Creative Scotland Award Winner GERRY LOOSE has been studying the Sunart Oakwoods in Ardnamurchan. His Ardnamurchan Journal is a first attempt at gathering his thoughts on a multifacted project.

FROM AN ADNAMURCHAN JOURNAL, 29 December 2007:

There is a need to approach Sunart oakwoods obliquely. Like sitting. Sitting very still, alert & relaxed, waiting for something to arrive: a deer, maybe, or an owl. If I look at trees in the dusk directly, they dance in vision; it’s the way our eyes are physically made. Look to one side & the tree is clearer. I approach trees sideways, a little nervous of their history & presence. I count geese, deer, list mosses, enumerate spiders, look out to sea with my back to the woods, holly & birch & alder all around. It’s as if to look directly is to somehow obscure a latency, a voice that I want to listen to; but it’s not enough to be attentive, scientific; it’s necessary to be receptive. I’m impatient. I’ll not live as long as an oak.

(To read An Ardnamurchan Journal, click on the link at the bottom of this page.)

GERRY LOOSE describes the project:

THE PROJECT is to study the Sunart Oakwoods, which are remnants of the Atlantic oakwoods. Because of the very high rainfall and the warmth brought here by the North Atlantic Drift (Gulf Stream), Sunart oakwoods are effectively a temperate rainforest and an extremely rare ecosystem in Europe.

I've been looking at the whole system here; not just fauna and flora, seabed to the tops, but the human interaction as well. That means the historical, but not just the recorded history – also the poetry (language & memory & story) of the two peninsulas Ardnamurchan and Morvern, around which the oakwoods are clustered.

A thousand inter-relating issues come into play: land use, landownership, clearances, more recent settlement, house and land prices, exploitation of the woods themselves, both current and historical; religion, local politics, wood ants, sea eagles, corals, and the trees: hollys, oaks, alders, aspens, rowans, elders and all the others; bird song, sheep, deer, cattle, Highland shows, jam-making . . . .

I'm trying to make first sense of this with An Ardnamurchan Journal. There'll be more considered works in due course: poetry, and the images of Morven Gregor, who's been commissioned to document all of this in still photographs in some way.

Gerry Loose would like to acknowledge a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council, which makes this project possible.

© Gerry Loose, 2008

Links

• An Ardnamurchan Journal