My Wild Places

I have just finished reading the first of my Christmas books  ‘The Wild Places’ by Robert Macfarlane and have that mixed feeling of sadness and contentment that comes with reaching the last page of a book which you have lost yourself in for the duration of its story.  The book in this instance was a non-fiction piece of writing but the story it told was about finding the wild places of Britain and Ireland.  Macfarlane began his writing with the belief that true wild places existed beyond the touch of ‘human history’ and concluded that wildness can, and frequently does, exist alongside human marks made on the earth.

As I was reading I began to think about what places I would consider to be my wild places. The places where I felt most connected to the natural world and where I enjoyed returning to. The first four that sprang to mind are the four below.

The Glen

This was where I spent a lot of my childhood with my friend Nina. We would go ‘down the glen’ and collect tadpoles from the burn, make a bridge across to our secret island, pick raspberries and just generally be free to do as we wished. Our glen was at the edge of a run down town in central Scotland where many years ago mining was the main employment.  I now live 1 ½ hrs drive away near the beautiful Angus Glens which are by far a different kind of glen altogether. Nina lives in Seville in Spain but her parents still live in our childhood hometown. In summer 2014 we met up at  the home of Nina’s parents and we took our two oldest children to visit ‘ our glen’.  Despite all the wild places I have been since I last visited here ‘the glen’ still had the ability to stir something inside me and in my mind I returned to the wild, carefree days of my childhood. Our daughters ran off exploring as soon as we passed through the gates and I felt a lump in my throat as I watched the next generation exploring our wee piece of the wild.

The Burn

This burn runs along the bottom of the field behind our house. In the summer it’s not much more than a trickle of water but in the wetter months it can be as high as the measuring stick seen in this picture. On June 22^nd 2013 I took our dog his usual wee walk to the bridge over the burn and stood on the bridge watching a deer bound across one of the fields. As I was watching I heard a plop as something disturbed the water and looked down to see what it was.  Immediately I saw a long brown body  just immersed and no more and swimming towards me, a moment later the body emerged from the water and the next thing I knew I was staring into the eyes of an otter as I gazed down at it and it looked curiously up at me. I was transfixed and it had no inclination to turn and flee so we stood like that for a good few minutes before the otter decided it had better things to be doing. Me, I could have happily stood like that all day.

 Glen Doll

One of the Angus Glens and in the Cairngorm National Park, Glen Doll is glen we visit most frequently. No matter what time of year it is the car park is never empty as this is where people come to climb the two Munros Driesh and Mayar, to walk Jocks Road to Braemar, to visit the beautiful Corrie Fee or just to walk around the wooded pathways and experience the fresh, clean air. It is highly unlikely then that you will not meet people when out walking but there is one pathway we often take that other people seem to overlook. The pathway takes you on a circular walk by the edge of the river South Esk, past the stony river edge where we like to search for interesting stones and river life, over a bridge where you can play a great game of Pooh Sticks, through a dark, mysterious wood and past the mountains where you can hear the stag rut in the autumn. The land tells the story of how it was formed (assisted by my husband’s narrative) and large erratics lie where they have been deposited by glaciers around 14-15,000 years ago. It’s strange to think that these boulders our children now clamber over and jump off were once carried by ice through a landscape that we today would not recognise, at a time when mammoths roamed the land. 

The Wood

I had never been in this wood until we got Ben our dog. It is just yards from my horses’ field but I had no need to go into it until Ben started coming up to the horses with me and required a walk once the work was done. I had never taken the horses in as I believed the wood was too dense and the ground too uneven to ride safely. The wood is only about half a mile long and not very deep. There are fields to one side, and roads at the other side and both ends. If you time it right you can walk through the wood and meet no one at all, half an hour at either side of your time slot and you will meet the same people walking their dogs no matter what day you are there. Despite the small surface area, in this wood I have encountered an amazing array of wildlife. It is home to red squirrels and at one time there were six of these rusty tailed characters inhabiting the tree tops and caching their winter supply in the undergrowth. It looked for a while that this population had disappeared and one regular dog walker informed me he had seen the last one being eaten by a buzzard, the tail having been dropped on the soft grass underneath the tree the buzzard had dined on.  I left that conversation with a heavy heart.  A couple of weeks later Ben alerted me to a red coated character darting up a tree and I stood and looked up into the tree canopy as two alert and curious eyes stared back down at me. On another occasion we were approaching the end of the wood and as I made to retrace my steps something flew right in front of me then landed on a branch just in front me. It was my first, and so far only, encounter with a Little owl. On other occasions I have watched Great Spotted Woodpeckers drum on the trunks of dead trees and just this week a Roe deer bounded silently through the snow yards from where we were walking.  There are also flocks of Great Tits and many different types of fungi depending on what time year you visit. I would never have believed this small area of woodland would be home to such a rich variety of flora and fauna and I think Robert Macfarlane was right when he reached the conclusion that “ There was as much to be learned in acre of woodland on a city’s fringe as on the shattered summit of Ben Hope”. 

