Blasted Tree.

Having seen the benefits of an early start with the workshop on Tuesday, I was out of the house by 9:00 this morning and making my way down to the Glen armed with a variety of camera gear. It would have been nice to have had some sun on some early morning dew, but that would have meant three (or would it have been four) nice mornings in a row; this doesn’t happen in Scotland. It was however, pleasant enough, so I wasn’t complaining
 
I stopped short of the Glen proper in an area has had a chequered history. In Victorian times it was (allegedly) known as the Fairy Glen, and horse-drawn charabancs would visit from Edinburgh bearing cargos of well to-do picnickers. More recently, Akela and myself used to bring the village cub pack here for “Sausage Sizzles” followed by games of “Kick the Can” – this would have been immediately after both they and their leaders had had a robust tea.
 
But back in 1650, the artillery of Oliver Cromwell’s commander in Scotland, General Monck, laid siege to Rosslyn Castle and used the chapel for stables, putting shell holes in both buildings. The soldiers camped in this very spot, and the story is that they lit fires against the tree trunks to keep warm at night, damaging the trees in the process. When we moved here just over thirty-five years ago there were a dozen or two of these fire damaged specimens, but most of them have since died, fallen over and rotted away. There are now just three left standing, this obviously dead one, one very sick one and one that is fairly healthy but still badly damaged. Unfortunately for this story, the numbers don’t quite stack up; I think the trees in question were mostly beech with a life span that might occasionally reach 300 years. The siege was 350 years ago and they would have had to have been mature specimens back then. Perhaps we should be blaming the Victorian picnickers instead General Monck.
 
Because of what I shall euphemistically call the mess that the soldiers made, this glade became known as “The Stanks,” however, my friend Google claims that a stank is a “flat marshy ground near a stream” which fits the description well, though it does dry out in the summer months. The extra is a general view which shows the overgrown nature of the place now; for both pictures, the camera was set up using its on-board spirit-level, so any deviation from the level (or vertical) is either real, or a figment of an imagination deranged by interesting substances.
 
As I have believed for a long time, it seems that nothing is true.