UKC

It had a rookery. When you went up Norman's Law at dusk, there would be homing rooks and jackdaws making spooky, cawing echoes around it.

It had greenfinches and bullfinches. It had pheasants and herons.

I heard a cuckoo there once, and very often there was a buzzard drifting over the tips of the trees.

In autumn the larches in it would turn auburn-gold, the birches would turn yellow-gold and then go bare; the deciduous trees would become black bones of trees.

In winter you could ghost through it with the ice-pools cracking under your feet, and in spring it had bluebell-filled clearings, and moss as thick as your arm on every branch.

Round the back of it, at the fence-edge under the little hill next to Norman's Law that is, delightfully, marked on the map as Whirly Kips, there was a kind of secret ancient-Britonish passageway, along the mossy hillside, where I used to go to sit and think, or alternatively just to sit, in the middle of nowhere with not a human or a road in sight.

I went up Norman's Law today and there are tractors and diggers ripping that wood apart. The path from the roadside is knee-deep in black ooze, and twice the width it ought to be.

Now I'm not even opposed, in principle, to "forestry operations", or to the "harvesting" of "mature woodland". (Less opposed than I am to soothing bureaucratic euphemisms, anyway.)

But the destruction of this beautiful little wood... It's only a little thing. But isn't that the point? Isn't natural beauty, precisely, a mosaic of many little things?

In my pessimistic moments I do wonder what exactly it might be that human beings are good at, other than very thoroughly f*cking things up.

I mapped it for orienteering once.

In reply to Fat Bumbly2:

Alas, no more...

In reply to Tim Chappell:

1:50K sheet 57, 310202, if anyone's interested in knowing exactly which wood I mean. I can't see a name for it even on the 1: 25K.

In reply to Tim Chappell: Isn't it possible that the Norman Law that you are so elegiac about came about as a result of the same sort of destruction centuries ago? We create as well as destroy.

In reply to Tim Chappell:
Sorry to hear that a place you loved has been targeted but what exactly is happening here? Thinning of woodland? Clear felling? or some other development? Is it a permanent destruction or a temporary mess?

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

It's being logged, clear-cut.

In reply to Tim Chappell: I have to agree with you. It was a special place.

In reply to Raskye:


I wonder how much the wood from it can be worth. They have probably 3 guys and 3 big hired machines, working flat out at smashing it up and taking the wood away, probably for about 3 weeks.

So for this to make even economic sense, the wood from that wood must be worth, I'd have thought, about £10,000.

I wonder if it is.

In reply to Tim Chappell:
Hmm then hopefully it will remain as woodland, although it may take a few years to regain some of its character. Larch sounds like commercial crop planting (although not always the Roaches larches are purely decorative estate planting from what I can see) with birch being your classic colonising tree. Which means that hopefully they will re-plant and revive the wood. Not much consolation for you but it should be there for future generations.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:


I wouldn't say I'm *inconsolable* about this, exactly. And I agree that woodlands can be replanted and regain their magic, in time.

It's just one of those things that makes me look at my own species in puzzlement and disbelief, and think "What the hell are we doing?"

In reply to Tim Chappell: the timber won't be worth as much as the intact woodland was aesthetically. The forestry on the other side of the hill could, in my opinion, go anytime... If it was replanted with mixed broad leaves.

In reply to Raskye:

Yeah, the other forestry--the one they've been trying to sell for a couple of years!--is much more "artificial" and much less ecologically diverse than the wood that they're trashing. I would be less bothered by the loss of that--though from a distance, it would probably matter more, as the trees there give Norman's Law its distinctive look (from Dundee).

On aesthetic vs. economic value... There's this familiar slide from being unquantifiable, to not being in the equation, to being quantified at ZERO. It's so old and so stupid a mistake. When will we learn not to make it?

In reply to Tim Chappell: let's just hope the other small woodlands dotted around the area don't go the same way.

In reply to Tim Chappell: there's a lot of larch clearance going on, due to the phytophthora

In reply to DaveN:


I don't know the details of what's going on in this case, but it certainly doesn't look like they're only taking the larches--most of that woodland is Scots Pine. And they're taking everything, except perhaps the edge-trees.

In reply to Tim Chappell: I read your philosophical arguments with Coel with interest. You obviously know a great deal about your subject. I don't know this wood, but I've been on the receiving end of a lot of equally eloquent but uninformed nimbyism about woodland management in the past. A bit of time on the FC Scotland website and you should probably be able to find the grant sceme/ felling licence for this site.

It's a crop like any other, it's just humans have problems getting their heads round forestry timescales and get all misty eyed at harvest time. Unlike a lot of things, felling is actually pretty well regulated, but harvesters do make a short term mess if the ground is wet.

In reply to toad:


A crop *exactly* like any other?

You really believe that?

Well, anyway. One way of presenting a vision, or a sense that something is important and fragile, is a poem.

This isn't a poem about Norman's Law or the wood on it--if I have one of those, I haven't got it yet. But it is a poem about place, and about how easily our sense of place, and the places that are sacred or holy or special (or whatever you want to say) to us, are destroyed. And it is a poem about Scotland.

And if you want to say it's crap or sentimental, by all means; how would I stop you?



