lonesome pines

Sarah was headed for Ae Forest this morning with the running club, so along I went too. I've only ever been there once and that was many years ago. I knew that most of the trails have been closed after the devastation wrought by Storm Arwen, but I hoped that I would find somewhere to get a good walk, or even just to explore for future visits. I did get a good walk, some of it on mountain bike trails, and I'll know where to go next time. 

The photo shows an area of the forest where a whole swathe of trees has blown down, and it's always interesting to see that one or two trees have survived unscathed. Resilience in nature and in humans is a fascinating subject (I only learned recently that the National Resilience Centre is based in Dumfries).

Next time I would like to find the Talking Head Stone. It has lines on it from a poem written by Hans Børli:

But still it satisfies my soul
To hear the spruce and
wind. They speak together
like sister and brother,
and use such beautiful
wind-wild words deep in 
the forest, deep in the 
forest.


Børli was a writer who was also a forest worker, so the use of his words is appropriate here, in one of the largest working forests in the UK.