The following fascinating account of the planting of Kilsture Forest is taken from 'Travels in Galloway - Memoirs of South West Scotland' by Donald McIntosh [available here]. As he says in this extract it wouldn't be "too wild a boast" to claim that his family had "a closer association with this ancient forest than any other during the course of the 20th century." Donald was the eldest son of a Perthshire woodcutter and his mother came from the Wilderness area of the Isle of Mull. In 1932, when Donald was two years old, the family moved first to Kilsture living in what is now called Hazelbank, then to Garlieston where he spent his childhood. He studied forestry in Argyll and worked with the Forestry Commission before spending the next 30 years working as a tree prospector/surveyor in the rainforests of West and Central Africa.
In this first section Donald MacIntosh recalls his first forestry job, as a 16 year old, planting trees in Kilsture. It is followed by a description of his return to the forest years later.
Bartholomew Map 1926 - 1935
My real working career began on the day I joined the Forestry Commission at Kilsture Forest near Sorbie. I had worked summers on farms and with woodcutting gangs, but these had all been school holiday jobs. This, though, was to be the real thing. This was to be my life.
Kilsture Forest was cut in two by the main Sorbie to Kirkinner road. Every part of it to the east of this rad had been planted in previous years, but the part to the west of it was a forbidding jungle of thorn and birch scrub, whins and the occasional elderly tree. This area, consisting of some few hundred acres, had to be cleared ready for planning, and, at 16 years of age [1946], I was to be one of the motley crew engaged for the task.
I knew not a single one of the other workers. Most, like myself had been newly recruited. There was on another lad of about my own age, but the others ranged from the fairly young to the not-so-young. There was also a smattering of women among them, two of whom were wearing Land Army uniform. The women had been working there for a few months obviously considered themselves to be veterans of the show. They eyed we newcomers with suspicion and some hostility, well founded in at least some of our cases, it has to be admitted.
This, of course, was long before the age of mechanical tools. Everything had to be done by hand. Scrub had to be disposed of in bonfires as it was cleared, boggy areas had to be drained and a perimeter fence had to be erected around the whole area to keep the local rabbit population at bay. It was a long and laborious process. Hands and wrists would be torn by briers and dogroses and various parts of the anatomy were as full of thorns as pincushions long before the end of the day. But I loved every minute of it. Scrub clearing and tree felling were done by axe and Yorkshire billhook, the latter being a fearsome, double-edged weapon that would surely have won the favour of Robert the Bruce had a supply been available to him at Bannock burn. Shuggie and I, the two ‘boys’ in the squad, took turn about with the ‘lassies’ in the burning of the scrub and the tree branches. I even enjoyed this hot and tiresome work: the distinctively acrid smell of the blue wood smoke; the crackle of exploding leaves through the roar of the fames; the showers of gold and carmine sparks soaring upward in the autumn sky. But I preferred the axe and the billhook. I was already efficient with hand tools of this nature, far more so than most of the other workers, for I had received a good apprenticeship while working with my father in the woodcutting gangs. It was most satisfying work. There was something about the chinking sound of a razor sharp blade biting into wood that was clean and exhilarating, something about the jar that ran all the way up the hickory shaft to the shoulder that was exciting and invigorating and there was something that was decidedly exotic about the highly individual scents from each species of tree or shrub when the axe cut released their fragrances to the clean fresh air of Galloway.
Different timbers had different degrees of hardness, too: holly , hawthorn and crab-apple were surprisingly hard, especially whether they were old and gnarled, while birch, rowan and alder were very easy to deal with. Horse chestnut was as soft as butter.
Additions to our gang appeared from time to time, and they came from all walks of life. Some were with us for brief periods only, others for very much longer. One, a Canadian airman, looked a dead ringer for Randolph Scott, the cowboy film actor, and he was just about as taciturn. He was quiet, industrious and popular with everyone. We also acquired over the years, an ex-RAF squadron leader, a Red Beret who had lost nan eye at Arnhem, an ex-detective constable who boar a striking resemblance to another American actor, Broderick Crawfold, and a devout English Latter-day Saint. A number of young lads, hellers all, arrived to swell our numbers, and we had the occasional girl student as well.
