From the Forest (29 page)

For me at least northern pine forest brings this issue of fear to a head. At a sensible, rational level I believe that the way the stories address the wild woods here is about our true relationship to the wild: animals and the forest itself will support and care for individuals, but only if they face their fears and confront the wildness. But when I am out under the gaunt pine trees with their heavy heads of black-looking needles, like a storm cloud; when I sense them hovering overhead, high up the apparently inaccessible cliffs; when their moaning and creaking sounds like pain; when the stags are roaring somewhere unseen above me and the early dark of the north comes down unexpectedly, I can sense the fear beneath these sensible thoughts and feel simple relief that the track will take me back down to my car any time I want it to.

I went over the Grampian Hills and down into the valley of the Dee to explore some of my own terrors. At first it was hard to see what I was looking for: Deeside, and the whole country around Braemar, is very beautiful. During the eighteenth century the Highlands of Scotland began to attract tourism. In 1769, T. Pennant published his
Tour of Scotland.
Of Deeside he wrote:

The rocks are exceedingly romantic . . . immense ragged and broken crags bound one side of the prospect; over whose grey sides and summits is scattered the melancholy green of the picturesque pine, which grows in the native rock . . . a vast theatre which is covered by extensive forests of pine: above the trees grow scarcer and scarcer, and then seem only to sprinkle the surface; after which vegetation ceases . . . the great cataract foams amidst the dark forest . . . I measured several [trees] that were ten, eleven and even twelve feet in circumference and near sixty feet high . . . having it is supposed seen two centuries.

This must, from his itinerary, have been Ballochbuie, one of the more extensive tracts of Caledonian forest, although he does not name it. In 1848 Queen Victoria made her first tour of Deeside and was impressed by the ‘beautiful woods’. She and Prince Albert added the Ballochbuie wood to their Balmoral estate in 1878 to protect it from a threatened logging project. Ballochbuie is therefore, like Balmoral, the private property of the Mountbatten-Windsors rather than part of the Crown Estate. This meant that it never came under the control of the Forestry Commission, and has been less affected by commercial plantation than much Scottish woodland. Ballochbuie, like Staverton, is therefore as near to ‘original’ or wild wood as anywhere in Britain, despite Victoria’s addition of a wrought-iron bridge to allow her to paint views of the ‘great cataract’ of the Garbh Allt Burn.

Ballochbuie is heavily conserved. The ancient pines (called ‘grannies’) are fairly wide spaced and surrounded by younger generations and by reaches of heather and rough grass, with bracken and blueberries or groves of birch and rowan. The resurgence of Scottish national identity since the late twentieth century has made the northern forests a particular concern; and, without getting complacent about it, there is good headway in preserving and enhancing these distinctively Scottish woodlands.

But there is a real threat to Caledonian pine forests; the danger is not from commercial exploitation, but from deer.

The issue is simple: red deer are on the increase and they destroy woodland. They reduce the ground coverage and the range and variety of flowering plants, and in particular they devour young trees, their favourite forage. Pine woods regenerated well when they were grazed by cattle in the eighteenth century, but less well after the red deer population started to expand in the mid-nineteenth. Throughout the forests of Braemar the shortage of younger trees, from about 1850, is conspicuous. There are too many deer to allow for natural regeneration without human intervention.

It is extremely difficult to find a strategy which is effective and will assure this kind of forest a long future. Fencing areas for regeneration works in the sense that young pine seedlings are indeed establishing themselves in the experimental enclosures in Ballochbuie and at Mar Lodge across the valley. Unlike oak change, there is no suggestion that Scots pine has altered or weakened its germination capacities: simply, the very young and tender trees are being nibbled off by too many deer. But deer fences need gates and tracks through the forest to allow for their maintenance; they need to be constantly monitored and repaired. In addition, fences stop the movement of
all
animals, not just deer. This creates problems, as for example with two species of bird that are unique to pine forest terrain – capercailzie and blackcock, both rare, both blundering night travellers, and both ground nesters. They have shown an alarming tendency to crash into deer fences and break their necks. Both are endangered species and need the regeneration of the pine forests to survive. We tend to think of ‘forests’ or ‘woodlands’ as places for
trees
, with everything else being somehow secondary, but it is whole habitats, not individual trees or even species, that we need to conserve. On what possible grounds, and by what means, can we choose between blackcock and deer – other than that the needs of the blackcock are more pressing at the present moment?

