The Square Woodie

There is nothing better I like, when I am behaving myself at least, than exploring undiscovered woodland.  Almost better than being there is seeing the un-trodden greenery in the middle distance.  It enjoy those groves which have existed in forgotten folds of earth for a thousand years, unmolested.  I like, too, those patches of blatantly lying forests and thickets which deceive the eye on the horizon, suggesting an immensity and mystery as untrue as a big fake beard on a pantomime villain.

    I remember things supposed to have happened in woods, few of which actually happened to me.  I like the atavistic dream Syd Barrett had when he laid his poor soon mad body down in some Oxfordshire wood in the sixties and opened up the unwary gates of consciousness.  And I’m quite prepared on entering an alien forest to encounter that horned being blowing his horn to summon the beasts of the wilderness that we all know exist for real.

    When I was young we went to explore and run about the Sidlaw Hills, which we called the Seedlees.  The name is supposed to come from an uncomfortable conflation of the Gaelic word for ‘seat’ and the Anglo-Saxon for ‘hill’.  But I never bought into that particular piece of place-name guessing.  For me, it was better to follow the older authorities, those much derided antiquaries who were sometimes perfectly correct.  They juggled with the etymologies and told us that the correct derivation was ‘Fairy Hills’.

    There are places in these hills that are certainly drab and earth bound.  There are nooks near the city where the farmhouses are stuck-up and watchful, and dayglo ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ signs shout at the stranger along the narrow lanes.  Such places must have their secret lives also.  Other parts of the hills suffer from too frequent communication with human beings.  I camped on the south side overnight once, when I was sixteen, and felt homesick and afraid, and saw the really unreal amber streetlights of home glowing far away.  Worse was that my tent was put up on an exposed slope and unguarded from intruders.  The first trespasser was a fat policeman, checking things out on the periphery of his patch.  He must have puffed up the hill with considerable effort, or more likely parked his car in some sly out of the way spot.  You don’t get coppers so fat or so nasty nowadays.  This one gave me a spiteful leer and enquired whether I was up here playing Cowboys and Indians; big joke.  Then, before he left, he told me to be careful because there was someone running about in the fields below with a shotgun.  And I believed him.  It wasn’t until weeks later that a friend told me there was no way a polis would leave a kid out there alone with a loonie running about with a gun.

    But you were supposed to bloody well believe policemen back then, so I was left scared and alone inside the blue triangle of the tent.  There was no kind of hassle for an hour or more, then I had another unwelcome visitor.  This time it was a faceless youth on a motorbike, who slowly circled the fragile tent six times, apparently trying to decide whether there was anyone inside and if there was anything in there worth robbing.  Meanwhile, I was very much inside, crapping myself, trying to decide if it was likely motorcycle boy had a shotgun, and whether I could adequately fend him off with a dessert spoon and a tin opener.

    In the end he toddled off, in noisy bluster, and I was left alone again with the spiders and the wind.  No-one tells you the soughing, whispering, allusive things you can hear in the air in the hills in solitude.  But I thought, sod that for sensitivity.  I had a wee tranny radio and tuned in to Radio 1 and heard Johnny Marr talk about his life, and Sir Johnny Marr saved my sorry life that night.  In the morning, having survived faceless bikers and piss-take polis and assorted arachnids, I packed up my gear and walked home nine miles.  The brave experiment with back-to-nature was not an unqualified success.

    But, thinking about it, my classic time on the hills happened a few years before that event.  We used to go up in the hills as a group, when we were twelve and thirteen, and must have gone up half a dozen times before our little knot fell apart and we became interested in other things.  The main thing we did up there was prowl about the contours, being as loud as you could never be somewhere else, challenging the rocks and any unfortunate stray sheep to have square go’s; wrestling in the bracken, imitating teachers, farting, pissing in burns, not talking about girls, throwing empty blue gas canisters at each other, being shrill and obnoxious little, parentless gits.

