The Pine Hunters

There is an eerie quiet in a plantation forest. The thick trunks are tightly packed, moving gently in the wind. The rustling up high gives way to not much else. We stoop below the branches, picking a meandering path around the pillars. Below us, a thick bed of needles muffles our steps.

James and Jane, our ecologists, move quickly and quietly, only slowed by their interest in tiny specks of flora that I don’t think I could have found with a guidebook. We follow behind, bulky cameras in tow, slightly on edge. We are, after all, hunting for something.

The first victims we come across are oaks choked out by the plantation surrounding them. In a desperate attempt to find some light, new branches have shot out of the main trunks of the vast trees.

James and Jane stop and observe these ancient oaks, estimating their age. They seem just as interested in the lichen around them as the trees themselves. Together, they seem to speak a different language, one punctuated with Latin names and a deep knowledge of our floral neighbours. We catch our breath – we’ve been moving up a steep hillside for around an hour. We should be reaching the right altitude soon, where few native trees but Scots pine thrive.

The forest feels like it’s getting darker. Conversation slows as we focus on picking a path upwards, until James finally catches a glimpse of what we’re looking for.

Surrounded by uniform straight conifers, an ancient tree stands, warped and leaning, gasping for the canopy. Bare of any green, its sculptural flowing form looks frozen in time. The last gnarled shape of giant in a biome that has survived since the last Ice Age. A wild Scots pine.

A Mighty Park of Nature

Scots pine used to cover large swathes of the Scottish Highlands. Over the last few centuries, through exploitation followed by increased grazing on the land, populations have dwindled, holding on in only the most remote corners of the Highlands, where around one per cent of the original cover remains. There’s around 130 recorded sites of ‘wild pine’ in Scotland – areas with a long line of ancient trees and a biodiversity makeup that dates back to the last Ice Age.

However, there are still sites that exist, undocumented and ‘undiscovered’ – or rather, forgotten by us. A few of these places are down to the last remaining trees, and without immediate support could disappear entirely. That’s where James and Jane of the Wild Pine Project come in.

The process they undertake to find these places is fascinating. Trawling through the oldest maps they have available, they use context clues like conifer tree symbols and Gaelic place names to identify possible areas where wild pines could have thrived hundreds of years ago. Cross referencing those to aerial imagery, the team have a fairly good idea of what might still be there. Then comes the fieldwork: hiking out to what can reasonably be described as the most remote corners of Scotland to find any remaining trees, then record them, their condition, and the ecological treasures that survive around them.

It’s not just about the pines themselves. These sites represent hotspots of a rich biodiversity that has survived for thousands of years, and one that is impossible to recreate through planting young trees. Once this biodiversity is recorded, the project can offer advice to landowners and managers as to how best to preserve these sites. The hope is that they can recover, preserving habitats vital for our rarest flora and fauna – such as the iconic capercaillie, which only survives in mature Scots pine forest. In this way, they are racing against time to preserve something priceless: the remaining fragments of our ancient temperate rainforest.

As a filmmaker, the idea of using ancient maps to spark a treasure hunt in search of the last remnants of an ancient forest felt like a great story to tell. I asked James what the most remote site in Scotland might be. He hesitated, then started to tell me about the Pont Maps, from the 1500s. It was the first serious mapping exercise in the Scottish Highlands, and deep in the North West there is a scrawled reference to a ‘mighty park of nature’, full of ‘fyrwoods’. By James’s estimations, of that once mighty forest, there might be one pine left standing today. It was on their list to survey that summer – only accessible by foot, a good hike in and out. We agreed we would tag along.

A Forest in Name Only

The mountainous vistas in the Scottish Highlands are iconic. They captured my imagination as a kid, but since I’ve begun to explore stories about our natural world, I’ve often been told they’re actually bare, denuded, devoid of life. I’ve always struggled to reconcile that feeling of absence with what I consider to be some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. For me, this film was an opportunity to capture the landscape differently, and try to see if we can communicate that feeling of loss.

High up on the ridge, hours earlier, James and Jane had become quite excited, spotting what could possibly be a wild pine. It wasn’t recorded on the first OS maps, and could mean a healthier habitat than they expected to find.

But as we descended into the glen, we noticed that we were surrounded by tree stumps. The more you looked, the more you saw. Hundreds of stumps lay around us in this empty glen. The scale of change, of loss, felt finally tangible to me. It felt like an elephant graveyard. A forest in name only.

And yet, against the odds, hanging precariously over a ravine, an undiscovered wild pine still clings on.

Hope

How do you draw hope from observing decay? It’s hard to say. It seems to affect James and Jane differently; these explorations of theirs have laid bare the extent of loss, and in some ways the futility of their mission time and time again. But they also shed light on a truth: that these places used to mean something to us. Enough to name places by, to record, to live amongst, to know. We have forgotten our connection to our wild landscapes, and they have retreated as a result.

But the Wild Pine Project shows that by rediscovering those connections, we can protect these places. And if we can revive those cultural connections, perhaps we can write a future where we live closer to them again.