The Exiles

"Still the blood is strong"


There every foot of field-end matters,
each river-pool is itself;
every stone is a sacred standing stone,
every hill a sith of the old ones;
here each street is the same
for mile after mile.

It only feels like what they had cannot be lost.
It only feels abiding unchanging home.
The bulldozer and the eviction writ,
north and south, work the same.

They walked into London’s sameness
with heather-seeds still in their socks,
the plough-callus still on the insides of their thumbs,
the mark of the sheep-tick still fading behind the knee.


Kincardine O’Neil, Aberdeenshire, 7 July 2008

In reply to Tim Chappell:

Apart from the length of rotation, pretty much yes. It isn't your fault, you're human. Trees have an inconveniently long growth cycle and it confuses us, but it sounds from your description (particularly if it's full of larch) like somebody planted this wood with a view to someone else cutting it down for money at a later date. Foresters are the nearest thing to time travellers. It's pretty rare to plant and fell the same tree in one professional (or actual!) lifetime.

But no. Every punter and his dog thinks they've got a special case.

In reply to toad:



Indeed I am. Sorry about that.

And what, I have to ask, are *you*?

In reply to Tim Chappell: Try this

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/infd-62fg7f

Enter your grid ref (INCLUDING THE BLOODY 2 LETTER CODE!)
it will bring up a map - check the relevant forestry boxes and they will overlay onto the map, then you can look at the relevant project and see whether it's random despoiling, or part of a wider scheme of desruction.

In reply to toad:

Thanks for that. But logging licences etc. are not really the point I wanted to pursue.

The question I wished to raise was, rather, something like this:

What is wrong with us humans, that we can look at a beautiful landscape and see it only as an array of pound notes stapled to the ground and awaiting collection?

And what is wrong with us, that we think that anyone who takes this attitude is "realistic" and "hard-headed" etc, whereas anyone who sees beauty *as* beauty is sentimental and subject to illusions?

That, surely, is exactly the wrong way up. Because there is nothing more overwhelmingly obvious than beauty. Whereas there has not been a greater or more pernicious illusion in the history of humanity than money.

And once we have trashed the wood to get the money, what will we do with the money?

Buy another wood, perhaps?

In reply to Tim Chappell: Maybe a bit of balance? We have all sorts of schemes to protect woods and other important, beautiful things, and there are charities like the Woodland Trust. We also need timber and landowners need an income.

In reply to Tim Chappell: The point I was making was that this wasn't indescriminate - it was done as part of a larger, sustainable plan. You wouldn't have batted an eyelid if this was a beautiful crop of wheat swaying in the dying light of an August evening, only to return the next day to find it heartlessly cut and left to lie.

I have gone through this so many times over the years, and I was felling purely for ecological improvement and protection. Some people seem to think trees are sacrosanct and immortal, and that only they understand their place in the landscape. Yet typically those self same people have lovely wooden furniture. It isn't just about money, it's about nimbyism. Just because you weren't born when these trees were planted doesn't mean somebody didn't look at this place and deliberately plan for their felling 60 years hence.

The site will almost certainly be replanted (you have to have a VERY good reason for not replanting these days or the FC won't give you a felling licence) In 10 or 20 years it will be different, almost certainly better both aesthetically and ecologically (modern planting regimes are much more imaginative) but just because it has happened here and in your time, you think it should be a special case. I thought you of all people would be capable of considering the bigger picture

In reply to Tim Chappell:


Maybe the landowner will pay for their offspring to do an OU philsophy degree, allowing you to eat, own a house and have time to visit woods?

In reply to Tim Chappell: I know the very spot, didnt humans plant that wood anyhoo? but i take your point. forestry is inherently destructive at a certain point in its cycle.

In reply to Tim Chappell:


We're very good at creating nice little spinneys and copses that are a delight to visit. Some of my favourite woods around here will one day be felled for timber, but they were planted for the same reasons, and they are gently maintained in anticipation of that day.

Unfortunately we went through a period of planting dense monoculture pine forrest that is almost hellish to visit and try and pass through, but there is a shift in the FC and wider community that is seeing them replaced with wider mixes of trees after they are felled.

It's also notable that - around here at least - anything felled is replanted, and a lot of farmland and other areas is being planted as publicly accessible woodland by the local wildlife trust abad the Woodland Trust.

You may see forestry as negative, but as building materials go wood is really quite eco-friendly, and done well and looked after can last for a thousand years. I know someone with a house where some of the oak sole plates are over 500 years old - that oak was grown with zero fossil fuels, removed CO2 from the atmosphere and continues to serve a purpose half a millennium later. You couldn't say the same for rebar cement... To do this, yes, trees have to be ripped up, cut down, striped and sawed. Which is why we plant more trees.

In reply to toad:

That website is brilliant! Thanks.

In reply to Tim Chappell:


In trying to find this story, I came across the Snopes write-up which debunks it, but I'd still like to imagine that some woodland can be run this way:

After the giant oak beams in the New College’s [Oxford] great hall rotted out, the Dons of the college were at a loss to source replacement oak timbers of sufficient size. The college forrester came to the rescue — it turned out that when the New College was built, 500 years previous, the Dons of the college had planted oaks in Oxford’s forest. Now, 500 years later, they were ready to be harvested and put into service in the great hall. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

In reply to DNS:


That's a lovely anecdote. Thank you. And good for New College.