Earlier this year we ran a high camp at Carrifran planting montane scrub. One of our attendees Sue sent us a diary report of her experiences. We thought it was so good that we wanted to share some of it on our blog for all to see. So find below the main bits of her entry.
After
breakfast, we drove to the Carrifran car park just up the road, arriving a
little early. It was a beautiful morning, warm and sunny, so I lazed around
admiring the local song thrush (who had been listening to buzzards, also to
someone working a sheepdog with a whistle), and the rather busy songs of
blackcaps. Other volunteers arrived by ones and twos, looking both fit/experienced
and relaxed/cheerful. When the group was complete, Lynn the camp/task leader
gave us a short briefing. We shouldered our packs and set off along a short
section of boardwalk, then on up the valley via a grassy track beside the burn.
The birches here were coming into leaf, and the willows had “pussies” of
various shapes and shades. Primrose-posies studded the grass, and the deeper
puddles on the track were full of tadpoles. This definitely felt like walking
through a young forest, whose naturalistic ragged edges straggled away up the
hillside. With no older trees, or dead/decaying wood, this might have been a
little bit how the valley looked during an earlier, post-glacial reforestation
– although maybe there would have been much less grass around then, more bare rock
and scree; more like parts of Greenland look now.
Further up the valley, tree height
decreased as we moved through younger and younger plantings, growing in higher
and more exposed conditions. All around us wood anemones – windflowers – were
flowering through last year’s dead grass; a reminder of the woodland this once
was, and is becoming again. During a short rest-break by an abandoned shieling,
a young lizard briefly sunned itself on the warm dark strap of a doffed
rucksack. We saw a pair of buzzards float over the brow of Raven Craig, being
harassed by a pair of peregrines. (A few years ago, we saw peregrines breeding
in the next valley, so maybe these were birds from that site.) Lynn pointed out
the bare scars of a couple of recent avalanche tracks coming down from the high
rim of the valley (both cornice collapses, I think), that had carried away or
knocked over areas of young trees. “We wondered about replanting, but the
management decision was to leave them. We have some horizontal trees that are
doing very well.” By now we were walking past waist-high birches, knee-high
oaks. Crossing the (now much smaller) burn for the third and last time below a
gorge/waterfall, we started an ascending traverse to high cup of Firth Hope,
across a steep grassy slope splotched with large patches of wood-rush (another
woodland survival?). I found this awkward terrain; I couldn’t get my feet down
flat. I think Lynn picked the route so that we a) didn’t wander too far to the
right and get stuck in the river gorge, and b) didn’t wander too far to the left and gain
a lot of unnecessary height. I saw hard fern, bugle, thyme, and the tight
rosettes of saxifrage leaves in a wet flush – an interesting mix of “woodland”
and “open ground” plants – I was checking out what I saw with Crinan, a site
Trustee.
After lunch, we
walked to the “tree drop” close to the head of the waterfall/gorge (trees and
planting equipment had been brought in by quad-bike). We were issued with
spears (heavy, narrow-bladed spades), sturdy carry-bags, and sets of young
trees (all plug plants grown from locally collected seed – the only trees at
Carrifran which aren’t local are the high oaks, which were sourced from the
closest remaining similar habitat in the Lake District), and chocolate
biscuits. Lynn gave a planting demo (screef a planting site by stripping away
vegetation with hands and spear, bang the spear blade into the underlying peat
and rotate it to produce a plug-shaped hole, insert tree plug into hole, firm
up surrounding soil), and told us to scatter and get planting.
R. and me went back to the campsite,
crossed the burn, and worked up the far side of the valley, planting willow and
juniper. I felt particularly pleased and lucky to have been given the juniper
to plant, as it’s a really interesting, and increasingly uncommon, plant (and
apparently it’s preferentially peed on by scent-marking wildcats – so if
wildcats ever re-colonise this area, The Habitat Is There). We found that after
firming up the soil, we were wishing each tree good luck, telling it that we
hoped it would flourish and do well. I was surprised to find helping with
planting such an emotional experience. I’ve spent a lot of in the Scottish
hills, backpacking and wild camping, and I get such tremendous positive
benefits from the land, that it felt like a real privilege to be able to give
something back. Walking (in heavy boots) is one experience; spending a lot of
time in this landscape on my knees felt... quite reverential. It was good to
have the opportunity to pay close attention to a small piece of landscape, and
the planting was magical and reviving.
