29 11 07

Ten in the morning & the waning moon rides high in a wild sky. There’s every kind of cloud here, cumulus, black in its lumbering rolling mass, stratus & alto stratus, pulled into ribbons by the wind, all tinged at their edges by the morning sun. The wind pulls tears from my eyes & spreads them across my cold cheekbones. In the bay a cormorant coasts along the gusts, unruffled, a winged lizard, then turns back into the wind for a rising drop into the teeming sea & straight under, wings folded. There’s only one mushroom under the birches, a charcoal burner, Russula cyanoxantha. Despite its name, this one is good to eat, witness the slight nibbles that a hind has taken. I guess it’s a hind since I’ve seen no stags this way for days. I’m happy to share; I picture it with a breakfast egg, whatever the hind may envisage.

John Cage, an avid mushroom hunter-gatherer, cooker & eater, is not above spreading fallacies concerning mushrooms. In Indeterminacy, he writes “Certain tribes in Siberia trade several sheep for one Amanita muscaria and use the mushroom for orgiastic practices. . . . . The Vikings who went berserk are thought to have done so by means of this same mushroom.” The key words here are orgiastic, which goes counter to all the evidence that this was once the intoxicant used during shamans’ curative practices; & berserk, for which there is no evidence, though it might perhaps have been a constituent part of an alcohol based cocktail that would send anyone wild; berserk if you will. I’m happy, though that he perpetuates mycophobia, I wonder if it mightn’t have been his intention. A mushroom gatherer will do anything to send people away from their patch with the idea that all mushrooms are deadly poisonous. I have several ruses myself. John Cage, again: “Guy Nearing sometimes says that all mushroom experts die from mushroom poisoning. Donald Malcomb finds the dangers of lion hunting largely imaginary, those of mushroom hunting perfectly real.” The fact is, though, that mushrooms are one of the last remaining wild foods available here, as elsewhere, & as such belong to those who find them. The law, a notorious ass, & with it the most risible of landowners, would suggest that anything found on a laird’s land belongs to him; including wild fruits & fungi. As well then to clear the land of noxious & poisonous mushrooms that I’ve seen deliberately trampled by those afraid of the orgiastic berserkers who might ingest them. Good with eggs, though, with just a little garlic.

Mushrooms & their association with the woodland here (as everywhere) have a beautiful symmetry. The mycorrhizal connections allow an exchange between tree & fungus of carbohydrates for mineral nutrients which each would find difficult to access otherwise. The exchange is made with a colonisation of the roots of oaks & birch or other trees by fungi. Look for healthy woodland, healthy trees, & they are made so by the fungi which grow on & around them below the soil. Some fungal mycelium mats outlive generations of trees.

Deer nibbling the fruiting bodies – mushrooms - may also bark young trees, but their droppings enrich the woodland floor, making yet more nutrients (droppings derived from their browsing in the Sunart woods) available to tree & mushroom alike. What the Sunart oakwoods may have been like centuries ago, can only be a matter for conjecture. A few years back, the ecologist Frans Vera put forward the theory that’s been debated since, that woodland in Europe (& therefore Scotland) was a savannah, with groves & grasses kept open by herds of roaming deer & other mammals. This runs counter to our belief, founded on folklore & perhaps a wish-fulfilment daydream that the ancient woodlands covered Scotland coast to coast in a single continuous closed canopy. Sweeny ("This clearing is too open, / without trees; . . .”) & the Green Man live there.

Whatever the cover of the trees in Sunart’s Atlantic oakwoods six thousand years ago & despite being a resource for timber products, the arrival of sheep altered it to such a point that ecologists & conservationists today have difficulties in trying to restore woodlands. I make no secret that I have a fairly low opinion of the intelligence & usefulness of sheep. I'd trade several for a big cep or some chanterelles any day. They were an indirect cause of great suffering (Landlords being the true manipulating culprits) during the Clearances & today have little economic purpose; but I have nothing like the spleen of the good Doctor of Rahoy, John MacLachlan, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century on sheep, shepherds & the subsequent decline of woodland, by then well under way. He writes (in Donald Meek’s translation from the Gaelic):

“Alas for my plight here, as I am so lonely,
going through the wood which I once knew closely,
when I cannot get a plot in my native country
though I’d pay a crown for a mere shoe-breadth.

Unsweet is the sound that has roused my reflections,
as it comes down from the heights of Morvern –
the Lowland shepherd – how I hate his language! –
bawling yonder to that slow dog of discord.

Early on a May morning when it is time to arise,
I hear no music on branches, nor lowing on moorland,
but the screeching of beasts in the English language,
yelling at dogs to make the deer scatter.

When I observe the towering mountains,
and the lovely country which was once Fionn’s homeland,

I see nothing there but sheep with white fleeces,
and countless Lowlanders at every trysting.

The glorious glens where one once found hunting,
where dogs on leashes were held by young fellows,
I see nothing there now but a ragged shepherd,
and his fingers blacker than the crow’s pinion.

Every old custom has been sent packing – . . .”

His poem equates the degradation of the woods with the erosion of language & Gaelic culture, a process that continues to this day. An ecological balance, once unbalanced, must find new purchase on the land: ecology as entropic biodiversity.