’s cascade at Ballochbuie. From it I can look down onto three or four tiny islands in the burn, each standing well above the water level, with vertical square-cut sides that looked almost artificially levered into place, so perfect were they; but Cathy Agnew assures me that they were natural. Each one is just big enough to sustain a little ‘arrangement’ of plants, like a tiny Japanese garden – a single small rowan and a clump or two of ferns; a pile of broken stones, green with moss and tan with the fallen leaves and detritus of the wood. In the autumn, precious, delicious chanterelle mushrooms (
Cantharellus cibarius
) grow on these rocks, bright gold funnels with their heavily ridged undersides; but they are more or less impossible to gather, protected by the steep-sided rock and leaping torrents of water. Across the bridge the main path turned back towards the house, along the other side of the gorge, with the same views from a different angle. It is wilder here, with more hazel trees, and their broken nut shells on the ground bear witness to the presence of red squirrels, now tucked away in hibernation.

Glenlee has one particular magical aspect. The trees here, and especially the specimen conifers, grow to vast heights. The tallest European larch in Britain
¹⁶
was planted on a small, flat piece of ground right beside the burn, its trunk rising through the ferns and mosses, which are green even in this drear season; it soars upwards – branchless and apparently perfectly straight; from the path along the top of the gorge I can look down to its base, which seems far below me, elegant and slim beside the tangled water; but looking up, I realise I am still much nearer to its base than to its crown. Far overhead, the branches begin, and the dark head of the tree seems to float high against the grey sky. When we scramble down the side of the ravine to stand beside it I become aware just how massive and solid the trunk really is, making me feel tiny and temporary; but from the path above the ravine, the extraordinary upward thrust of the trunk looks ethereal, delicate, impossible. The larch is not alone. There are two Douglas firs that are even taller, and they probably still have a good deal higher to grow. These conifers are of such distinction that the eminent tree historian Alan Mitchell, of the Forestry Commission’s research wing, has visited and measured them at various times over a thirty-year period and written about them, so they are well authenticated, should they need it.
¹⁷

When Lugar first admired the setting of Glenlee, the wood was here; it formed part of his picturesque vision for the house. It would then have been predominantly oak, with hazel and rowan mixed in. There are indeed a number of oaks around the house, as well as in the glen, which are evidently ancient – much older than the house or the laying out of the grounds – the sort of oak that Repton would have recommended keeping. It seems probable that the beeches were added fairly soon after the house was built. But the conifers were planted throughout the century as fashion and enthusiasm dictated. For example, the first Douglas fir imported from the northwest coast of the USA was planted at Drumlanrig (the home of the Duke of Buccleuch in Dumfriesshire) in 1848. The ones here at Glenlee
cannot
be older than that – and all the evidence is that they were planted in the 1860s and 70s.

In this sense the glen here was fortunate: it seems to have had successive generations of tree-planting enthusiasts, and over nearly two hundred years, they have developed and cared for a unique and lovely thing.

It is not wild. Red Riding Hood’s wolf would be hard put to sneak through the undergrowth on swift and silent paw, never mind locate an aged granny in an isolated cottage. Hansel and Gretel would find it well-nigh impossible to get lost in this forest, or stumble upon a witch’s gingerbread house (although, as a matter of fact, the land around the glen has several little estate houses, including the lodges, which were built in the Gothic style and could fool the imagination on first sight). It is not wild but it is a place of enchantment.

I have been trying to work out why these artificial Victorian woods are so redolent of the atmosphere of fairy stories, and I think there are at least three reasons.

The first is the simplest. As I have already mentioned, the two are simultaneous. The printed form of the stories was introduced to English readers and quickly achieved wide popularity and cultural reach at exactly the time that these sorts of woods were becoming fashionable. From the late eighteenth century there was a great deal of cultural exchange between the various German states and Britain – the British royal family was Hanoverian and all the monarchs had German consorts. The cultural closeness was also influenced by anti-French sentiment – first in opposition to the Revolution (which began in 1787) and subsequently in the anti-Napoleonic alliances. The Romantic movement emerged out of this cross-fertilisation; for example, Goethe (1749 – 1832), the great hero of the movement, was profoundly influenced by
The Poems of Ossian
by James Macpherson, both directly and in his own explorations of
Volkspoesie
(folk poetry). These poems, published in the 1760s, and which Macpherson claimed were translations from the original ancient Celtic (although this is still much disputed), not only influenced the Romantic movement generally, but more specifically inspired the study of regional folklore, directing the attention of scholars like the Grimm brothers themselves towards these sorts of works. At the same time, the German ‘romantic woodland gardens’ and picturesque landscapes were inspired by the earlier ‘English Garden’ style: Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell (1750-1823), often dubbed the ‘father of German landscape gardening’, was trained in England. The two impulses were closely connected to each other, as well as connecting the German and British Romantic movements.

