Alan Riach: Trouble among the honey-scented heather hills

It’s still a good country to live in. We are not so cut off from nature’s reality as to be immured from its contact.

Hugh MacDiarmid, or Chris Grieve, the wee boy growing up in Langholm, said he read all the books in the town library, housed upstairs in the building where he spent his childhood, but that equally, wandering around the “honey-scented heather hills”, listening to the sounds of rivers that come to a confluence in Langholm – even their names each have a different music: the Wauchope, the Esk and the Ewes – was essential to him, to his experience growing up.

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Book learning and nature – you have to be in touch with both. More than that, you have to be immersed in both and see how they interconnect. “By leaves we live,” said Patrick Geddes, who chaired the first public reading MacDiarmid gave in the 1920s. The leaves of trees, the leaves of books, the leave-taking of childhood.

The “grand thing to get leave to live” of which Nan Shepherd spoke, the phrase that is reproduced in tiny, beautiful calligraphy on the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note. The honesty of such experience is our human test.

How does MacDiarmid address it in his poetry? Try In the Caledonian Forest. Part One sets out the challenge clearly, although the words are so unfamiliar that you might need more than one dictionary or online search engine to decipher their meaning. They are in themselves a metaphor for finding yourself in the uncharted depths of the forest. You’re lost. Find your co-ordinate points.

The geo-selenic gimbal that moving makes

A gerbe now of this tree now of that

Or glomerates the whole earth in a galanty-show

Against the full moon caught Suddenly threw a fuscous halation round a druxy dryad

Lying among the fumet in this dwale wood

As brooding on Scotland’s indecrassifiable race

I wandered again in a hemicranic mood.

She did not change her epirhizous posture

But looked at me steadily with Hammochrysos eyes

While I wondered what dulia might be her due

And from what her curious enanthesis might arise,

And then I knew against that frampold background

This freaked and forlorn creature was indeed

With her great shadowed gastrocnemius and desipient face

The symbol of the flawed genius of our exheredated breed.

As in Antichthon there among the apoproegmena

A quatr’ occhi for a long time we stood

While like a kind of springhalt or chorea

The moonshine flickered in the silent wood,

Or like my own aporia externalised,

For her too slight kenosis made it impossible for me to woo

This outcast Muse, or urge the long-lost cause we might advance even yet,

Conjunctivitis viribus, or seek to serve her, save thus ek parergou.

You can look it up for yourself. And as if that piece isn’t difficult enough, there’s a Part Two. But now the logic of the poem’s meaning becomes clear. An endlessness of form, patterns, shapes and natural kinds of articulation.

Life’s manifold, manifest meanings grow forth in all the multiple ways of forest trees, of branches, twigs, interconnected, convoluted, self-sustaining miraculous flora. We know that form must have endings to take any shape at all. Mortality assures us of this and ensures we cannot deny it.

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But no single life can encompass them all, that’s for sure too. The world is too great, too large, for any multi-trillionairic thicko to be actually “in charge of it”. He – or she, but at present, it’s mostly a he – might be in control of a lot of it, and might be able to bring destruction upon a lot of it. But nobody owns it, nobody ever knows enough to be “in charge of it”.

So what? Does that just spur you on to make the next attempt to stink up the joint with megalomania? Or does it maybe prompt a kind of humility? A recognition of exactly what our limitations are? You’ve just seen them in action, in Part One of In the Caledonian Forest. Now here’s Part Two:

They are not endless these variations of form

Though it is perhaps impossible to see them all.

It is certainly impossible to conceive one that doesn’t exist.

But I still keep trying to do both of these

And though it is a long time now since I saw a new one

I am by no means weary yet of my concentration

On phyllotaxis here in preference to all else,

All else – but my sense of sny.

The gold edging of a bough at sunset, its pantile way

Forming a double curve, tegula and imbrex in one,

Seems at times a movement on which I might be borne

Happily to infinity; but again I am glad

When it suddenly ceases and I find myself

Pursuing no longer a rhythm of duramen

But bouncing on the diploe in a clearing between earth and air

Or headlong in dewy dallops or a moon-spairged fernshaw

Or caught in a dark dumosity or even

In open country again watching an aching spargosis of stars.

That’s beautiful. The word “spargosis” signifies the swollen breasts of a woman about to suckle an infant. That’s what the stars in their constellations in the night sky are to us, if we can see them as such.

But there are the interferers, the corporate world, corporate globe, corporate exploiters, hard at work. And this is where MacDiarmid’s poetry, his birthplace and childhood home, and what’s actually going on in the world’s commercial reality, right now, all come to another kind of confluence.

I’ll quote now from a document prepared by the Langholm group SWAG – the Save Warblaw Action Group – headed “Langholm Locals Object to Commercial Forestry on their Doorstep”. It says: “An unprecedented 974 local signatures have been obtained objecting the development of commercial forestry on Warblaw Hill above Langholm.

“Local residents fear the planting of non-native trees, such as sitka spruce, will impact on the local scenery and wildlife surrounding the town. For generations local people have accessed the hill for recreation and farming and they fear this will now be stolen from them. The petition was hand delivered to the offices of Scottish Woodlands in Melrose on September 16.

“In a landmark development in recent years the townspeople of Langholm have bought extensive areas of land from the Buccleuch Estate to develop an extensive nature reserve just a short distance from the commercial forestry that is now being developed.

“The use of non-native sitka spruce in commercial forestry is known to have a major impact on biodiversity, as well as self-seeding beyond the areas where it is being commercially grown. This can have an adverse impact on biodiversity, areas of peat and native woodland.

