IAIN THORNBER

Many of us have a favourite tree. It may be one we remember from childhood – a tree we liked to climb up or swing from or hide behind. Or perhaps it’s one of the ancient and majestic yews, ash or oaks that stand sentinel in churchyards or by the loch sides, hardly seeming to change as the human years hurry by.

Maybe it is an age thing, but it seems to me that no sooner are trees planted these days than they are ready to be felled. I appreciate the commercial necessity for planting fast growing Sitka spruce and European larch, but I cannot help thinking that our landscape would be greatly improved by many more oak, ash, plane and, dare I say, a few acres of Chilean pine that do so well in the glens of South America, which has a similar climate to our own.

As far as I can see, the few broadleaf species of any quantity planted in Morvern during the past four decades has been on the edges of Sitka spruce plantations to satisfy a nebulous grant requirement. These thin lines of trees might add a bit of colour to begin with, but in reality, they are no more than a sop or an apology and will be destroyed when the main crop is taken out in later years.

The land round the head of Loch a’ Choire, Kingairloch, is a classic example. What a magnificent sight the woods there would have been when viewed from a boat entering the loch in early spring or late autumn, if broadleaves instead of rectangular blocks of monotonous Sitka spruce, had been planted 40 years ago.

It isn’t as though the soil in Morvern cannot support anything other than conifers.

Professor John Walker, Scottish minister and Regius Professor of Natural History, Edinburgh University, in his report on famous Highland trees, dated 1808, mentions that there were many oaks growing in the parish in 1764 with girths exceeding 17 feet.

In 1909 the Reverend Alexander MacDiarmid, the United Free Church minister in Morvern and an antiquarian, wrote: “Perhaps the greatest natural curiosity in the [White Glen] is the famous old oak, near the public road, not far from the foot of the glen. A few inches above the ground it has a circumference of 20 feet. The trunk is now hollow in the middle and some six or eight feet up from the ground the old tree has disappeared. But the seeds of other trees were carried by birds, or by the wind, and got embedded in the sides of the old trunk, and now a birch tree and three trees of the mountain ash species grow from the bowels of this once majestic oak to the height of 25 feet. The locality was at one time full of oaks, but they are now all away except this long-surviving tree of Jove.”

There are still some large oaks growing between Acharn and Ulladale but, unfortunately, the site of MacDiarmid’s famous oak has been lost from living memory. A fine avenue of lime trees flourish on the west bank of the Glen Geal River and above the nearby farm of Acharn. The avenue was said to have been planted in 1690 by a cousin of Flora MacDonald of ’45 fame and once led up to the front door of an old mansion house that has long gone.

In 1867 The Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland produced a series of papers called “Old and Remarkable Trees of Scotland”, in which there is reference to an elm growing on the lawn of Sunart House, Strontian, which was 60ft high and had a medium girth of 10ft. It was estimated to have been 120 years old and was said to have been planted by Lady Jane Cameron of Dungallon, wife of the estate owner, who first built a black house at the place and lived there.

According to the Reverend John Macleod, the Church of Scotland parish minister and another keen antiquarian, Morvern was so thickly covered in natural timber that there were only two places between Lochaline and Drimnin from where the Sound of Mull could be seen. That was in 1842.

There is an even earlier account of the woods along the same coastline glowing “as one red ember” from Drimnin to Old Ardtornish, when it had been set on fire by Government troops in 1746. War and pestilence took care of the remainder prompting local bard, Donald Mackinnon (1830-60), who lived at Rhemore, to compose a song called, A Mhorbhairne Ghlas nan Tualaichean (Green Morvern of the Hills) in which he wrote: “They used to call you ‘tir an coille’, [the land of woods] and there was a time when you deserved it, though now your thickets have been stripped bare by the ones with the white faces (Border sheep)”.

The seasonal migrants of the feathered variety have arrived. Cuckoos, wheatears, swallows, great northern divers, stonechats, golden plover and house martins have all come in the past few weeks and are well distributed throughout the parish.

There are no puffins in the Sound of Mull yet. Their great sanctuary is Lunga, one of the Treshnish Isles off the south-west coast of Mull.

A few years ago, I was on Lunga to watch them coming ashore from the Atlantic to breed; what an awesome sight it was to witness them arriving in ones and twos and making straight for the same cliff-top burrows they use every year – ejecting the disgruntled rabbit population in the process!