From the Forest (48 page)

9 Kielder Forest

1
I had wimped out on this occasion, declining the tent and insisting on a proper Bed and Breakfast establishment. Rough camping in England is a more dubious enterprise than in Scotland – and trying to do it somewhere we did not know and would not reach until dark seemed too much.

2
This creates a slightly odd situation – the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1989 meant that various issues were ‘devolved’ to that assembly while others (defence, for example) remained in the hands of Westminster. One area that was devolved was forestry. Already there have been some divergences of practice – most recently, the present government’s consultation document which outlined possibilities for selling off (or long leasing) much of the Forestry Commission’s estate only applied to England and Wales. The Scottish Parliament has made it clear that it has no plans to reduce the Commission’s role. In Kielder, uniquely, this could lead to obvious management problems.

3
These small rectilinear blocks in the middle of moors and hill country are often called ‘pepper pots’. The very worst version of this is sometimes called ‘pyjama planting’, where larch and spruce are planted in separate but adjoining straight strips, and from even fairly short distances the difference in the colours of the two trees creates a very weird striped effect.

4
For example, far more than most private landlords, in Scotland the Commission has embraced not just the letter but the spirit of the access laws of 2004, opening up access to enormous swathes of rural countryside, and positively welcoming visitors, especially walkers.

5
For good measure, the Commission was also given research and training functions.

6
Not quite all, actually – because, as I have already explained in the case of Epping, a few of these had already been hived off into various different sorts of arrangements.

7
De Re Rustica
is a massive 12-volume work, fortunately preserved in its entirety, and one of our principal sources for agricultural practice in the Roman Empire. Very little is known about Columella: he was probably born in Cadiz, served in the army, and on retirement took up farming.

8
Although not highly valued now, poplar wood was extensively used in earlier periods – for example, for making shields, because it was as sturdy as oak but considerably lighter.

9
John Reid,
The Scots Gard’ner
(Edinburgh, 1683).

10
This figure has been contested. C. Smout argues that a good deal of scrub and small woodland was not counted properly, and that the actual date is sometime in the 1880s.

11
This is a management-level job. McLaughlin has a degree in forestry from New Rigg College in Cumbria. Although there are still senior managers who began ‘axe in hand’ as part of the workforce, the Forestry Commission increasingly recruits at graduate level.

12
Mason, Kerr and Simpson,
What is Continuous Cover?
(Forestry Commission internal note, October 1999).

13
Ninety per cent of forestry wood for sale is still clear felled.

14
See Chapter 2.

15
Rackham,
Woodlands
, p. 466. He goes on: ‘Do similar considerations apply to wind farms, now being objected to on similar grounds?’ It is heroic of me to even raise this question, since a highly likely place for ‘blanket’ wind-farm construction would be precisely where I live – an upland region with very good winds and a very small population. Nonetheless, it is worth thinking about: would it be better to have six hundred wind turbines on these hills as closely grouped as possible, and leave all the other hills and moors free? The Forestry Commission Scotland has just granted wind-farm development and exploration licences to a number of energy companies, so now is a good time to raise this possibility.

10 The Purgatory Wood

1
They argue (truly) that it is non-biblical, and sometimes that it is explicitly forbidden in Jeremiah 10:1-5.

2
Mabey,
Flora Britannica
, p. 125.

3
There is, in fact, considerable doubt as to whether Sawney Bean ever existed at all – and if so, when. The reports are confused and inconsistent. Nonetheless, he is well established in local folk legend; his story was rehearsed, along with a large number of similar cases, in broadsheets and scandal/horror literature, especially in the eighteenth century, and he is still cited extensively in discussions about cannibalism.

4
Quoted in O. Rackham,
The History of the Countryside
(Dent, 1986), p. 258.

11 Glenlee

1
Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600 – 1840 (Yale University Press, 1995).

2
Robert Lugar,
Villa Architecture
(1828).

3
The Ramsar Convention (the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat) (1971) is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilisation of wetlands. Globally, there are nearly 2,000 designated sites, 168 of them in the UK.

4
There is no evidence that Young Lochinvar ever really existed, but he appears in local ballads and songs before Scott.

5
Walter Scott,
Marmion
(1808).

6
John Syme, letter to Alexander Cunningham, 1794.

7
J. Buchan,
The Thirty-Nine Steps
(Blackwood, 1915).

8
Compact edition of
Oxford English Dictionary
(OUP, 1971 [1933]).

9
This is pure speculation on my part – I can cite no source or evidence beyond the coincidence itself.

10
The Southern Upland Way follows Garroch Burn down from the Galloway Hills to cross the Ken Valley – one of its loveliest sections.

11
Deer were hunted with hounds on Exmoor until the practice was outlawed in 2004. In the New Forest, deer were hunted more traditionally until 1997, when the last pack was disbanded. In Scandinavia deer are still hunted with hounds, but the dogs are used to drive the deer onto a strategically placed line of guns, rather than to bring the deer down. Deer are, as I have mentioned elsewhere, still hunted in forests throughout Britain (as well as stalked on open ground in Scotland), but the ‘kill’ is now done by rifles, not by hounds. Unlike in the USA, throughout Europe shooting deer with a bow and arrow is illegal.

