The Nature of Winter
Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.
Step inside an ancient hazel wood, on the west coast of Mull. Feel the millennia tumble away. Immerse yourself in its embrace and the press of trees abruptly reduces your awareness of the world to the next few yards, sometimes the next few feet. Again and again the architecture of such a wood commands you to turn aside, bend double, unpin yourself from brambles, wade bogs... any combination of these and more or less all the time. And the trees are eerie. They writhe their trunks and limbs, the ones that have trunks and limbs, that is. Many of them are effectively self-coppicing, that is, they produce dozens of stems instead of a single trunk. Our own distant ancestors learned from nature how to coppice trees, and especially hazels, so that they might create endless supplies of firewood and of straight poles for building. Often in the Atlantic hazel woods, the trees just do it themselves. If you walk there in a certain mindset and if the day is soft grey and calm, the effect can seem curiously aggressive, nervy, edgy; and if the sun shines, they throw such a web of shadows on the woodland floor that it adds to the untranquil aura of such places. When Yeats went out to the hazel wood in The Song of Wandering Aengus “because a fire was in my head”, it was not to cool the fire that he went there, but rather to cut a hazel wand so that he might catch a trout. The uneasiness of hazel woods is not the environment you would choose to cool a fiery head. If, on the other hand, what you want is an instant fishing rod, it’s perfect.
Hazel woods are also vocal. The trees rasp and rustle in a good-going wind (and on Scotland’s Atlantic seaboard the wind is good-going more often than not), and groan and creak when the wind gets excited, and these are notes of protest that ocean winds have heard for almost as long as there have been hazel woods on an Atlantic shore.