After a couple of hours, we’d
planted all our trees, so we wandered back to the tree/chocolate dump for
further instructions/trees and a “little something”. I was feeling very sleepy,
so I crawled back into our tent and snoozed in the sun while R. had a second
round of planting. Partly because the weather was so good, the volunteers had
no trouble planting all our trees – about 1100 plugs, mostly willow. Because
this project covers a whole valley, Borders Forest Trust have paid contract
planters to reforest large blocks of terrain, particularly some of the high,
steep ground which is difficult to reach and awkward to work on – but the Trust
have also always encouraged local community, and volunteer, involvement.
Rory stopped
planting at about 6.00 pm, and we had a tasty and welcome supper. We brought a
flat stone to cook on into the “front porch” under the flysheet. The Norwegian
“Real Turmat” dehydrated meals that we use are not cheap, but they are by far
the nicest we’ve found – bad dehy
meals can be terrible! After supper,
the wind dropped, and the evening light was amazing – a flawless bluegreen sky
fading to lemon, apricot and rose at the horizon, with the late sun making last
year’s dry grass shine like metal wires. For an after-supper walk, we followed
a subgroup of volunteers up to the summit of White Coomb, with an amazing view
of the roll-backed Uplands greying into dusk under a flawless sky. It was quiet: no wind, no rustle of grass, no
water-murmur, no bird, no sheep – the sky-bowl ringing with silence like a Zen
bell. Rory has walked White Coomb before, several times; this was the first
time he’d seen anything other than cloud and rain.
On the way back down to the tent, we made a
slight detour to look at a high bog pool (interesting and unusual
habitat/terrain feature) and some trial work to prevent further erosion of
exposed and vulnerable peat hags (using dams and mats of natural fibres), which
hopefully will encourage re-vegetation of the stabilised bare peat. A few
blades of grass were poking through the coarsely knitted bandages, and tiny
cushions of moss were starting to live on the rope dams. (Peat restoration
projects in other areas are also using slope re-profiling and scattering
locally collected seed or cut vegetation to encourage regrowth).
A
couple of weeks later, I had one of those why-have-I-never-realised-this-before
moments. I started hillwalking on the moors around Buxton (Derbyshire) when I
was about four years old. The moors had peat hags. Moors, peat, peat hags: for me
that scarred landscape has always been there; it’s what peat does. But a couple of weeks after
visiting Carrifran’s tiny peat-restoration trial, I suddenly thought: but that
means peat hags aren’t “natural”. They are erosion,
the sign of an over-stressed environment, and they shouldn’t be there. Footpath
erosion I understand, it is caused by too many people walking over a
fragile surface. But peat hags aren’t formed by human feet (mostly). They are
formed... by... what happened in Iceland. Overgrazing. Too many sheep, too many
deer. I am stupid, to have reached nearly-retirement age, and never to have realised that peat hags
are abnormal. The trouble is, I’ve
never known anything else. I had learned, not from the hills themselves but
from books, that overgrazing prevents the natural regeneration of forests. I’ve
watched trees start to grow across our local moor along the A-road that was
sheep-fenced 25 years ago. I’ve listened to people praising Scotland’s wild,
open country, “wilderness” created and maintained by human intervention and human management. And I have been
blind; all my life I’ve been suffering from perception creep, from happy
acceptance of the “new normal”. I am deeply, deeply grateful to the visionaries
who have shown me, at Carrifran, that this is not how the land ought to be –
and that it could be different. We could manage this land in a less destructive
way. We need to do this.
As we had
already completed the tree planting, we spent the morning removing vole guards
from trees planted in previous years. This was sometimes easy (pull!) and
sometimes surprisingly difficult, where tree roots had grown through the guard,
or it had become folded and deeply buried during planting. We tied up the
flattened guards in bundles of 10, for later transport back down to the road. This
work, in a small, scattered group, grubbing in the earth, working gently but
steadily, having slow, extended conversations of a single sentence every 5
minutes: this is how our gatherer ancestors lived. This is what we evolved to
do. It feels right.
Although we found a good number of
dead (or missing) trees, it was also clear that many trees were surviving and
thriving on this challenging site. I found myself feeling very positive and
hopeful – maybe we can do some good in the world... maybe if we can improve one
piece of overgrazed, deforested land, there’s hope for the rest of the world.
