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”.