The Birks of Aberfeldy

Days of low cloud, drifting mists and that damp air that chills the spirits as well as the bones have made the high tops unnatractive. Wandering in a cold wet fog with little to see has not appealed. Woods and waterfalls can be colourful and exciting on dark November days however and one of my favourite walks encompassing both is the Birks of Aberfeldy in Strath Tay, which I visited a few days ago. This is a deep wooded ravine down which tumbles and crashes the Moness Burn. After all the recent rain the burn was a whitewater torrent, the bigger falls sending sprays of water droplets fine as mist high in the air. In the confines of the narrow gorge the noise of the water was deafening. The mixed woodland - beech, oak, ash, hazel, larch and pine as well as the "birks" (birches) of the name - is beautiful at this time of year. Some leaves still cling to the trees, most golden, some still green, especially on the hazels. On the larches the needles were only just beginning to change colour. The woodland floor glowed bronze with fallen beech leaves, shimmering with drops of moisture. Despite the roar and rush of the burn it is a peaceful place, feeling hidden and protected from outside storms. It impressed Robert Burns who wrote his poem The Birks of Aberfeldy here and gave the ravine its name:

The braes ascend like lofty wa's,
The foaming stream deep-roaring fa's,
O'erhung wi' fragrant spreading shaws-
The birks of Aberfeldy.

The Birks of Aberfeldy walk ends right in the centre of Aberfeldy, where it was just a short stroll to The Watermill cafe and bookshop and a warming mug of hot chocolate and restorative slice of sticky flapjack. The Watermill, which is in the old Aberfeldy mill, is a wonderful relaxing place where you can browse the latest books and have a tasty lunch. At the end of a cold November walk it's very welcome indeed.

Photo info: the Moness Burn in the Birks of Aberfeldy, November 2009. Sigma DP1, 1/30@f5.6, ISO 200, raw file converted to JPEG in Lightroom 2.

Beowulf, Dragons & the Wilderness

Last month I went to see Beowulf, a rather odd film with slightly cartoonish modified characters that seemed facially wooden compared with straight acting but also with some dramatic special effects and a wonderful dragon. The film is based on the Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name that dates from sometime in the last centuries of the first millennium. The poem is set in Sweden and Denmark in the sixth century and tells the story of the hero Beowulf and his battles with the monster Grendel and his mother (described in the poem as a “swamp-thing from hell” but played in the movie by Angeline Jolie as a seductress”) and finally the “old harrower of the dark”, the dragon. The poem is a powerful tale of heroic warriors and evil monsters, the original of all “sword and sorcery” stories. Beowulf wasn’t taken seriously as a literary poem until 1936 when J.R.R.Tolkien, then a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, wrote an important academic work called Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics. The influence of the poem can be clearly seen in Tolkien’s own stories. In The Hobbit, as in Beowulf, a dragon is roused to violence when an intruder steals a gold-plated cup from its horde of treasure. In The Lord of the Rings there are even direct quotes from Beowulf in the descriptions of the land of Rohan and its people. The Golden Hall of the King of Rohan, Meduseld, sounds like the hall of Hrothgar in Beowulf, described as "radiant with gold". Meduseld is convincingly portrayed in Peter Jackson's film of The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, I think that Jackson's Rohan is more like the world of Beowulf than that portrayed in the Beowulf film.

Although Anglo-Saxon or Old English gave rise to modern English Beowulf can only be read in the original with difficulty. However there are several translations into modern English. Of the few I’ve read I like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, which is powerful and compelling. All the quotations in this blog come from this version.

Much of Beowulf takes place in the outdoors, in wild country that is threatening and strange with “dismal woods” and “windswept crags and treacherous keshes, where cold streams pour down the mountain and disappear under mist and moorland”. The poem contains one of the first known uses of the word “wildeor” which means “wild animal or deer” and from which the word “wilderness” derives. Beowulf itself probably means “bee wolf”, that is a creature that eats honey, a bear. In my book Crossing Arizona I link Beowulf to Winnie-the-Pooh (who lives in a wilderness – a wood on a hill) and Beowulf’s quests to long distance walking. For those who love the literature of wilderness as well as the wild itself Beowulf is the place to start.

The photo shows a carved dragon in Weem Woods in the Tay Valley in the Scottish Highlands. Photo info: Canon EOS 300D, Canon 18-55mm lens at 18mm, f3.5@1/60, ISO 200, flash, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

The Wild Places- Book Review

My wilderness journeys and my love of nature and wild places are inextricably linked with my love of literature. The two intertwine and inspire each other. This goes back to my childhood when I was enthralled by the stories of Arthur Ransome and even Richmal Crompton’s “William” books, which often have woods and fields as their settings (I still find William’s adventures hilarious). As an adult it has been writers like Henry David Thoreau, Colin Fletcher, Edward Abbey, John Muir and W.H.Murray who I have read and reread, always finding something new and thought-provoking in their work. A few months ago I wrote a piece on these writers called Visionaries of the Wild for the January 2008 issue of TGO magazine (out now in early December and full of suggestions for Xmas gifts, despite the cover date – one of the strange quirks of magazine publishing). I finished that piece with a reference to a recent book, Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, in which the author seeks the wild in the British countryside, ranging from the Northern Highlands to Devon and East Anglia, in a series of short journeys, most involving a night or two under the stars. Macfarlane links these places with natural forces – the weather, geology, wild life – and the people who have inhabited the landscapes. He collects talismans – stones, feathers, shells, wood – that connect up the places in his memory and finds that these connections present a different map of Britain, a web of nature, to the road map most people are familiar with, a rigid structure that ignores nature. Macfarlane also discovers that wild places are not only remote and vast but can be found everywhere, that the natural state of the world is wildness and that to this it will return. Macfarlane’s discovery of wildness in little woods and lowland farmland brought me back to my childhood in the flat countryside of Lancashire where I discovered nature and freedom in such places. The book, a wonderful celebration of the wild, brought back other memories too and stimulated me to think anew about the meaning of wild places. It’s not a polemic in defence of wild places but the joy the author expresses in wildness shows the importance of these places and therefore the need to protect them (the author supports the Scottish Wild Land Group and does say “the contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe”). The writing is compelling and enthralling, pulling the reader into the wild landscapes and the experiences of the author. Optimistic and life-affirming the book is a great antidote to the sense of despair and loss that can come with the experience of the destruction of wild places. As an old hippy-farmer friend of mine was found of saying many decades ago “nature will out”. That is the message of The Wild Places.