The Land Be Lore

Contribution from Sandra O’Connell
Sandra is a brand strategist and copywriter for places, operating as Studio Telltale. She also writes screenplays and created Hotel Capitani, a story series for women on Substack. Travel and exploring are always on her mind.

When the Romans snaked like ivy up the walls of the continent, across a channel of water, all the way to Scotland, they named the northern region Caledonia, or “wooded heights.” Tales of an enormous, impenetrable, foreboding forest, the Great Wood of Caledon, trickled down to Rome.

But the telling was an exaggeration—no real forests matched the description.

Even then, almost 2,000 years ago, humans had started to prune the Scottish forests. To see them in their glory days, with the most tree coverage, you would have to travel 6,000 years into the past.

Perhaps the Romans’ stories were woven not from an experience with a physical forest, but from a sensed energy. They felt the long-gone trees, the wild’s whispers, the magic.

Magic is potent in Scotland. I know because I’ve felt it. I return because I can’t get enough.

In a dinosaur’s footprints immortalized on a seaside ledge, my hand was swallowed. Was it my imagination or did the earth tremble as their ghosts wandered? I sensed the playful fairies living in a hidden glen, a brilliant-green miniature world that mirrors the greater landscape. If I dozed off on the moss, I might shrink to their size, or, at the least, they would tie the laces on my two shoes together.

I touched a cold yet emotive rock, one of many sticking out like teeth, purposely arranged in a circle. At that moment of contact, I was sure that time paused, that the clouds stopped moving, that the planet halted its rotation, that I was possessed by the spiritualism of our Neolithic ancestors. I witnessed chameleon waters colour from cerulean to cyan, a trickster ocean stealing from the tropics. I stood beneath rock erections balancing on mountaintops, a feat so precise, so puzzling, so phallic it had to be the work of juvenile giants. And, let’s not forget, a Jurassic-like creature lives in a loch—unseen by my eyes, but a myth I can’t help but believe.

What’s real? What’s imagined? What persists from another time? It’s too hard to tell.

There are also craggy hills and valleys, sad and barren, naked, empty, missing the trees that once grew from its soils, lamenting the lost wolves and lynx and bears.

Only one percent of Scotland’s native pinewoods still stand, according to the organization Trees for Life. Not even magic can fool visitors into believing there was once a Great Wood of Caledon—its whispers have been silenced.

But there’s hope. The Scottish Rewilding Alliance has proposed to rewild 30 percent of Scotland’s land over the next 10 years, making it the world’s first rewilding nation.

Those wild forest legends will soon awaken from a too-long sleep. What will they tell us? How will they enchant us? What kind of magic will return?