ON THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE
Once, a vast forest teeming with wildlife sprawled over the Western Highlands. Today, mere fragments remain. But at Loch Arkaig, ancient pinewoods are being restored to their former glory. Mark Sutcliffe marvels at the spectacle
Beyond Fort William, where the tourist trail splits to take coachloads up the Great Glen to Inverness or out west to the coast, lies a freshwater loch set in a secluded glen. This enclave is the ancestral home of the Clan Cameron and, while the glen itself has no name, the 12-mile-long loch at its heart is called Arkaig.
Once a pristine wilderness, the ancient woodlands that surround this beautiful body of water have suffered setbacks over the past century or so. As the memorial at nearby Spean Bridge attests, this trackless vastness was used as a training ground for Commando units during the Second World War. In 1942, exercises with live ammunition caused catastrophic fires. Later came the depredations of intensive commercial forestry.
But today, the ancient forests of Arkaig are the site of an ambitious restoration project that will strip out the conifer plantations to make space for regeneration of native species – Scots pine, oak, rowan and birch.
Led by the Woodland Trust Scotland, the Arkaig Community Forest is a landscape-scale initiative that will restore some 2,500 acres of the ancient Caledonian Forest to its former natural glory.
THE LOST RAINFOREST
The Caledonian Forest was a vibrant patchwork of woodland habitats that colonised much of Scotland after the last ice age some 7,000 years ago. Bronze Age pastoralists began felling trees around 4,000 years ago and more and more of the forest was lost to farming over the centuries. Now only remnants of the Caledonian Forest can be found in remote glens across the Highlands. In the east, these fragments of forest are dominated by pine, but in the west the maritime climate encourages a higher proportion of oak, birch and rowan.
Loch Arkaig lies less than 20 miles from the coast and these woodlands are a prime example of one of the scarcest habitats on the planet: coastal temperate rainforest. That’s one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in Britain and the project will benefit a broad spectrum of wildlife, ranging from eagles and ospreys to butterflies, red squirrels, pine martens and rare mosses and lichens.
Arkaig is only accessible by road from the east, where the B8004 offers some of the best views of Ben Nevis before plunging into unclassified lanes through the woodlands that separate lochs Lochy and Arkaig. Between the hamlet of Clunes and the eastern end of the loch lies the ‘Dark Mile’ – a straight stretch of road through the dense, damp temperate rainforest habitat that will characterise these woodlands once the restoration is complete.
Here – even in November – plant life bursts forth from every bosky nook and cranny. Dense mantels of bright green mosses cloak the tumbledown ‘walls’ and delicate fern fronds peer from every damp crevice. Lichens cling to the damp trunks of the birch and rowan that form the understorey and hang from the branches of the taller pines, which dominate the fiery autumn canopy.
Beyond the dark mile, the Chia-Aig waterfalls cascade through the trees and the head of the loch comes into view, dominated by two wooded islands. The larger of these was a burial ground for Cameron clan chiefs and the remains of a chapel dedicated to St Columba are still visible. The island was also home to the last nesting pair of native ospreys in Britain, prior to their 1950s reintroduction. Today, ospreys return to Arkaig every spring, and from 2016 were joined by a resident pair of white-tailed eagles.