    Someone by default would always end up as a group scapegoat and get teased and taunted and laughed at, but somehow I managed to always elude the honour. Much of what I remember is tied up in the remembered taste of the landscape. We camped in one of the miniature glens in the central part of the highest of the hills, somewhat away from the beaten routes, because we did not like to be bothered by clean-cut and nosey hill walkers.  We slept safe between Craigowl and the neighbouring hills.  When I dream of Craigowl it is of a lumbering, but protective giant, with a single red eye, seeing all, swirling in a mass of suggestive haar.  There is a rhyme, long-forgotten, about Craigowl putting on his cap and bringing down the mist on the whole hill range.  The red eye is there in dreams because it is the warning that glowed on top of the TV mast on top of the hill.  On the crest of the next hill west there is a frozen group of trees, caught forever in wind cringing agony, distorted as they grew, bent at gale force angles away from the searing Sidlaw breezes.  I imagined them as defeated Pictish warriors transmuted into frozen forms forever.

    When we had stuffed our heads with junk food and got sick of boisterous play we expended the remainder of our energy in the expanding twilight roaming about the gorse and heather, boldly declaring our presence in the face of the looming and unsettling darkness.  I used to both like twilight times when the mist would coil in around us from sources unknown, cruelly making a visible white sea before the darkness came down.  And I remember jack rabbiting among the yellow gorse and thinking that every elevated spring on each head high bush was a figure; not a human figure, but a minion of hell.

    I first met the Men of the Square Wood at that time, but did not remember them until years later.  Losing and finding things in these hills was always a thing with me, even memories.  I nearly, almost lost my virginity somewhat near here, in one of the sad dormitory places too sad to be villages, where the inhabitants cluster in their shopless communities and hide away from the rowdies of Dundee.  Anyway, I tried to persuade this willing party lass to accompany me outside on a lovely starry night.  But no way would she go outside anywhere; as if there had been a pack of slavering wolves on the loose.

    A couple of years later I was walking on the slope of a hill not far from the place of the frozen Pictish warriors.  There were a few, annoying people about, though it was bloody cold.  My friend and I had a flask of tea and went into an old tin hut on the hillside to try to drink it.  But the oldness of the Thermos permeated the brew and made it undrinkable.  When we came out, we had an audience.  Over the deep ravine, but close in terms of straight line distance, were two teenage ne’er-do-wells.  Christ knows what they were doing on the hills.  When they saw us emerging they sniggered and hooted.  They shouted across something about us being poofs, because we had sheltered in the rusty hut together.

    There was a bit of slate or flat scree stone handy.  Without thinking, I picked it up and whizzed it across at them, and was a better aim than I had intended.  The stone landed at the feet of one of them, making him hop as if it had been a ricochet from a rifle round.  It was gratifying indeed to hear him curse.  Then him and his mate kind of jerked where they stood and bolted off at a precipitous angle on the hillside.  There was something in their action, their stupid reaction, that made me pay attention in my marrow.  My friend finished laughing at them after three or four minutes, and then he said, noticing me silent, ‘They’re not running after us, you idiot.’

    ‘But what are they running from?’ I asked.

    ‘Look, and you shall find, eejit.’

    I thought he was taking the piss; maybe he was.  Across the broad front of the hillside the cloud shadow was chasing the sun, leeching all the colour out of the heather.  As it rushed across, you would have sworn that you could see strange forms spring up in the fissures and shadows in the vegetation. It looked like these had spooked and chased off the pair of idiot lads.  

    Now, this incident should not have reminded me of the thing it did, as there was no palpable connection, but it did bring up a certain memory in my mind.  I remembered the Old Men and the woods.  When we had gone on these camping trips we used to see, on a certain track, an occasional hiker toiling his way northwards.  Those who continued on the track would have sunk down a shallow valley, climbed another hill, then entered the golden bowl of Strathmore eventually.  Most of those we encountered heading that way on the track were what we would have reckoned to be very decrepit old men. Re-adjusting my age perception now, I would say these solitary walkers might have been men in their fifties and sixties.  The sight of them became so regular that we became familiar with them and spoke to them sometimes in passing, though it was always a different old man and none of them ever appeared to come back in the opposite direction.

    The bolder boys among our group would jump out at them and challenge them with the question: ‘Where is it ye’re heading to?’

    The walker would feign astonishment at being accosted by a master of ambush – though I think we knew they always knew they were there – and smile broadly back at us.  It was a kind of game:  the challenge, then the rote answer, which never, ever varied. 

