Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 40

A lone Scots pine tree, bent and twisted by age and ravaged by the weather, standing alone on the edge of a moor or Highland glen, personifies the harshness of the landscape and the struggle that man and beast have had to survive in this unforgiving part of Scotland. There is a recurrent theme in Highland folklore that these lone trees were used to mark burial places of warriors, heroes and chieftains. In areas further south, where the sight of a Scots pine may have been more unusual, they can be seen to mark ancient cairns, trackways or crossroads. In the Lowlands and in England, they were commonly planted to mark not only the drove roads used by the Scots cattle drovers bringing their herds south, but also the perimeters of holdings along the route where the cattle could spend the night.

Scots pine woods were a valuable source of timber; they once covered great areas of the Highlands but they are now restricted to Abernethy, Inshriach, Rothiemurchus and Glenmore Forests near Aviemore, Achnashellach in Wester Ross, Ballochbuie in upper Deeside, Einig Wood in Sutherland, Glen Affric in Invernessshire, Ordiequish in Morayshire and the Black Wood of Rannoch in Perthshire. The high resin content in the sap of Scots pines means the wood is slow to decay, so large numbers of trees were felled for house-and ship-building materials. Straight trees were in demand as spars for the rigging on sailing boats – hence Beinn nan Sparra, Hill of Spars, in Glen Affric. The light, strong wood was ideal for fencing stobs, furniture and deal storage boxes. Later, the wood was in demand for railway sleepers and telegraph poles.

Scots pine made reasonable charcoal and was a vital source of turpentine, rosin and tar. Turpentine was made by cutting a V-shaped notch in a tree and collecting the oleo-resinous gum that ran out. When distilled, oil of turpentine was produced and used in making varnish, oil paints, polish, and as an antiseptic. Rosin, the residue from the distillation process, was used to wax the horsehair strings of violins and other bowed string instruments, for sealing wax, glue, in soap and early printing inks. More recently, powdered rosin is rubbed on the soles of shoes worn by gymnasts, dancers and boxers to improve grip. Crude tar was made from Scots pines by digging a pit on the edge of a raised piece of ground with a pipe running from the bottom to a container. A fire of dried pine cones was built in the pit, and as soon as this was burning well it was fed a supply of small pieces of freshly cut pine wood. The black fluid that trickled down the pipe was wood tar, which made the best weatherproofing for wooden buildings, boats or fishermen’s nets.

Although Scots pine is quick to regenerate if left undisturbed, overcutting to meet timber demands, natural fires, overgrazing by sheep and deer, agricultural reclamations and even deliberate clearances in the Middle Ages to deter wolves have all been factors in the decline of the great woods that once covered 1,500,000 hectares.

The long history of coppicing is the reason why ancient coppice woodlands can be seen as the direct descendants of the original wildwood. It is perhaps strange that coppiced woodland, with a structure that looks least like one’s perception of an ancient natural wood, is biologically closest to it. Virtually no trees were deliberately planted for commercial woodland until the late seventeenth century. There was no need to; the coppice and standard system continued to work perfectly well, and in the north of Scotland the Scots pine woodlands seemed to stretch into infinity. In most woodland, apart from some very localized transplanting of saplings to maintain the coppice crop, any improvements were made by encouraging the more valuable species to fill gaps where old stools had died, or by layering and protecting the natural regeneration.

Unwanted shrubs and invasive species, such as birch, were sometimes removed to favour more desirable trees, but by and large the general pattern of species remained very close to the original natural cover. Even in the late eighteenth century it is recorded that ‘the underwood was not carefully selected and planted; the production of it, both in quantity and quality was, for the most part left to chance’.

There was, however, considerable planting of garden and orchard trees such as apple, pear, fig, sweet chestnut, common walnut and medlar, during the medieval era. Any planting of native trees was not for their timber but to enhance the landscape or to provide cover for game or as covert for foxes, with extensive planting becoming commonplace among wealthy landowners by the late Tudor period.