Walking in the Wood

Some people believe that when we live at the Wood our brains will atrophy and we will have nothing to do except sit around vacuously staring at the view. In fact, there are plenty of things to do, both intellectual and physical.

The physical things are fairly easy to list: collecting wood; sawing logs; ditching; walking around diligently exercising heart and muscle, which is what I did yesterday (pictures below). Today, we opened our pores for an hour and a half, throwing and dragging logs and branches from just up the hill to the wood pile. This has the satisfying effect of tidying the landscape as well as supplying fuel.

Walking in the wood

Indoors, I knit (pictures below of some of the twenty pairs of socks I have knitted this year – not all at the Wood) and do tapestry. Well, all of that is fairly mindless, though it leaves time to think other thoughts, some of which involve planning physical things: the location of more ditches; the delineation of paths (not actually making them, but finding ways of indicating preferred routes, such as by cutting the bracken, or identifying the convenient places to sit, which form markers along the way); where to place trees and other plants.

Socks

My walk yesterday was what I now regard as my favourite short circuit round the upper and middle part of the wood. It takes a fairly direct route to the eastern burn, and then along a prominent ridge parallel to the burn and overlooking it. There is another oak tree on this ridge, and hazels below it beside the burn, where there is a space between the bottom of the ridge and the burn itself which I am sure the Victorians would have turned into a lovely path, with interesting planting. There are plenty of knolls with boulders to sit on, and plenty of places demanding interesting specimens of tree or rhododendron. The ridges of moraine which run down the slope at intervals (usually with boggy bits between them) make for a great variety of views and visual possibilities.

Which leads us on to fencing, when we can afford it.

Ditching also came to the fore this weekend, as Donald Cameron, the ghillie from Kinlochhourn, came to talk about putting his machines to our rather silted up ditch, and to making new drainage in our wasteland, where I disappeared to the tops of my boots a few weekends ago, and had to be rescued by Livy It is always interesting talking to him.

And then the intellectual things. Why should we do less than we do at present? We don’t go to the theatre or concerts much – I don’t know why. We read, we write, we listen to music. Roy reminds me that when the Ellice family had Quoich Lodge (this was in the early years of the last century) they made it a centre of intellectual and cultural life, visited there by artists, writers, statesmen and the lions of their time. There’s a project for us.