By the time the scrub had been cleared and the fence had been erected the first tfrosts were upon us. Winter was the time for tree planting. Both conifers and broad-leaved species were planted in Kilsture, each individual species being planted in the soil conditions considered best suited to it by the foreman and the forester in charge. The seedlings were planted in rows, the distance between each plant and each row also varying according to species: the slow-growing oak, for example, being planted at distances of three by three feet, while the fast growing larch was planted at distances of five feet. It was hard work, but it was most satisfying work, at least for idealists such as myself who could envisage those same seedlings growing to tall forest trees and being there long after we who had planted them had all gone.
With the arrival of spring came the process known as ‘weeding’. New bracken, nettles and fireweed suddenly appeared, shooting upwards at a quite astonishing pace. This weed growth had to be kept in check, otherwise it would smother the seedlings. Our tools for this task were sickles, or ‘grass hooks’, as they were more commonly called locally. These were very sharp and they were most dangerous implements. We younger workers tended to be very casual in our handling of them and it is a wonder that none of us suffered really serious injury from them. The proximity to each other at which we worked was just asking for trouble. We moved up between the rows of plants, swinging our hooks as we scythed the rank growth down. It only needed on tiny lapse in concentration from yourself or the chap or working beside you… It happened to me once, and it was entirely at fault. I was chattering to my colleague as we worked side by side, oblivious of the fact that I was edging ever closer to his swinging blade. The inevitable happened: the tip of his sickle went straight through my hand. The resultant five stitches inserted in me taught me a lesson in the necessity to exercise great care when handling sharp implements.
OS Map - 1937-1961
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Kilsture is not a name that springs readily to mind as you power through the holiday brochures during the long months of winter, trying to decide which part of the world would be drawing the short straw for the pleasure of your company during the forthcoming summer. Indeed, beyond the Machars of Wigtownshire, it is doubtful if many people will have heard of it. You will find it on the OS maps, but only if you look hard enough. There, it is shown as a we splodge of olive located between Sorbie and Kirkinner, and the gentlemen who compile these maps have – with a charming simplicity all to rarely associated with government organisations – labelled it ‘ The Forest’.
Locally, it is called ‘The Forest Mair’, and I suppose that that is as good a name for it as any. Nearly 70 years ago my family lived on the edge of the Forest Mair. In fact, it is not too wild a boast that my family has probably had a closer association with this ancient forest than any other during the course of the 20th century. My father worked in its woods in the very early 1930s and – much later on – I worked in them myself. Later still my brother Neil became a gamekeeper there, a post he proudly occupied for the next 34 years. It was perhaps only natural that my travels would eventually take me back there, for I had been responsibility, to a certain extent, for the green tinge in that ‘wee splodge of olive’ on the map. I had planted a lot of trees here in my time, and I was curious to find out whether they had survived our rather cavalier approach to the science of planting. How tall had they grown, if indeed they had grown at all? Or had they been felled to make way for some ghastly modern theme park full of hamburger stalls and plastic amusement arcades? It was time to see for myself.
Kilsture has been around for a long time. Famous figures from Scotland’s warring past have amused themselves within its boundaries, mainly by indulging in such masculine pursuits as ‘chasing the wild deer and following the roe’. First mentioned in a charter granted by Robert the Bruce, it passed through a number of owners over the centuries before falling into the hands of the Earls of Galloway. During much of this period there was not a great deal growing on it apart from hazel and thorn scrub, the odd clump of native pine, and plenty of bracken and whins. However, around 1790 it was quite extensively planted with more commercially acceptable hardwoods: oaks, elm and beech for the direr ground and ash for the black, fertile soil of its damp hollows.
Roy Lowlands 1752-55
The exigencies of World War 1 and its aftermath saw most of these trees felled during the early part of the century. Various timber companies came in over the years, extracted what they wanted and departed. The company that my father worked for was one of those. Indeed, we lived in the old Kilsture house for some years, until the Forest Commission took over the whole areas in 1934. My own recollection of this period is pretty hazy as I was fairly small at the time, but I do have two vivid memories. One of them is that we were never hungry. The Kilsture woods were alive with game and no woodcutter worthy of his salt would have allowed his family to starve while pheasants roosted nightly in the old thorn tree at the foot of the garden when the snow lay thick on the ground.
