From the Forest (27 page)

“Look. You can be like a squirrel and eat these hazelnuts.”

“Look. With your pretty nails you can split these stalks and make a daisy chain.”

“Look. Now this fern is just a monk, with his bald knobbly head; soon he is a bishop with a beautiful crosier; and at last he is an angel, see him spread his feathered wings.”

“Look. You can plait these reeds and make sandals, cool for hot little toes.”

“Look. A ladybird has seven spots. Perhaps you are a ladybird and we are the spots.”

The ancient woodlands are lovely and generous if you go quietly. She was a child, and children heal easily from that pain and fear. Her scratches and bites and bruises all healed, and so did her fear of the forest. But still she did not grow lovely. Far away down through the forest in the castle her stepmother could ask the mirror, daily if she chose to, and the mirror, which must always tell the truth, would say truthfully, “You. You. You oh queen. You are the fairest of all. You.”

The dwarves could see she was
pretty
. But if you spend the hours of bright daylight in the dark you learn that pretty is not enough. Coal is not pretty. Coal is beautiful. And her hair was as black as coal. They wanted her to be beautiful.

So, being wise, the dwarves put her to work. The best medicine for fear is rigorous discipline applied with great affection – hard, slogging, difficult, skilled labour, ideally in the service of others. Especially if the child is a princess and has been raised idle.

They gave her a broom and made her sweep, though she whined about it.

They gave her a brush and made her scrub, though she grumbled about it.

They gave her a knife and made her chop, though she moaned about it.

They gave her hard soap and made her wash, though she pouted about it.

They gave her a trowel and made her weed, though she sulked about it.

They gave her a pot and made her cook, though she bitched about it.

They gave her coal and made her keep the fire – raking and riddling in the morning; tending through the day; damping down at night, though she sobbed about it.

Being made to work makes a child angry, and anger breeds courage and hope. At first she was pathetic, useless and desperate to please; then she was both disagreeable and self-pitying, moaning and lamenting and pettish; then she was wonderfully, blazingly furious; and then, all of a sudden, she was brave and whole and lovely. Beautiful. The fairest of all.

And in changing her, the dwarves changed too. Of course, as they were miners, they were used to dealing with the outside world. Once a year they had always harnessed their seven sturdy pit ponies to their seven wagons and taken their coal to the city to sell, and come home with beer, tobacco, sugar, milled flour and shiny new pans and pewter tankards and crisp linen sheets when required. But now they needed toys and coloured crayons and clothes for her to wear and they had to learn how to find them for her, so they had to talk with other people. They wanted her to have good manners so they had to become less surly. They wanted her to be happy and they wanted her to be admired so they took to going to fairs and markets and even, occasionally, parties. And, illuminated by their own kindness and her loveliness, they discovered that people could be kind and helpful and that not all the world’s jokes were cruel.

So that, for a while, they were all very happy. Eight not seven.

Seven is magical, strange; a prime number; indivisible and unbreakable; lucky and dangerous.

Eight is an orderly, elegant number, a Fibonacci number – the poised spiral of the snail’s shell. Eight is still the same when it is turned upside down. Eight is the visible celestial spheres – the sun and moon and planets all dancing together.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
It has a different rhythm. Eight is a resolved octave, a perfect scale; they all sang together in the green summer evenings and they were very joyful.

The trouble was they cured her fear too well. She became too bold to be careful. The dwarves heard the village gossip now and they knew that, down in the valley where the cows were fat and the pigs glutted on beech mast, the wicked stepmother was still looking in the mirror, which must always tell the truth, and asking who was the fairest of all, and learning that the child lived. They warned her and she laughed at them. She was growing more beautiful every day and more high-hearted.

Perhaps the dwarves should have taken her down the mine with them for her to learn to respect the dark and feel the sturdy power of caution and self-protection.

