What is the point of veteran trees in the Highlands?

I first discovered veteran managed trees in Glenleraig, the long, lovely, wooded glen which runs from the western rampart of cliffs of Quinag to the dark and secretive Loch Nedd, in the Parish of Assynt. A white cottage beside the amber pools of the burn was our beloved holiday-home in childhood and adolescence, and I was lucky enough to live there again for 15 years in my middle-age.

I had become very interested in the evolution of these woods, and as I walked constantly through them, I began to realise that the strange shapes of many of the native trees, (deciduous apart from the holly and occasional juniper) reflected their individual histories. I loved them as ‘natural sculptures’ and as part of the attractions of my glen, but I also began to recognise that there was a much deeper aspect to be explored and studied; these trees could tell me something.

To cut a long story short, helped by reading the works of Oliver Rackham, and two very helpful visits by Scotland’s own woodland ‘guru’ , Peter Quelch, I realised that throughout Assynt, there were trees of almost every present species (ash, alder, birch, hazel, holly, oak, rowan, willows), which had been coppiced and/or pollarded. Some were clearly of considerable age; anything that was over 200 years old would take us back before the time of the Clearances, and so was part of the mediaeval-to-late- mediaeval landscape which included the cairidh, (fish-trap), the noust (a boat-shaped indentation or small dock), the mill, clearance cairn, lynchet, rig and field wall or bank which were all part of that pre-Clearance economy. (As well, of course, as the all-important sheilings).

Veteran trees in such a context have a wider significance; the folk who worked them appreciated and used, often repeatedly, the astonishing ability of such trees to renew themselves, almost forever, after coppicing or pollarding. This characteristic was fundamental to the local economy, and being used kept the trees alive. This is very far from the attitude you may still hear from the occasional old ecologist: “ The Highlands were once covered in trees, and we cut them all down”. Far from it! All around the older settlements in Assynt you may come across old trees of the most remarkable shapes, testimony to repeated use over centuries. Some still show sawcuts.

And, on close acquaintance with these veteran trees, you become aware that you often can hardly see any bark; they are almost covered by mosses and lichens, with liverworts, perhaps, at the base. So far north, there may not be a great variety of species, but what they lack in numbers, they make up for in coverage. Associated with these species, there may well be specialised invertebrates; (of which I have to admit ignorance!).

Such trees are often found in areas which were clearly formerly wood-pasture, grazed in the winter; they would not have the dense canopy of what we might term “woods” but have the scattered veteran trees, sometimes, like the remarkable single-stemmed, pollarded hazels of Assynt and Rassall, in groups or groves. And some of these remarkable veterans are found in locations which may seem surprising: the lovely pinewoods of Glen Affric and Strath Farrar shelter at least one spectacular managed oak, and a whole group of wonderfully squat-trunked, (pollarded) alders.

Such trees in the Highlands may not yet have adequate recognition or protection, but they should at least be recorded. Some are of incredible age: we found an oak-ring in Assynt, an ancient coppice-stool, which could be as much as a thousand years in age -truly an ancient monument!

So, these veteran trees are remarkable in themselves, but what they represent is far more significant; they have transformed the way that people thought the native inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands regarded their trees and woods.