Tall and elegant, the Scots pine flourishes in the wild glens of the Highlands – come rain, shine or snowfall. Ecologist Andrew Painting reveals the secrets of Britain’s most tenacious tree
I am walking through Glen Derry, frost-filled and with the first of the winter’s snow smattering the path, softening the calls of the Scottish crossbills that fill the still air. This glen cuts through the heart of the Cairngorms, coires (bowl-shaped valleys) sprawling along its flank.
‘Derry’ is an anglicisation of the Scots-Gaelic ‘doire’, meaning grove, and the glen is well-named. Ancient trees sprawl along the valley, each grown into its own unique mass of large trunks, big limbs and open canopies. They proudly sport blue-green needles and scaly, rusty red bark. A black grouse sends snow shivering from the canopy to the forest floor. There is a fresh, savoury flavour to the air. Glen Derry has been draped in woodland for 8,000 years, and it is wooded with Scots pine.
ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
A hardy ‘pioneer species’ (the first to colonise an unwooded ecosystem), Scots pine arrived in a wave across the British Isles as the last Ice Age ended. A pine stump in Glen Derry pokes forlornly out of the peaty moor; last year, it was radiocarbon-dated and found to be 6,500 years old. It is joined in this glen by a great survivor, a gnarled, twisted thing sitting solemnly in ice-slicked scree: a tree 570 years old and counting, one of the two oldest pines in Scotland.
People and pines have lived together in Britain for millennia. In Glen Derry, this relationship is written into the landscape. In its 570 years, our great survivor has seen Scots pines retreat, cut out by people for fuel and timber (some trees in this glen still bear the axe marks of people, centuries ago, cutting out the heartwood to use as ‘fir candles’).
Pine, which grows tall and straight, has always been supremely valuable to people, for firewood, building materials and ship masts. This has been both a blessing and a curse. Pinewoods across Britain have been actively conserved for their timber for centuries, but they have also been exploited for commercial gain. As the industrial revolution took shape, dams and sawmills were built in Glen Derry, people made and lost fortunes from its timber, and the pinewoods retreated inexorably.
In the wake of this enterprise came Highland sport. For 200 years, artificially high numbers of red deer were kept for hunting – so many that pine seedlings were eaten before they cou