    ‘The Square Woodie,’ they would say every single time.  And, having given the required password, off they would go to the unknown four sided wood.  More than once I wanted to follow them, to see where the wood was and what went on there.  But I imagined the old men would lope off ahead, vanish in the mist; or if I ever got there, some mysterious sentinel at the gates of the wild wood might fiercely bar my way.  Even now, when I read the ballad ‘Lord Randall’ I get the same odd buzz of tingling fear about the denizens of the magical forest.

   Back home from camping trips I would haul out the Landranger map and scan the grids for any sign of the Square Woodie.  But, from Nevay to Glen Ogilvy, there was no copse or plantation you could reasonably say was a square wood.   The 1:25000 scale map was no better, nor any of the older Ordnance Survey maps I looked at later.  So the Square Woodie did not exist in any place where the old men could have walked to inside a solitary day.  The old men trudged on forever, never reaching a true destination (inside my imagination, at least).  I cannot say I thought about them constantly over the years, and there were even times when I was slogging about the Sidlaws that I didn’t consider them at all.  When I did think of them, I got slightly angry.  The wonder of where they were going and what it went had worn away.  What I resented was that the men and my friends may have been involved in an elaborate game that was somehow designed to exclude me and make me look stupid.  This was a firm, paranoid delusion I fostered for a number of years. 

    In the end I forgot about the men, as you do.  I went away to work in England for several years and did not venture near any hills at all.  After divorce and career meltdown I came back and began building up the blocks of my shattered psyche very slowly, doing all the old things that used to make myself myself.  For a start, this involved sitting in pubs most of the day, drinking pints of heavy.  But my body soon vetoed that form of reminiscence.  Activity and exercise was what I needed, plus a chance to get out of the house, away from my family and their ‘told-you-so’s’. 

    I got into hill-walking again, tentatively.  Wee hills mainly.  One method I used to ensure that I kept it up was to help an old pal supervise an activity group of young people on the hills.  These, at least, were keen and happy outdoors, and put me and my mate to shame with their energy and attitude.  No doubt they thought of me as an old man.  One time out walking with this group in the height of a burning summer we halted on a crest after a long and arduous walk.  Some of us, including myself, dozed under the brilliant sun.  All the land to the north, the flat fields of Gowrie and away to the blue Grampians, wavered in a heat haze where few things could be seen distinctly.  I glimpsed in between my napping the silver threads of moving burns and rivers:  the Dean Water, the Ericht, the Isla.  The trees were verdant exclamation marks pointing at heaven, and the only thing constant attracting the eye by movement were the silver comets of cars going to and fro.  Even these, through the distortion of the day, seemed to leave shimmering vapour trails on the land.

    I was dozing sitting up, cross-legged, the rucksack on my back keeping my balance, though every time I nodded too much I jerked awake, opened my eyes and took in a hazy shimmer of the landscape.  The whole land pulsed for ten seconds when I had these awakenings, and the movement there coalesced with the confusion caused by a series of intermittent dreams. Once I woke and spat out the word ‘Dunsinane’, then looked around and wondered if anyone had noticed me.  Someone sniggered from the bushes nearby, and I was confused for a moment by the intelligent plant life.  Then I decided that it was only two of the teenagers in our group doing their own thing there.

    I screwed my eyes up; the sun was at its height and ferociously strong.  Why had I said ‘Dunsinane’?  The hill of Macbeth went through my head.  I thought I felt a great awakening shudder of awareness from Dunsinane itself, ten miles to the west.  Then there were shadows in the strath, through the flickering heat haze.  The movement I saw down there in the great wide valley was indefinable but compelling and definite.  In the middle of the distance, where there was a huge yellow rectangle of crops, something was moving to the centre.  It looked, of course, like a trail of insects from this far away, but that was not it.  There was a straggling, living line, inching its way across that fold of land, slowly coalescing in the centre. 

    And I watched it forever coming together.  As the feeding line of movement slowed to the occasional straggling individual, I saw what it was.  ‘The battle of the trees,’ I whispered.  ‘Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.’  There was a definite dark square in the centre of the summer scorched field.  I started to laugh.  Who needed crop circles when you had this:  men as trees and trees as men.  It stayed there as a reality as the others slept, and only broke apart when they got up.  But I had witnessed and experienced it by then, and knew I had discovered where the Square Woodie really was.