The second memory I have of the place from those days is that the house was haunted.
There was no question in the minds of my Hebridean mother and grandfather that there was something unnatural in the house. I needed no convincing at all, but my more pragmatic Perthshire father did not believe in ghosts. Or so he claimed. It’s not that any of us actually ever saw antyg, so far as I am aware. But sometimes in the blackness of a a winter night, when the artic winds came raging in from the Irish Sea over the flat fields and the grey dykes surrounding Sorbie to rattle the slates on our roof, sometimes where banshees were keening eerily and without pause in the chimney and sending flurries of blue wood smoke swirling back into our living room, sometimes, just sometimes, we could hear it. We could hear it moving up the bare wooden stairs to the attic . CUMP…CLUMP…CLUMP…CLUMP...Heavy footsteps, slow and deliberate…CLUMP…CLUMP… then a drawn-out squeaking sound as the attic door was pushed open with agonising slowness…footsteps again, over the bare wooden boards of the attic floor, not clumping footsteps this time, but soft, padding, sinister footsteps, such as might have been made by a large furry feet belonging to some brutish creative unknown to God or civilised man. Then would come the scrape of a phantom chair being dragged into position over the attic floor (our attic was empty of everything except dust) and – most spine-chilling of all – a very human, very deep and melancholy sigh, followed by the chair legs creaking in protest as though from the wight of SOMETHING – some perfectly unthinkable THING sitting waiting for us up there in the darkness, with nothing at all, God save us, between us and IT but the frailty of the ceiling boards.
Then we would all huddle a bit closer to the fire, the scepticism of the head of the house waning noticeably as he jockeyed for position with the rest of us. My grandfather would through another log onto the flames, sending showers of sparks flying up into the black void of the chimney to join the tempest outside. The paraffin lamp on the mantelpiece would be turned up to its highest level and God himself could have induced any single one of us to leave the safety of that hearth before the light of dawn had banished all nightly spirits to their rightful repose amidst the morning starts.
Hazelbank Cottage today photo: Andy Farrington
From the outside, the house looked much the same as I remembered. It looked much more cheerful, though: the blue whinstone walls had a less faded look about them and the whole façade had been tarted up to meet the demands of a modern family living. Two large skylights protruding from the roof showed that the old attic had been converted into bedrooms and the ubiquitous television aerial sprouted from one of the chimney stacks.
The resident forester invited me in for a coffee. He had lived in the house for the past eight years and I found him to be most informative and helpful. Nothing about the interior evoked so much as a flicker of a memory within me. It was all so orderly and up-to-date. I did not bother to ask about the ghost, partly for fear of ridicule and partly because of my conviction that it had simply become so disgruntled that it had exorcised itself from the house. There can surely be few things more off-putting to self-respecting ghosts than exposure to microwaves and Australian soap operas.
The Commission still ran the place, the forester told me, and, though there had beens some felling, most of what we had planted was still there. The forest, he reckoned, was probably even more of a naturalist’s paradise now than in my day Roe deer and foxes were in abundance and the open nature of the forest created by the mix of trees species had attracted many types of moths and butterflies. These, in turn, had increased the bird population considerably. But the red squirrel had gone, wiped out by disease, and the corncrake – so vociferous in the surround fields in my youth – had vanished, a victim of modern farming methods.
I gave thanks and said my good-byes and walked down the track from the house to the main road. It had started to rain steadily. The clouds were low in the sky, with that settled-in look that tells everyone who has ever had anything to do with Galloway that the rain was here to stay a while. I pulled the collar of my coat up under the brim of my hat and trudged.
The piping call of a bullfinch attracted my attention. I leant over the roadside dyke and peered up into the tall larch tops, trying to locate it. These were the first trees I had every planted in my life and I gazed at the, trying to envisage myself as a young lad all these years ago, planting bag slung around my back, sticking trees in the ground for a posterity that, in truth, we youngsters had little interest in. Why should we have had? Posterity was for the birds and the present was for us, the youth.