Because we’d been planting krummholtz, I was reminded of one of my favourite landscapes
in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, where Sax Russell (one of my favourite
characters) is planting at the foot of the Arena glacier. Instant post-glacial
landscape – that’s what we’re trying to do here! We’re Terraforming, I thought in delight. If we do ever get the chance to
colonise another planet (unlikely), we’re going to need plenty of practice in
creating viable habitats. And we have plenty of land to practice on right here –
some very difficult sites, with not enough water, or too much salt, or
difficult heavy metals... we have a lot
of work to do, to remake the Garden of Eden, in all its variety.
This got me thinking about lots of
stuff, while stripping off vole guards, like what do we mean by “nature”, what
do we mean by “wild”? It’s called “Carrifran Wildwood”, but every tree has been
carefully and deliberately planted by humans. And the valley is managed with as
light a touch as possible, but with a great deal of thought and care – sheep
are excluded, roe deer are culled. But those are the big, easy things that we
can do to mimic post-glacial recolonisation. Would it help to do more? Dead
wood, ground flora, bryophytes, fungi, insects, microlife... will they find
their own way here? Would this place benefit from a bacteria fix? We will never be able to recreate the woodland of 6000 years ago – we don’t know exactly
what was there (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), the climate is
different, we’re starting from different conditions (grass rather than gravel),
the timescale is different... It’s an experiment. Quite a Romantic experiment.
Must find out more about “re-wilding” as a philosophical and aesthetic
movement.
Why can’t we do something like this
locally? Answer: because the “wild” North York Moors (just like “wild”
Scotland) are owned land, valuable
property, carefully managed – our moors for grouse shooting and sheep, much of
“wild” Scotland for grouse and red deer hunting. The shooting estates are high status enterprises, land ownership
and land rights are big, difficult issues. Should land be owned by privileged
individuals, or by communities, or by charitable bodies like the John Muir
Trust, or by the Government of the day. Who can own “the environment”? Who
should take responsibility for “the environment”... if not us? Who cares? How
can we care for something we don’t own? We evolved to “own” a handful of stuff
we could easily carry around with us, just like we evolved to be able to “throw
away” stuff not of immediate use. When we “threw away” stone, antler and wood, and
odd bits of dead animal, we didn’t change the world all that much. Now we’re
throwing away plastics, heavy metals and greenhouse gases, radioactive residues
that will remain mutagenic for hundreds
of thousands of years, longer than human history. Oops.
So, back at Firth Hope, after the
group had pulled up about 1200 vole guards, we had lunch, struck camp, and
walked back to the car park. Lynn asked if the group could carry down the planting
spears and the carry-bags, so we divided them up between us. Just like
travelling to/from the Arctic, I noticed how much a change of environment had
changed my perspective. Walking in on Saturday morning through the young trees
at the head of the valley, I’d thought “Oh, what small, twisted, sparse trees!”
Walking out on Sunday afternoon, I thought “Oh, what lush, flourishing, sturdy
trees, how big and healthy they’re growing here!” Down in the valley, I saw a vole – a brief
flick of dark brown fur.
This was a wonderful way to spend a weekend, one of
the most rewarding things I’ve done for ages.
I hope I can do something like this again. It’s a long time since I’ve felt so
hopeful. I don’t think I have ever participated in an event (ritual or
non-ritual) that made me feel so deeply connected to the past, the present
moment, and the future. It makes me feel that maybe it is possible not to live in a destructive way. Maybe we can live
co-operatively. Maybe I can learn how to co-operate with juniper. That would be
good.
Sue
Carrifran Wildwood volunteer
this is a really wonderful piece, combining so skilfully description with reflection, and with such authentic passion - lovely; thank you
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing that beautifully written and inspiring blog. The changes to the vegetation at Carrifran must already be affecting the valley's ecology. You get a sense of this beginning to happen from the annual bird survey data published in the book of the project. Is this survey ongoing and, if so, is it published anywhere?
ReplyDeleteHi Duncan. Many thanks for your comment and interest. Our volunteers have just completed the 10th year of our bird survey. The plan is to pull all the data together and publish the results. If you'd like more information then drop us an email to Carrifran@bordersforesttrust.org and we can put you in touch with the volunteer who is leading on the project.
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