It’s a wet, cool day in the woods. Snow shrouds the high ground, but down here among the pine and the larch and the beech, the leaf litter is soaked through like a dropped towel. Here and there, the bodies of fallen trees lie sinking into the mud, the remains of last year’s autumn drifting at their sides, dwindling away into dust.
I know this path well, but for the first time I notice there are several small signposts in front of the largest of the fallen. Memorials, I assume – but no. They are warnings.
Each sign appeals to the public to stop damaging the deadwood; these “wishing trees”, now popular again in Britain in a revival of a centuries-old tradition, are bristling with metal spines where copper and silver coins have been hammered into the grain in the hopes of a wish come true. Some coins are recognisably dated – the oversized 10 pence I grew up with, or older shillings – but most are far more recent, added in the last few years. They are tightly packed; here, the cross-section of a trunk is more metal than wood, the coins bent over with the force used to insert them, and discoloured by corrosion.
The National Trust for Scotland, which owns this land, argues that the metal leaches into the wood over time. As a result, it poisons the habitat for many beetles, wood-boring insects and woodpeckers. Though they might seem like so much rubbish, fallen branches, treefalls and rotting stumps form a crucial stage in the recycling of nutrients in a woodland habitat such as this one.
Just off the path, where fewer feet tread, a huddle of small dead trees haunt the shadows. Here, sleeping undisturbed, they are claimed by thick mosses, wood sorrel and bracket fungi. Bark peels away like wet wallpaper to reveal a dense fretwork of lacy undergrowth and mould. And there, on our return path, the newly deceased. A huge Douglas fir lost to the ravages of Storm Éowyn, a shard of rose-gold wood still powdered with sawdust and scented with resin. And so the cycle continues.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