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“The town has been developing its tourism industry, not least through the nature reserve and the popular appeal of the wider local landscape, scenery, and open hills. The countryside surrounding Langholm provides extensive walks and spectacular views to enjoy.

“Locals point out that dense forestry, surrounded by 6ft-high deer fencing, will destroy this and tarnish the wider appeal of the town.

“Local feelings are running high and many have vented their anger on feedback forms regarding the proposal. Locals have established the Save Warblaw Action Group (SWAG) to campaign to oppose the development.

“SWAG has seen more than 80 of the forms that have been submitted and reports that not a single one was in favour of the development of commercial forestry in the hills above their town. SWAG reports that local feedback on the proposals has been scathing and it has vowed to seek answers to every one of the issues and concerns raised by residents.

“Many have also criticised the consultation process. For example, the feedback forms could not be completed electronically or online, forcing people to obtain hard copies and handwrite their responses and arrange for them to be submitted to the offices in Melrose.

“However, local people rose to the challenge and hand delivered their lengthy petition and the feedback forms in person. Locals have vowed to continue their fight beyond the current consultation period which has now come to a close.”

I have personal experience of this territory, and it makes a difference. When I visited Langholm in September 2023 to launch my book of poems The MacDiarmid Memorandum my friend Margaret Pool and I drove up on to Tarras Moor before the event.

Margaret had been deeply involved in the community buyout of the moor from the Duke of Buccleuch. Great swathes of the territory are now community-owned and this is the subject of one of my poems in the book. I wanted to be up on the moor and see it again before the reading.

When we got up to the summit, where Jake Harvey’s sculpture commemorating MacDiarmid is located, the afternoon was drenched in gorgeous sunshine and the whole expanse of the territory which is now in common ownership was spread out splendidly.

You could almost hear individual insects and birds as well as streams and the breeze moving the plants and bushes. I was told there are now eagles nesting nearby and frequently to be seen in the skies above.

We were walking up to the MacDiarmid monument when a campervan drove up and parked.

A man got out and asked us if there was something to see here, and what was that spire on the hill?

The spire is beyond the MacDiarmid monument, erected to a prominent local citizen in the 19th century.

MacDiarmid has a poem about it denigrating such a symbol of upper-class superiority, so I told the visitor it was a memorial to some local dignitary who was of no consequence whatever but he needed to pay attention to the sculpture nearby.

I introduced him to Margaret as “The Godmother of the Territory”. She said: “No, no,” and introduced him to me, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University.

He said in a broad southern accent: “I’ve struck gold here, haven’t I?” He was driving from England to Hawick and had simply stopped for a look around and to exercise his dog. We took him to the monument and he sent a photo of me there for evidence.

It’s a pleasant personal anecdote but it shouldn’t distract from the seriousness of the confrontation currently going on in Langholm and on Warblaw Hill, between the desire to build back into the future, to create or recreate a world where living things have their own priority, and the need to oppose corporate finance of one enormous inimical kind or another.

Death is so much better for business than life. That’s the rule. So, what is the life we’re fighting for? Where does the value lie? Here’s one answer, a poem of my own poem:

The Forest Floor

From my window, the blue sky sails

through high Scots oaks and beech,

sycamore, ash, hawthorn and

spruce,

lights and makes shadows on

innumerable tangles of branches,

angled, twisted, stretching horizontal,

thinning, leaning, curving down

or thinly sloping out above their

neighbours,

almost touching, slender,

as the tall slim sturdy trunks

might sway

a little, in the wind,

or in a storm, might bend, and leaves

shiver green like flames in

a flaring fire,

but cold in the rain

or even just the early spring blue air,

coming among them, there.

That squirrel,

moves so fast then stops,

dead still, legs spread,

claws caught on the bark,

then heads up, races again,

and leaps

to how can it know where, or how secure,

how pliant and connected,

how brittle or broken the next

branch might be?

Hits safely, darts on,

up and around, into the woods,

reappears further on, stops, still,

then moves again,

and is gone.

There is an endless tension, day and

night. Animals and trees don’t sleep.

The beasts might close their bodies

down a while. Trees never do.

The tension never goes away entirely.

A forest at night is dark, but never asleep.

Night creatures move and sound

in their own time, darkly, but highly awake:

the tension is acute.

Day creatures, that squirrel,

gone elsewhere, stay fast in their

proprioception:

we look on and study, can only imagine,

get into, sometimes, for a moment or two.

The wilderness things are within it,

all of their lives.

Almost none of them die of old age.

Predators, invaders, diseases brought in,

removals, destructions,

the industry mind, the numbers folk,

the dollars talk, disrupt. Pollution

spoils.

But wilderness things connect.

Trees, squirrels, birds,

from sky to the forest floor.

Voles, mice, spiders, ants.

and under the earth, the worms.

And nutrients of corpses.

At dusk the crows coagulate,

their throats fill out

with flowing music craws,

cacophonies of polyphonic soaring

growing massive, individuations,

as the sky gets

duskier and darker and the

darkness

starts to close things down.

They gather on the branches of the

tall Scots oaks

and other trees and mass.

A Catholic conglomerate of

Protestants,

and then, at one moment, they rise,

flying out

of the mesh of the traps of the

branches,

all in curves and angles, fast, freely,

Then in a cloud of winged black

bodies, connected

and singular, curve up and out

and into the air,

and turn in an arc,

then bar in another,

then over our heads

and return once again,

and then take themselves off into

darkness,

and go as the sound of their crying

and calling

grows less, and then less,

and then settles, into silence.

Not silence.

And we turn, go indoors,

to our rooms, to our beds,

to our warming, and silence.

Not silence.