And perhaps, as she became a woman, she needed other women and the dwarves should have known it. Another woman to pull her stay-laces tight and admire her tiny waist; a woman to braid her hair and pin it up with fine-toothed combs; a woman to share sweet things with her like women do. There are things that even dwarves cannot teach a growing child.

Perhaps – just perhaps – she recognised her stepmother and was rash enough to want to try again, to seek out that lost love, to return to childhood and do it better. Stupid; stupid in her beauty and her courage and her greed for life.

Envy looks like a little emotion – petty and insignificant – but it is as deadly as the fungi carried by the elm bark beetle. It suffocates like stay-laces pulled too tight; it penetrates like the tines of fine-toothed combs; it poisons like an apple from the tree of knowledge. In the end the bitch-witch killed her. She died of the Queen’s envy and her own stupidity.

The dwarves found that they had changed, that love had changed them. Even though her hair was as black as coal they could not bear to take her back underground, back into the dark, into the other forest, and bury her there. They kept her in the light, in a glass coffin, where the sun could kiss her though they could not. They loyally treasured her in death as they had freely treasured her in life.

Until one day a prince came by and revived her as the dwarves had failed to do. And they were generous enough and humble enough to be delighted.

They were invited to the wedding. And the grateful prince gave them the privilege of hot justice.

So they brought up coal and iron from the mines and lit a fire, a hot furnace, hotter, hotter, until it smelted the dark ore and released the metal. They forged it up all through the night before the wedding and hammered out the iron shoes. The wicked stepmother needed punishing so they made the shoes red hot.

We do not tell this part of the story any more; we say it is too cruel and will break children’s soft hearts. But the dwarves know their tough little hearts yearn for justice. Dwarves know about heavy feet; they stomp and stamp in the dark dance of retribution, which we are all too scared to use. The dwarves made that wicked woman put on the red hot iron shoes; and then they made her dance until she was dead.

They did not try again. They will not try again. The dwarves have all gone back underground, delving down deep into their own more ancient forests, different forests without flowers, without blossom or fruit.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

She was their gold. Their falcon. Their globeflower. Their birch tree. Their dappled trout. Their diamond. Their fallow doe.

Their sweet hot coal.

8

October

Ballochbuie and the Forest of Mar

D
riving to Braemar from the south is a bit like entering into a fairy story. In so many of the tales the characters set out on long journeys, following the road up and across mountain and moor until they finally descend through thick forest and arrive in a village with a castle or palace where their fortune and future is to be found. North of Edinburgh, the A9 runs all the way to Inverness and finally to Thurso on the north coast. At Perth the A93 turns east off this great trunk road and, like a branch, pushes its own way northwards, out of Perthshire, where the deciduous trees are famously large and fine, past Blairgowrie and Bridge of Cally, where the road is gated to stop idiots getting stuck in drifting snow, up the desolate and lovely Glen of Shee, and out onto the high moors and craggy mountains. Somewhere north of nowhere the road crosses into the vast Cairngorms National Park, a huge chunk of granite mountain, the wildest place in Britain, home to five of the six highest hills in the country, and eventually it runs down again through lowering forests, into Braemar on Royal Deeside. The Cairngorms are cut by two big rivers, the Dee and the Tay, each with its own deep valley, collecting water from innumerable tributaries, and flowing out into the North Sea. Braemar is in the more southerly of the two, the Dee, and here Queen Victoria supplied the fairy-tale palace when in 1856 she built Balmoral, her Scottish fantasy home where she could play romantically at being a Jacobite and, later, pursue her odd relationship with John Brown, her forester.
¹
She and Prince Albert particularly loved the ancient woods of Deeside. Perhaps they reminded him of home – Scots pine (
Pinus sylvestris
) is common throughout Germany, but in Britain it is indigenous only in specific parts of the Scottish Highlands.
²
Deeside represents a specifically romantic image of Scotland, with the huge wildness of the hills dropping steeply down to the forested valleys, a lot of surface rock, fast rivers, waterfalls, ruined castles, and heather and red deer which, in cold weather, can come down to the roadsides in large herds. And here there are also some of the remaining fragments of the great Caledonian Forest.

