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Forests form the skirts of the mountains and it’s easy to lose yourself within their green folds. However, as someone who is essentially a mountaineer, in the broadest sense of the word, it has taken me until middle age to fully appreciate the qualities of the woods, to wander aimlessly between the pines and learn of their secrets instead of striving upwards, ever upwards, in search of the rocky ridges, the isolated summits and the far flung views.

It has taken me a long time to learn that the forest is part of the mountain experience, and indeed, both forest and mountain environments are part of a greater wilderness experience.

A number of years ago I worked on a book of essays with John Hillaby, one of the UK’s best-known long distance walkers and a man who was a poet as well as a scientist. I had written about passing through Rothiemurchus Forest en route to the high tops of the Cairngorms and had dismissed the forest in a few terse sentences. John, my editor, quite correctly, took me to task.

“Don’t ignore the forests in a short and simply melody,” he wrote, “bring out the full orchestra and celebrate it with a loud fanfare.”

The fanfare took shape: “The classic route of the Lairig Ghru breaks you in gently through a relic, a mere fraction of what used to be the great Forest of Caledon, an immensity of Scots pine which once stretched from coast to coast. The relic is at Rothiemurchus, a treasured nature reserve, a living museum of yesterday. Look at those trees with respect. They are rock hard and anchored deep in the ground. They have a trunk like the foremast of a sailing ship, goldened at the cross trees, a colour perfectly offset by the bottle-green colour of their foliage. In the streets of the mountains they have about them the quality of a bugle blast and they are tenanted by pine martens, crossbills, crested tits and capercaillie, that huge grouse of the woods.” (Walking in Britain, edited by John Hillaby, Collins 1988)

John Hillaby taught me to respect the forests but in the score of years since we collaborated on that book of essays I’ve embraced a wider concept, recognised a more crucial relationship than just respect. Our pines, albeit deeply anchored and rock hard, badly need our protection.

Today I walk through forests and woodlands and look carefully for new growth, the progeny of the forest. In so many cases there is none and I become aware that I’m walking through an old folks’ home of trees – the forest is a museum, but not a living museum for there is no future for it. How can there be a future without youngsters, because in most cases the youngsters of the forest are destroyed in their infancy? ...

Cameron McNeish

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