Everything Endures

Quite literally just after I had written down the last word of this reflection yesterday my mum came through the door and told me my grandpa had passed away. Writing this was my way of coping with the waiting and the sadness and I decided to post it on my blog in memory of him. 

ANDREW AITKEN 30/04/1923-08/01/2015

It is the New Year and rather than thoughts of new beginnings and moving forward my thoughts seem to be concentrated on death and dying. Some of these thoughts are brought about due to the consequence of working with adults who are predominately in the winter of their lives. Indeed in winter many seem to melt away from this life in large numbers, some expected others not.

Reasons closer to home are also affecting my thinking and as I write this my grandpa, my dad’s dad, is lying in hospital on the cusp between living and dying. He is ninety-one approaching ninety

two in the spring and when we last saw him on 27^th December 2014 he was happy and content surrounded by every member of his immediate family, my granny, his son and daughter, his son-in-law and daughter-in-law, his five grandchildren with their spouses and his five great-grandchildren with two more expected in March.  He was happy but he was tired and there was a feeling among us all that this would be the last time we were all together. Yet there was no sadness, just joy in being there at that moment in time.

My grandpa’s deterioration in health prompted a text conversation with my friend last night on the subject of death. Admittedly it was not the cheeriest of conversations but it was interesting. We discussed our reactions to death now as opposed to our reactions when we were teenagers. At this stage in my life my other grandpa passed away after years of living with Alzheimer’s disease. My response to his death was to cry inconsolably and internalise the loss I felt. It was in many ways a selfish grief I experienced but then as my friend pointed out “ Teenaged selves are very self centred and experiences of death at that age will be difficult”. So is experiencing a death less difficult now in my thirties  than it was in my teens.

As I have been walking in the woods this morning with our dog, mucking out my horses’ field, cleaning out the hens and walking Ben dog again this is primarily what my thoughts around death and dying have centered on, is it still a difficult subject to deal with? My friend and I touched on this in our conversation both feeling our society is not very confident when dealing with someone who is nearing the end of their life. Rather than looking at the person and allowing a dignified death free from interference, there seems to be a need to turn to medicines and medical settings to try and prolong the inevitable outcome. As my friend rightly pointed out, dying is part of living. The two come as a package and every minute of every day people are reaching a natural time in their life when they are ready to exchange life for death.

This exchange also takes place daily in nature. A queen bee sees through a summer of reproducing then dies having led a brief, productive life. A salmon makes the final journey to its spawning grounds, ensures more generations will follow then dies.  A flower blooms, produces its pollen then fades and dies having ensured more colour will appear next spring. A dragonfly emerges from the pond, finds a mate and after only a day of sunlight dies, the eggs containing the next generation laid and waiting to emerge. Living is natural and dying is natural. One cannot exist without the other.

Looking at it in this way I find death is not as difficult to deal with as it was when I was a teenager, or when I was even younger and at an age when the tears would flow over the death of a stick insect. Death is actually a fascinating and contemplative subject and one which we should not shy away from. Loosing someone will always be difficult even with an understanding that this is their time and keeping them with us any longer would be unfair. However, I believe everything and everyone endures in some form or another be it in the new blooms that emerge in the spring, the dragonflies that unfurl their wings as they leave behind their watery nurseries, the young salmon beginning their migration, the new queen bees pushing their way out of the soil where they slept away the winter or the nineteen family members who are there and together because of you and who all see you as their inspiration.