I climbed over the dyke and went into the trees. They towered far above me, their delicate lime -green fronds hanging heavy with water. I began to whistle, trying to imitate the call of the bull finch as I had done so often in my youth. To my delight he appeared out nowhere, settling on a fragile branch above me, cocking his glossy blue-black head inquisitively and piping mellifluously in answer to my calls, the soft pink hue of his breast gleaming richly in the murk.
I follow the line of ancient beech around the perimeter wall, skirting tangles of dog rose and briers as I did so. I had been given the job, back then, of removing all overhanging branches from those old tress so that they would not interfere with the development of those were planting. To a youth such as myself who would much rather have climbed trees than walk on terra firma like a normal human being, this was an ideal job. The safety-conscious authorities of t today would have had apoplexy if they could have seen me then, scrambling high amongst the branches like an ape, wilding billhook and handsaw, without benefit of rope or safety harness. The trees were very gnarled and wind-battered now, but the lumps of the old calluses from the branches I had cut down were still clearly visible.
The rain had eased somewhat by midday. I sat down on a gentle slope covered in tall, straight poles of silver-barked oak. This had been a mass of whin and blackthorn before we cleared it with axe and billhook ready for planting. Adders had been in abundance here, sunning themselves in the short grass between the thickets. Indeed, Kilsture as a whole had been a haven for these retiles. The more foolhardy among us took awful chances with them, holding the twisting, furiously hissing reptiles by the tail at arm’s length. We deserved to be bitten, but none of us ever were.
It was still spring and the new bracken had only just begun to edge its sappy green shotts through the thickets of last year’s growth. The dead coppery stalks of winter crackled and snapped as I ploughed through them. A few yards in front of me a roe deer, startled by the noise, exploded from the bracken and bounded away on stiff legs, like an African springbok. On a bare hummock some 50 years away he stopped to look at me, eyes wide and anxious, nose twitching. I moved, and he vanished from my sight forever among the trees.
Back in the woods I sat by the wee spring tucked in at the foot of the slope. It had been there when I was a boy and it had taken me some time to find it, buried as it was under an accumulation of years of dead bracken. But, once I had cleared this away, I found that water beetles still zigzagged their darting mercurial trails over the surface, and the water was as pure and cold as it had ever been.
The rain had started up again. I rose and zipped up my coat. The weeping skies were drawing the day to a premature close and we were in for a dirty night. I gazed around me. The opposite slope was covered with oak, still bare of leaf for oak is a cautious tree: it is one of the last to expose tender young foliage to the vagaries of a Scottish spring. I had a vague memory of helping out with the planting of those, but they were not what I was looking for. I had something else in mind.
I look around me uncertainly. Then, at the far norther end of the slope, beyond the oak, I could see the silhouette of a dense grove of conifers. Norway spruce. The Christmas tree of fable and tradition. Memory was suddenly as clear as the waters of the little spring I had just been drinking from. This was what I had been looking for. I had planted those. Our patient, long-suffering foreman, Neil Drysdale of Bladnoch, impressed by my inchoate enthusiasm, had given me this little plot all to myself to plant. These were MY trees. Every single one of them. I had planted them. Now, here they were, standing tall and proud, 50 feet high and more, beckoning to me. I crossed the hollow and walked swiftly through the oak towards them. Once I reach them e did not hesitate. I got on my hands and knees and crawled under the denseness of their foliage, curling myself up comfortably on the thick, soft mattress of dry needles under them. Somewhere above me a wood pigeon began to croon throatily.
The patter of rain in the surrounding tree tops grew steadier, a soporific accompaniment to the pigeon’s hypnotic lullaby. I opened my rucksack and took out a packet of biscuits and a flask. The tea was still hot. Even warmer would be the half-bottle of Bladnoch I was reserving for later that night. It was going to be a long one, and I had no doubt that the ghosts of the past would be keeping me company.
But this time, I had nothing to fear from them. Why should I? I was one of them myself.
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