The obvious answer is to shoot the deer, and then eat them, as was the custom in woodlands for centuries. Some historians believe that systematic poaching was how deer populations were managed in earlier times
¹³
– and certainly the fairy stories treat the hunting-and-eating of deer as entirely normal, even when, as in ‘Brother and Sister’, the deer in question is a small boy under enchantment. (He brought this on himself to some extent by a failure of self-discipline: he drank from a stream although he was warned it would turn him into a fawn.) But we have put deer on our ‘good animal’ list and there is a powerful tendency to wax lyrically sentimental about the animal. People become deeply agitated about any proposed culling.

One response to the deer problem has been to suggest reintroducing wolves. Because there were once wolves throughout the UK, the British government is obliged by EU regulations to give consideration to this project, and the discussion has rumbled on for years now. But if the purpose of reintroducing the wolves is solely to manage the deer, it would seem more honest and less risky to kill the deer directly. Reintroductions do not have a very good reputation – starting with rabbits and moving through grey squirrels and mink in the animal world and taking in rhododendrons and some other deliberately imported plants, those that have been successful have also thrown up considerable ‘collateral damage’.
¹⁴

Wolves are the stuff of fairy stories – the name and shape of the terror of the wild. There were lynx and bear in Scotland, as well as wolves, as indeed there still are in the vaster forests of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic states. A vicious and ultimately victorious fight against the wolves of Britain was fought through the Middle Ages: unlike the loss of most species, the extirpation of wolves was deliberate, planned and triumphant. Wolves induced terror in the British psyche and had to be destroyed. Wolves are the psychological embodiment of what the fairy stories knew and what we want to forget, or at least ignore: nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, and nowhere more so than in the terrible forests.

In the abstract I like the idea of wolves, but walking in the steep glens of Ballochbuie, where grim pine trees lower from inaccessible pinnacles, where ruined steadings and broken walls bear witness to the tragedy of the Clearances, and where the forests meander slowly across the landscape, I find a strange interior relief in not having to keep even an inner eye or ear out for them.

They feel, as I walk here, like one fear too many. I had come to tackle my sense of terror through another phenomenon of the forests – much smaller, more commonplace and absolutely real – which can also give me the same strange shiver of fear as the dream of wolves and as the fairy stories themselves, a sense of being in the presence of something eerie: fungi.

So after I had walked through the spooky creaking woods of Ballochbuie, I crossed through the little town of Braemar and up a side glen to Mar Lodge, a rather bizarre grandiose house built in its present form in the 1890s as a ‘holiday home’ for Princess Louise, the Princess Royal, Queen Victoria’s daughter who was married to the Earl of Fife. It now belongs to the National Trust for Scotland. I went to walk in the forests there with Liz Holden, who lives in a farmhouse at Mar Lodge.

I have promised Liz Holden that I will not write her into this book as a witch – though I will say that her oat biscuits would make a more tempting little house for me than any gingerbread would. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine anyone less witchy in terms of almost all the stereotypes, but she is engaged on deeply uncanny fairy-story work. Liz Holden did her first degree in anthropology, but claims she was ‘hijacked by fungi’ after seeing a red cage fungus (
Clathrus rubra
) in a Devon garden.
¹⁵
And over the last twenty years she has become an expert in fungi, a ‘mycological consultant’ – not an academic, but a field naturalist (and now, I am glad to say, a lecturer and teacher).

