OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: A walk without a purpose is a true escape
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Why not, says the notice in Dunnet Forest, enjoy a walk with a purpose? You can go round checking the tree guards. Or, you can go to the ‘green gym’ and help to clear brushwood or plant trees.
I suppose it’s all very well if you live in a Thurso flat!
It is a privilege to own a wood, as it is to own a garden. But the great advantage of walking through somebody else’s wood or garden is that those weeds, that broken tree stake, are somebody else’s responsibility and you can just enjoy the walk.
A walk around my own garden at this time of year simply reveals many hours of work needing to be done, manure to spread, beds to dig, hedges to trim, logs to split and stack… Venture into the wood and even more urgent work reveals itself – logs to cut and collect, tree stakes to cut, fallen trees and brushwood to clear and the endless job of tree-planting, maybe another 400 to go…
Planting trees is most definitely 'green gym' stuff. The ground to be planted is extremely rough, a tangle of stumps, holes, brushwood and ditches. Just picking your way across it is slow and hard.
Each little tree needs a stake hammered in, and the stakes must first be cut from suitable branches among the tangled brushwood. Then the tree needs a protective guard – a plastic tube attached to the stake – so that it is not browsed to the ground by the roe deer.
Trees, saw, spade, hammer, stakes and tubes all need to be carried across that awful terrain to the planting site. Usually grass and dead branches need clearing before the tree can be planted. The whole job averages about 15 minutes per tree. But the little sycamores, local seedlings, stand a good chance of surviving and growing, even if they are planted in solid clay or on waterlogged ground.
It’s a fight to keep hands and feet warm in the cold winter winds, a change of dry gloves helps and the highlight of a morning’s planting is to retreat to the log cabin where the stove (lit a couple of hours earlier) should have the place nicely warm with the kettle boiling. Sometimes, though, the fire’s gone out the and the camping stove has to do instead.
Then back for another hour’s planting before heading home for a late lunch, after as much exercise as climbing an easy Munro. But it’s always good being out in the open air, seeing the sun come up over the east coast hills, listening to the ‘chip-chip’ of the crossbills, seeing a handsome male sparrowhawk sweep across the cleared area.
After so much purposeful walking it is good to enjoy a walk without a purpose. Like an amble over Dorrery Hill, as easy a top as you’ll find anywhere in Scotland.
Just a short walk up the track from Dorrery Lodge on a clear and frosty day with a powdering of snow for wonderful views out across the Flow Country beyond Shurrery Loch. Then along the little ridge, some rough going, to the northern top with a real cairn like a mini-mountain and even some tiny crags hung by icicles which needed skirting on the way down.
I passed the old settlement of Balnabeen with a memorial to John MacDonald, famous in Free Church circles as the 'Apostle of the north', before crossing fields to regain the road for a walk back up to Dorrery Lodge.
It’s as tame a walk as you’d get but enough to give some of the true feel of the Highlands at this time of year.
Dunnet Forest is an increasingly popular location, especially on cold and windy days when the shelter is much appreciated, the big network of paths gives a wide range of possibilities.
You used to often meet big boisterous dogs which would leap all over you and scare the wits out of small children but nowadays owners are much more considerate.
The forest improves all the time thanks to the effort of the volunteers putting in all those green gym hours. But when we go there I’m quite happy to enjoy a walk with no purpose at all and let somebody else do all the hard work!