Thus, both the idea of collecting folk tales as ‘authentic’ expressions of a deep and ancient sensibility and the picturesque aesthetic which informed ornamental woods like Glenlee grew out of the same historical impulse. Not surprisingly, then, the illustrations of the first published versions of the Grimm stories, and the many other collections that followed swiftly, showed forests that looked very like these woods. The influence of these illustrations on the way we visualise fairy stories is profound.

All the great collections of fairy stories have illustrations – it has become almost part of the genre.
¹⁸
The Grimms themselves were initially resistant to this idea, apparently worrying that it might undermine their scholarly and historical intention, but they were persuaded by their publisher, and from the early editions onwards the collections were always illustrated. Early German illustrators tended to go for interior scenes, perhaps influenced by the German title:
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
(‘children’s and house [or home] stories’). Philipp Grot Johann (1841-1892), their principal illustrator, who was explicitly proud of his work on the tales, took a subtly satirical approach; for instance, in his illustration for in ‘The Devil With The Three Golden Hairs’, the Devil is pictured reading the stock market report from a newspaper. But later illustrators, especially in the English translations, tended to focus more on the outside – and therefore inevitably on forest scenes. Above all, the influence on our imaginations of two illustrators – Walter Crane (1845-1915) and Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939) – cannot be exaggerated. Both these artists were heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement – Crane, indeed, was a founder member and worked directly with William Morris. Their forest pictures are full of twisted, gnarled trees and especially of dark coniferous evergreens, exactly like the picturesque artificial woodlands that were also enthusiastically embraced by Arts and Crafts followers, who saw in them something more ‘natural’ and unsullied than the formal gardens of neat borders and bedding plants or ‘un-English’ classical landscapes.

Walter Crane was one the first artists to define the difference between easel painting and illustration: by removing frames from his pictures and designing them as part of the text, he not only changed the nature of children’s books, he was also able to insert his imaginative vision more deeply and directly into the fairy story.

But perhaps Arthur Rackham was even more influential. Rackham was an immensely successful illustrator of a wide range of books – from
Gulliver’s Travels
and the Lambs’
Tales from Shakespeare
to Wagner’s
Siegfried.
In 1900 he illustrated an edition of the Grimms’ tales
¹⁹
with 95 line drawings, and this was so successful that the 1909 revised edition increased his contribution to 40 colour plates and 62 line drawings. The forests in these pictures are pure Arts and Crafts renderings of the picturesque: he might have made his sketches at Glenlee.
²⁰
Although he did not abandon the ‘pretty’ Victorian fairies with pointed toes and delicate filigreed wings, he often broke away from these stereotypes to show much darker, harsher woodland, filling his forests with both gnarled tees and gnarled gnomes and dwarves, with anguished, suffering heroines and with a general atmosphere of the uncanny, neither light nor sweet.

A second connection, though a more complicated and intellectual one, is that both fairy stories and woods like these have been made and developed by a rather similar process. We no longer know the true origins of the stories – we know they are a great deal older than 1812; we know, as I have discussed throughout the book, that in collecting and transcribing them, the Grimm brothers changed them. They changed them formally – from an oral to a written form; they changed them subconsciously in relation to their own lives and concerns; and they changed them further quite consciously and deliberately in order to ‘improve’ them for specific audiences. This process has continued ever since – one of my favourite examples is the young ‘feminist’ heroine in Disney’s 1991
Beauty and the Beast
who loves her Beast as much for his library as for the luxury of his castle.
²¹
Since 1812 we have come to want our magic more difficult to perform and more spectacular in its effects; we want our heroines more active and our heroes less military; we want justice to be gentler and morals and religion to be less overt. We import, as it were, fairy godmothers and insert them like exotic trees into the old stories. We weed out the unwanted tropes like birds pecking people’s eyes out or natural mothers ever being cruel. But we plant all these new details into the core of the old story – just as the Victorians planted New World giant firs, Himalayan rhododendrons and Japanese maples through their ancient woods. And when you add something brand new, something which does not belong naturally in the place you put it, you are doing some subtle magic and creating some very subtle effects.