After the biscuits in her farmhouse, below the forest and looking out across the flat, glacier-carved glen, we went for a fungus walk. The Mar Lodge estate is crisscrossed by little tracks and roads, and we set off initially in the car. Later we left it and walked in a looping meander through the ancient pine woods. They were conspicuous for their variety: there were areas that have been deer-fenced to encourage regeneration; places denuded of trees altogether; clumps of birch and rowan; swathes of very rough ground with long, ragged grasses and thick bracken, now golden tan. There were also patches of dreamlike pine forest, with the trees running up almost vertical braes above fast burns flowing pure and clean and laughing over stones, swirling into small still pools, embedded in moss and ferns; and from the rises above the burns, sudden long views over the wide valley floor would open out. Autumn was in full golden force, with rowan and birch both turning bright yellow.

And everywhere there were fungi. Holden talked and taught and pointed and saw. By the time we returned to the car I had not learned to see fungi – but I had learned how much I did not see, how much I miss every day and what a loss that is to me.

Fungi are of course by no means confined to Highland pine forests, or indeed to forests at all. We all have contact with them without qualms on an almost daily basis: the rising of bread, blue veins in cheese, penicillin, wine and mushroom soup are all dependent on fungi. They flourish everywhere, from damp cellars to open grass fields. We tend to notice them most in the warm damp weather of late summer and autumn, but in fact they are around at all times of the year in various forms and quantities.

I am not sure why they feel so strange, except for the simple fact that they are strange; and their strangeness feels close to the uncanny in the fairy stories. When you come upon fungi in the woods they have a magical otherworldly appearance, enhanced by the improbable variety of forms and colours: fungi like jelly, like coral, like brains, like tongues flickering out of alder cones, and even, with the weird earthstars (
Geastraceae
), like aliens from space. But this cannot be the whole story, because there is just as much variety and strangeness in flowering plants, although they never arouse this dark unease.

Perhaps their spooky strangeness grew when, as children, we were warned against them, and rightly: several British toadstools are fatally toxic and many others are very bad for you indeed. At the same time, many of them are not merely edible but delicious – free food, if you get it right. But like the good and bad characters encountered in the forests in the stories, it is singularly difficult to know which are which. This possibility of disastrous error is part of the sinister atmosphere that surrounds them:
Gyromitra esculenta
(the false morel), for instance, is deadly poisonous, but in appearance and fruiting season it has ‘wickedly’ copied the true morels, a famous culinary treat.

Or perhaps it is because, like the magic in the stories, fungi seem to appear without warning and then disappear equally suddenly. They pop up, fully formed and beautiful, where you did not anticipate it, and disappear as suddenly, as though by magic. Additionally, they sometimes appear in formations that seem ‘designed’ rather than natural, as though a conceptual artist has been out in the night arranging them in ‘fairy rings’, patterns so precise as to appear engineered rather than spontaneous.

And for me, even since my walk with Liz Holden and my purchase of not one but two recommended guides, I can never identify them with confidence. I cannot pin them down, cannot say what I have seen, cannot crack their secret code.
¹⁶
They remain darkly mysterious.

And the more I learn, the stranger it all seems. Fungi used to be classified and treated as plants, although rather odd ones – but mosses and ferns and horsetails are ‘odd’ too and they remain comfortably ‘plants’. In 1969 fungi were hived off and given a scientific ‘kingdom’ all of their own.
¹⁷
One major difference between fungi and plants is structural – where plants use cellulose to provide form and stiffness, fungi use chitin, the same tough substance as the exoskeleton of insects is made from. Moreover, fungi do not manufacture their food by photosynthesis.

The visible toadstool is in fact only the fruit of its fungus (just as an apple is to a tree, producing and dispersing the seed – or spore in the case of fungi). The bulk of the fungus is normally hidden underground and is called the
mycelium
. It is made up of fine hair like threads called
hyphae
, and it is these that you sometimes see as a web of white strands under broken bark on a dead piece of wood. A mycelium may be tiny, forming an organism too small to see, or it may be massive – perhaps comprising the largest living things in the world.