The Black Wood of Rannoch

The Black Wood of Rannoch is one of the oldest and largest surviving remnants of the native pinewoods remaining in Scotland - the great wood of Caledon. Continuous tree cover has been present in these woods for over ten thousand years, and this is one of the very few woods in Scotland where none of the trees have been planted by humans, instead having seeded and grown naturally. It’s home to indigenous varieties of Scots pine that grow only here.

That’s not to say that people haven’t had a long and close association with the wood. It has sheltered folk from weather and has been a place of refuge from neighbouring clans since ancient times. The 17th century saw increased felling due to the increasing demands of house building and when it came into the possession of the Crown after 1745, it was plundered still more. In the 19th century, the “best” (most straight, commercially viable) timber was felled, but many of the old, more twisted, irregular trees remain, with younger trees having seeded naturally in the gaps in the intervening years. Their “imperfection” was to be the very thing that saved them. The wood was scheduled to be cut down in 1919, but was spared by the signing of the armistice, although many of the straightest trees were subsequently felled during WW2 by the Canadian Forestry Corps, and with overgrazing by deer also occurring in it’s use as a sporting estate, there were few young trees left by the middle of the 20th Century.

The forestry commission purchased the Black Wood in 1947 and declared the core of the wood to be a conservation area and it became a protected forest reserve in 1975 under the care of Gunnar Godwin, and since then, has regenerated naturally to become the special place it is today.

The character of black wood is very different from regimented and tightly spaced commercially planted woodland. Despite it’s name, in summer the Black Wood is a place of dappled sunlight, an airy, naturally spaced community of predominantly Scots pine, with silver and downy birch, alder, rowan, juniper and aspen also growing. The wood is full of life.

The forest floor is clothed by an incredibly dense cover of heather and blaeberry (the Scot’s name for wild blueberry), smaller, and more intensely flavoured than their commercially grown cousins.

In August 2021, I made a pilgrimage to the Black Wood, making photographs, and collecting just enough wild blueberries to make a single pot of jam - a distillation of this magical place.