Sandstone Press

Rowan berries

Posted by RLD on 17th August 2009

There was a subtle change in the air the other day. Sitting down at this desk in the morning I felt a decided coolness. It didn’t last, but it was the first such airiness since spring turned to summer and it silently introduced the coming of autumn.  It wasn’t the only such announcement that day. On my walk I noted that the rowan berries were changing colour through a pale pink-orange towards their eventual bright red. West and south of where I live they are further on.

Quite a number of local people look on the number and size of the berries as a signifier of the future, a provision by God or nature to see the birds through whatever freezing depths of winter lie ahead. The idea is that huge and plentiful clumps of berries mean that a long hard cold season is on the way. A thinner crop promises an easier four months. This seems unreasonable to me. Nature is considerably tougher minded and God is a compassion free zone. Compassion is human business. God’s game is Love, which is a hopeless, helpless sort of condition, an imprisonment really – but, enough of humanism and theology and back to the steadier ground of nature.

The size of the crop results from the quality of summer the berries developed through, this is obvious. This year has been fairly ordinary with good long sunny periods, heavy rain arriving in showers bunched over two or three day periods, and one crackling lightning storm that swept down the Firth altogether too close for comfort. The rowan berries are plentiful enough as a result.

I have never much enjoyed them as a food, certainly not in their bitter, uncooked condition, plucked from the tree and eaten on the move, best to boil them down into a jelly and eat with another great Highland bounty, venison. The berries have a high acid content that a sensitive stomach can do without and the cooking process helps to reduce it.

Rowan trees and their berries play an important part in Scottish and British rural culture, especially Highland culture and, since there has been such a strong Viking impact in these parts, many of its influences come from Scandinavia. The Norse believed that the first woman was made from a rowan, the first man from a different kind of ash. I have to say I like the idea of a tree intermediary between the dust and the flesh. Aside from its natural romance it strikes me as closer to the scientific truth - and humans are a species of ape so, of course, we like trees.

More interesting still is the rowan’s reputation as a defender against supernatural threats: witches, evil spirits, and other invisible dangers. Walk around the huge area of the Highlands where a rural Gaelic speaking, largely peasant, people once lived and you will come across the ruins of their former homes. Some of them you will find in small groupings down by the riversides. Others you will find in the high shielings, where herds of black cattle were driven to their summer pastures. Rickles of stones, roofless and with the walls reduced to knee height, thoroughly overgrown, it is easy to pass them by without noticing, but they are filled with meaning, not only to historians, but also to the socially sensitive.

Invariably they have a rowan tree planted in one corner, trees that have outlived the planters not only to the extent of their individual lives but also past the death of their rural culture and the good health of their language. The people’s descendents are now scattered all over the world, but the rowans and their descendents remain.

For many years I have been convinced of the need of reforestation. For most of the world’s history the northern land mass has been covered in trees. The number of living trees at any time would greatly outnumber the human population, probably even the population of mammals. Both trees and mammals breathe in air but mammals absorb oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Trees are exactly the opposite. I try not to think of this in terms of balance, or even symbiosis. It is ‘movement’, necessary agitation, a part of the world’s weathers.

John Muir pointed out (in which book I can’t remember) that it is trees that form rivers, rather than trees finding river banks to grow on. Not too many tramps through the Highland hills, where the eradication of trees has created unnatural boglands, Fraser Darling’s famous ‘wet desert’, will demonstrate the truth of that. Bold replanting efforts have been made in recent decades, notably by the John Muir Trust, but it is a slow process, as was the decline. So slow was it that we can easily think of the way things are as ‘the way they have to be’, even ‘the way they are meant to be’, but that earlier, Gaelic culture did not flourish in a bog, as it must have done if we accept that false premise.

Enriching of the soil and a better cleansing of the waters and the air all follow from the increase of trees. Some trees will be stronger in these functions than others, and that brings us back to the rowans. Their supernatural reputation must surely have been founded on what is natural, on how they made people around them feel. As mentioned earlier, it wasn’t that their fruit is so great to eat. The likelihood is that it was their efficiency in cleansing the air around a small building, the smoke and the animal smells, perhaps especially as winter closed in and the rowan flowers berried and came into maturity, especially through that period of change.

Away back in April 1986 the Neil Gunn Trust was working towards the creation of the Viewpoint on the Heights of Brae when the Chernobyl explosion occurred. Those who were alive at the time will remember how the disaster came without warning and how the Soviet authorities covered up for as long as they could, but the wave of radiation that swept across Europe no more recognised borders, or for that matter Iron Curtains, than rowans do. Lethal consequences were predicted here in Scotland, and such things as birth defects among humans and animals. I knew people who took iodine tablets in hope of protecting their livers. Perhaps it was foolish of me but I was more fatalistic and did nothing, not even letting those very real fears interfere with my hillwalking.

One of our Neil Gunn Trustees, at that time, was the famous forester, piper, composer, everyday kilt wearer and traveller, Finlay MacRae. Just a few months later, about this present time of year, he pointed out to me how very red the rowan berries had become, much redder than he could remember seeing them in his life before. From his long years living and working in Glen Affric, which were much distinguished by his preservation of the Affric Pines, Finlay was particularly observant of such things.

I hadn’t noticed but kept a watchful eye during my wanderings about the Highlands, and it was so. I especially noticed it of my favourite rowan tree, which stands below Ben Wyvis where the stream that runs from between the Munro and its partner, Little Wyvis, passes under the A835. Its canopy has always struck me as particularly beautiful, an almost perfect sphere. It is a very old tree indeed and I imagine some wise road builders made the positive decision to let it stand, to actively defend it when their dozers could so easily have taken it down by accident.

One afternoon in early August of that year I stood with a bunch of its red, red berries in my hand, almost frightened by their startling brightness. Let me not bore you with adjectives such as ‘angry’ or ‘livid’, or any such ideas as ‘warning signs’, which speak only of human sensibilities, but my eye moved naturally upwards from the berries in my hand, along riverside woods to the surrounding foothills and forests all speckled with the same bright red. Everywhere across the Highlands was the same.

Yesterday I paused on my walk at a favourite point beside the Cromarty Firth, where several mature rowans stand clumped between more numerous willows and a few alders and, once again, held a bunch of rowan berries in my hand, this time of the much paler colour that is usual at this time of year. There were no deaths in the Highlands as a result of Chernobyl as far as I am aware, no increase in cancers or birth defects. By the time the radiation reached here it was much less than was suffered in Belarus and Ukraine, but it was by no means inconsiderable. It may be a romantic notion, but I think the rowans took the hit for us.