A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 147

We stopped above a waterfall whose cool breath I could feel while
standing on the rocks over the gorge, and whose spray I could taste
on the air: mossy, halogenic. The peaty brown water stretched dark
olive over the sill before plunging and pluming down the long ser-
ies of rapids. The gorge was a Japanese painting, knotty pines bristling
on crooked rocks above the water.
On the far bank, preserved from grazing, the boulders beneath the
trees were carpeted in moss and lichen, through which cowberry and
bilberry grew. Around them the heather sprawled in deep drifts. The
trees too, in the perpetual mist raised by the falls, were bearded and
maned with outrageous growths of lichen. The hazels and rowans in
the understorey scarcely emerged from their shawls of moss. This,
Alan reminded me, was rainforest.
The road took us past Loch Beinn a Mheadhoin, whose waters
looked like brushed steel. On its islands and bluffs grew umbrella-
shaped pines. Beneath them, inaccessible to the deer, young trees
spiked towards the light.
Glen Affric is one of the few parts of Britain in which the work of
the Forestry Commission has, from the beginning, been largely benign.
Since a sawmill was built in the valley in 1750, the old trees had been
under siege, while the sheep grazing beneath them prevented almost
all recruitment. The commission bought most of the glen in 1951,
and, neglecting its customary duties, decided to preserve it rather than
to wreck it. In the 1960s a young forester persuaded his bosses to let
him fence 800 hectares of the glen, arguing, against the received wis-
dom of the time, that the trees could regenerate without being planted.
The results were spectacular, an unequivocal rejoinder to those who
said it was impossible. We could see them on the brae on the far side of
the loch: stockades of pines a few decades old, their spiky profile broken
in some places by the great humps of older trees. This experiment was
one of the factors that had inspired Alan to found Trees for Life.
He parked the car at the head of the loch, in a patch of birch and pine
wood. Here, by contrast to the fissured grey bark in Glenmoriston, the
trunks of the birch trees were mostly white and smooth. Beneath them he
pointed out something that fascinated me. The ground was covered in
hummocks, which I might have taken for anthills. Alan explained that