12
H. Repton,
Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening
(1803).

13
There are still about 30 traditional deer parks with deer in them in the UK – the most famous is probably Richmond Park, near London.

14
Although
Northanger Abbey
was not published until 1818 (posthumously), it was written about 20 years earlier, and finally revised (to what extent is unclear) in 1803.

15
Some, indeed, did too well: a great deal of woodland across the country has been wrecked (or at least seriously degraded) by rhododendrons
,
discovered in the Himalayas and introduced into Britain by Joseph Hooker in 1849. They proved immensely successful, partly because many would flower under trees, in woodland; however, one version,
R. ponticum
, has turned out to be destructively invasive, destroying the underfloor of woods by suppressing other species.

16
One hundred and fifty feet high when it was last officially measured (not an easy undertaking), in 1979. As it is still in full health, it will certainly have put on more height in the last thirty years.

17
Alan Mitchell, in
Scottish Forestry
(1979).

18
This is one of the reasons why I wanted pictures in this book.

19
Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
(Constable, 1900 and 1909).

20
There is
no
suggestion that he did. There were many ornamental forests like Glenlee at the time, though, curiously, Barrie drew his inspiration for
Peter Pan
in Galloway.

21
To make this work, the film invents a bucolic male chauvinist for her to reject – a new sort of ‘villain’ for fairy stories. The only sadness for me was the way the Beast was finally turned back into the most regressive and old-fashioned style of handsome prince it is possible to imagine (and, in the process, he also lost his wonderfully sexy growly voice).

22
A blackhouse is the traditional highland dwelling house (found especially in the Western Isles); they were built with double dry stone walls, lined with earth, and thatched. They had flagged or packed-earth floors, single open space inside and no chimneys.

23
My mother gave each of her nineteen grandchildren a traditional ‘firestool’ with their initials carved on them, so for me they are still very particularly associated with childhood.

24
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, or the matter, for me, and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiasticall and civill
(1651). The full phrase is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

25
Terri Windling, ‘White as Snow: Fairy Tales and Fantasy’, in
Snow White, Blood Red
(Avonova Books, 1993).

26
See Chapter 8.

27
When Prince Philip was taken into hospital just before Christmas 2011, I was surprised by how much the media made of the fact that he would not be able to organise the ‘Boxing Day Shoot’: we do not know who carves the turkey at the royal Christmas dinner; we do not know where or when members of the royal family open their presents; but we do know (because it happens outside) that they go ‘hunting’ on Boxing Day – and apparently this is something we are still interested in knowing.

28
See Chapter 7.

12 Knockman Wood

1
It is not clear in the story whether the compulsion is in his human identity – proving him to be royal by nature – or in his deer identity – nourishing the happy (and surprisingly common among pro-hunting people) conviction that deer and foxes enjoy being hunted.

2
Nothing in the story says he was a white deer, but I have always imagined that he was (perhaps because the girl gives him a golden collar), and was quite surprised when I went back to the text to check, and found no mention of his colour. He is a white fawn in my personal version.

3
The present management strategy is to try and weed out new beech seedlings (and also sycamore, another introduction), but the old trees are so handsome and have become so much a part of the ‘flavour’ of this wood that they are being left.

4
Wood of Cree, for example, where fast burns and high waterfalls crash down the escarpment, was clear-felled in the 1920s, its ancient oak trees cut to the ground, but then no one did anything with the ground. The oak trees regenerated spontaneously on the ancient root stock, so there is now a wood of young, apparently identically aged, oaks with the ground flora of an ancient wood.

5
Taken from the CVCWT website,
www.creevalley.com

6
The Buchan Wood’s survival is partly down to its real isolation, high up in the sparsely inhabited hill country, and on the way to nowhere. Additionally, however, it was the site of Robert the Bruce’s first major ‘come-back’ victory in 1307 against the English army – a bold, guerrilla-style ambush from the heights above Loch Trool. The woodland here has probably been protected as a result of its iconic status.

7
My enthusiasm for local partnership is not meant to derogate other organisations, like the Woodland Trust, the UK’s largest woodland conservancy charity, which has been a fairy godmother to little, threatened Cinderella woods all over the country since it was founded in 1972. It has probably also been the major force in publicising the perils facing the woods and teaching us to value our forests and woodlands more and understand them better. The Woodland Trust now owns over 1,000 woods, a total of more than 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of deciduous woodland. However, it is clear that some of the Trust’s woods are very small, and for full habitat conservation you need some big forests as well, but it would be expensive for the Woodland Trust to acquire these. One particular benefit of a partnership model is that you can link woods together to form corridors or chains of related land, overriding ownership.

8
Rackham,
Woodlands
, p. 525.

9
Julius Caesar,
De Bello Gallico
, verse 21.

10
For example,
Jack and the Beanstalk
, a very well-known fairy story, is
not
in the Grimms’ collections and appears to be purely British in origin. We have no idea how many stories have been entirely lost.

11
Three of the twelve woods I have written about – Saltridge, the Great North Wood and Staverton Thicks – were entirely new to me; I went to explore them because of writing the book.

12
In Britain, the Authorised Version of the Bible used to provide this ‘common text’, but obviously this is no longer appropriate. We need a replacement.

13
I am making this an endnote because I do not want to suggest

From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales
Copyright © Sara Maitland, 2012

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