‘Caledonian forest’ is now a technical term for a particular type of rural habitat – high woodland dominated by Scots pine, accompanied by birch, rowan, juniper and heather; home to pine martens, capercailzie, black grouse and other species – of both flora and fauna – not found elsewhere in Britain. Within the historical era it has been home to wolves and wildcats.

But the Great Caledonian Forest, which is commonly supposed to have spread over millions of acres of Scotland, is also a forest of myth and magic. It existed in story, in the imagination, and in the pages of medieval romance: here Merlin wanders in his madness, lamenting the folly and the violence and corruption of ‘civilisation’; here there are monsters and dragons and unnamed, unimaginable perils awaiting the brave of heart; here hermits dwell, using the forest as their predecessors had used the deserts further south;
³
here wolves prowl through the long dark winters ‘seeking whom they may devour’.
⁴
Part of the mythology is that this great swathe of uninhabited forest ever existed at all: the ‘millions of acres’ are now contested – much of the Highlands, as we discovered in the twentieth century, is too far north, too peaty and cannot even usefully support the ‘easy’ conifers after draining, peat clearance and planting. After the ice withdrew and the blanket peat moved in, a very great deal of the Scottish Highlands could not (and therefore did not) sustain woodland. Rackham argues that there is now
more
native pinewood in Scotland than there was three hundred years ago.

The myth of the immense forests of Scotland has been given additional imaginative leverage by a nationalist sensibility that claims that the trees – those that weren’t burned in Viking raids, or cleared to extirpate wolves and brigands – were ‘stolen’ (like ‘our’ oil) by English entrepreneurs working under the protection of cash-strapped absentee landlords after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie. This pervasive belief is based on the unfounded theory that fire and logging destroy such woods and they cannot regenerate. In fact, in every location where there is evidence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commercial logging, there is still pine forest in good heart.

There are somewhat under a hundred patches, some of them very small, of genuine ancient Caledonian forest, and they are very distinct from more southerly ancient woodland, or from the oak forests on the west coast of Scotland. Scots pines have some characteristics not shared by deciduous trees. You cannot coppice or pollard them; they are killed by being cut and do not regenerate on their old roots; they re-grow as new individual trees from seed and tend not to do this under their own canopy, but to the sides of existing stands. This means that pine woods have a strange habit of wandering – instead of the neat boundaries between trees and moor or field, the pine woods crawl across the hill sides, changing the shape of the land. Over longer periods of time this adds to their atmosphere of mystery, and incidentally puts a rather spooky twist on the haunting prophecy that ‘Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him’
⁵
(although presumably not an irony that Shakespeare can have appreciated). Scots pine is also fire adapted, and, on century-long cycles, flourishes best if it is burned out. Nonetheless, these pines are individually very long lived and can become as warped, gnarled and complex as their deciduous relatives – and they do it without the assistance of pollarding or any other management system. Even the straight, tall, middle-aged trees are strange looking: they have heavily scaled grey trunks, like dragons’ hides, while their upper branches are smoother, more delicate and pinky-orange. They carry their round-topped umbrellas of foliage very high, and put out few low branches, so any long view in these woods is cut by hard grey vertical lines, almost like giant telephone poles, creating an odd, rather sinister atmosphere. Another specific effect of Scots pine forest is brought about by pine’s ability to root on apparently vertical rock faces, or in tiny clefts well up the hillsides, which are here steep enough to be cliffs. At Mar Lodge, a National Trust for Scotland property slightly to the West of Braemar, they say a nineteenth-century earl shot pine cones from cannon up onto his vertical cliff faces to seed the clinging, impossible trees:
⁶
they hover above the valleys, brooding, inaccessible and sublime, simultaneously truly wild and highly improbable.