Extract from the Calendar's Introductory Essay
by Scottish writer and broadcaster Kenny Taylor

Sometimes it's good to feel dwarfed by nature. The immensity of a mountain, the earth-shivering percussion of a thunderstorm, the swirl of a spate river swollen with melt-water: all of these things have made me tingle at the power of natural forces, often at the very same time as making me aware of my all-too precarious hold on existence.

Some trees I've encountered can also do that, not through sound or movement, but through utter stillness. Such trees, both living and dead, seem to have a presence so arresting that they can etch themselves in mind for years to come. Somehow, they push the boundaries of thought beyond the confines of existing woods and the limits of a human lifetime. There was one such tree that I came upon a few years ago, when I walked for many hours with my family through an old forest in western Norway.

The length of journey has significance. Again and again, whether in woodland, mountain, riverside or coast, I've found that it takes a while to ease-in to the particular qualities of a wild place. The quietness that can be a feature of many large woodlands often plays a part. Its very subtlety - the general absence of noise rather than an easily registered presence - needs time to percolate through in mind.

So that's how it was that day. We'd walked from mid-morning, through birch and Scots pines cloaking low hills where patches of snow still lay, glittering in bright sunshine, shifting to blue under cloud. Our feet had bounced on a lushness of blaeberry, ling and moss, our minds been boggled by the bigness of wood ant nests and the thought that somewhere - perhaps close by - there could be elk and bear. Now it was late afternoon and the clear path we'd travelled earlier had been left long before. There was no obvious track in this part of the forest; not even the trail of a fox to follow.

Choice of route, beyond a general sense of compass direction back to our base in an old wooden farmhouse (now some kilometres distant) was largely a matter of doing what felt right at the time - whether for seconds, minutes, or more. Travelling in this way, we reached a particularly green slope among the trees. Perhaps the snow, now melted in this spot, had lain in the ideal way to boost the dwarf shrubs here. Perhaps. But what seemed obvious was that this was the way to go - a ramp to raise us to a higher level of the forest, from where there might be views over the trees to other valleys and hills.

A dead tree lay near the upper rim of the slope. It was unlike any I'd seen before, so immense was its size, so beautiful its trunk. Few branches remained - most would have gone long, long before that day. But the trunk, which stretched for ten metres or more, had solidity and sheen and a kind of permanence. There was no bark left on it, but the wood - smooth to the touch, mid-grey in tone - had a spiral coiled along its length, like taught muscle, clenched in time. It was as if something of the multitude of tensions of heat and cold, droughts and downpours, thunderstorms and blizzards, season after season, through youth and old age, was now laid bare in death. It was a testament in pine, a geometry as glorious as the fluted pillar of a cathedral, a wildness resolved in wood...

Return to Calendar and Engagement Diary 2006