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Caption: WHERE TREES ONCE STOOD
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Caption: Where to start with this story… I’ve been meaning to share this one since November, but haven’t known quite how to share it. How to explain it. So I’m going to begin by rewinding slightly to July 2020 when the tightest of Scotland’s lockdown restrictions were lifted and we could drive down the coast again. We headed straight to John Muir Country Park. In this story here on Steller, which I titled ‘home’, I wrote this:
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Caption: ‘On Saturday 4 July, which was the first day where we could travel ‘for leisure’ in Scotland, we drove down the coast to my ‘home’, John Muir Country Park. This is the place that I missed most during the lockdown weeks. It’s a place where I can exhale and feel grounded. Where I can soak in the calm. The town that we live in doesn’t feel like home, even though I’ve shared so many photos of our walks there during lockdown. I’m so thankful for those walks and those places, but that feeling of being home is something deeper.’
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Caption: That’s how this place has always felt to me: home. The place that resets my mind like no other. I’m far from alone in this: I’ve had a lot of these conversations in recent weeks. This has been a special place for many people - for years.
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Caption: Thursday 25 November
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Caption: So now, moving this story forward to Thursday 25 November 2021. We drove here for our morning walk with the lads. It was cold and crisp and beautiful. We watched the sun rise, that first morning light glowing through the trees. The weather was due to change the following day. Storm Arwen was heading our way and the forecast was showing winds of 45-50mph in the afternoon. Nothing strange really. We’re used to windy conditions here. This walk is always our place of refuge in stormy conditions. We’d walk here for shelter. And it’s always felt exhilarating to walk here on a breezy day with the pine branches thrashing around above us.
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Caption: But Thursday was calm. Oh so calm.
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Caption: On Friday afternoon, that forecast changed. Arwen was much more powerful than initially predicted. A red alert was issued for parts of Scotland, including the whole of the east coast. The winds picked up by mid-afternoon. We stayed at home, tucked in safely, following the news. Arwen looked wild but… we’re used to storms.
We didn’t know that later, by nightfall, the winds were gusting around 100mph just down the coast.
On Saturday, we drove back to John Muir Country Park. We wondered about the damage, expecting to see branches down; wondering whether the most vulnerable trees along the bay side of the woodland, which usually takes the brunt of the weather, might have suffered more damage. Never expecting anything more… I shared this post on Instagram following that walk:
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Caption: …and I wrote:
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Caption: ‘There can be a delay between the moment your eye sees something and your brain processing that information. It can be a second. Seconds. Longer. Your brain is busy, words, thoughts whirling, but it can feel frozen. You can’t comprehend what you’re looking at.
For me, that moment came right at the start of this walk. No, that’s not right - it was happening throughout this walk. All the way along the edge of the woods.’
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Caption: ‘But the first moment happened at the start. We came round the corner from the toilet block and there was a tree on our left, blocking the path we usually take. The path that leads along the edge of the woods closest to East Links Family Park, and on past the fields before reaching the bay. Someone was telling Richard that the path was closed with fallen trees. “You’ll have to go round the other way,” they were saying. I was hearing this, but I was looking ahead, just off to the right of this path, towards the trees we were about to walk towards. Only I was looking at sky.
Why is there sky there? I thought. How is there sky there?’
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Caption: ‘There’s a heron’s nest (edit: actually an established heronry) at the edge of the woods here. ’Is’ - I realise this should be past tense. You couldn’t see it, high in the tree canopy, but you could hear when there was a hungry youngster in there. Like earlier this year, when walking here - goodness, the noise. And if you paused, you might catch a glimpse of the parent, the flap of wings above.
But there were no trees. They were gone.
The wood was gone.
This wood is gone. Battered. Excavated. Brutally ripped from the ground. A swathe of devastation. Lone trees, the ones that somehow survived, stranded in shock.
It takes a while for the brain to catch up with that reality.’
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Caption: I wasn’t trying to take ‘good’ photos here, or good videos. I was simply recording these scenes, in shock. In tears at times, to be honest. Pausing to speak to people, everyone with the same shock and disbelief. I haven’t encountered environmental destruction like this before. I’ve never seen a storm like this in Scotland. And these scenes were repeated in other areas of forest and woodland: in the Scottish Borders, in Fife, in Aberdeenshire, in Northumberland. Scenes of destruction.
Arwen was brutal.
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Caption: 75 to 80% of the Hedderwick Plantation at John Muir Country Park was destroyed with an estimated 3,000 trees uprooted. Just… devastated. It was heartbreaking to see the violence of these scenes. Not just the uprooted trees but the many that were broken, snapped, literally ripped apart. The violence of it in a place that was so peaceful. In a place that offered peace to us and so many, and that was a refuge to all the wildlife who called this place home. The roe deer and the herons and the crows and the many wild birds and creatures.
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Caption: There’s a lot more destruction than I’m showing you here, but the light was fading quickly, and when we reached this point I couldn’t take more photos. I needed to stop. These scenes were heavy. We asked ourselves, how do we still walk here and find peace within these scenes? But we knew we would. A place that has been your ‘home’ doesn’t simply stop being your home. So I’m continuing to share stories and posts from our walks at JMCP on Instagram, as a record of this place before, and now, and as a way of processing this and also bearing witness to the changes here.
I’m using the hashtag: where trees once stood.
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Caption: Local photographer and filmmaker Rob McDougall made a short film showing the devastation here following Storm Arwen. Rob’s film puts this into context in the way that photos can’t. It’s beautifully shot and edited. It’s haunting. You can watch it on Rob’s Vimeo here.
Caption: #wheretreesoncestood John Muir Country Park,
East Lothian
Saturday 27 November
