Scottish Highlands – Kirsteen Bell

The bracken is dying. The green hills are slowly singeing; yellow, copper, and bronze blending with some still-verdant patches, smirred into an impressionist’s pallet in Loch Linnhe below. A puffer disrupts the vision as it steams down the water, purple-black smoke streaming behind it, a novelty from a fading generation.

Though once used for bedding or mulch, bracken fern is now mainly viewed as invasive, reducing both biodiversity and the grazing territory available to farmers and crofters. To be rid of bracken you must repeatedly knock it back, two, three times in a season. Then you must repeat the process the following year. Year, upon year, upon year. If you do not, if you give the new growth an inch of space and time, it will take it and grow.

Bracken is old and bracken is persistent. Fossil records date it to at least 55 million years ago. It can quickly regenerate from the smallest of roots, rhizomes waiting patiently underground for new shoots to be allowed to unfurl, fiddleheads rising again to play with the wind, to reach above our heads so that in spring the hills ripple with soft green waves.

I cross a stile by the Polldudh track in Glen Nevis, following a path of mud-sunk footprints and flattened grass. Underneath a tall rowan, red berries still clinging to its branches, there is a hint of a gap in the bracken. Someone has already stamped through here – stalks lie snapped at right angles close to the ground. Beyond these, the greener stems slope away from me, their lush heads pulled down by the weakening below, their lower fronds now brown, cracked curls trailing the late September sunshine to its faint ends.

I put my hand out to one withered stalk, running my fingers along its dried pinnae; I thought they would crumble, disintegrate into my palm, but they are surprisingly strong. One curls around my thumb and holds tight as I pull, like a baby’s reflex, tiny fingers gripping mine.

The single-track road curves away to the west, following the dark shore. Straight still pines look unsure in this undulating landscape, but when the rain sweeps in they hold steady, riding the strobing surge as one. The downpour billows wide like a net curtain released from a window flung open. Higher up, the river courses down the slopes against the wind, the water streaming off granite like smoke. There are no ravens in the sky now. What strength do the birds have to maintain their grip in the face of this onslaught?

Perhaps their strength comes from the knowledge that the tide will pass. When the worst of the storm moves before us, the sun begins to shine gently through the clouds. The deep-wine tips of the birch poke through the hillside, like the underside of embroidery, and the dun-wet rushes have been buffed to a purple shine. At a distance the full burns rush with a faceless stony white, but seen closely their foam is creamy with peat. Raven calls begin to echo in the hall of birch; in ones and twos they lift to embrace the wind that remains. A double rainbow appears in the grey sky, but our attention is suddenly shifted down to the soft brown feathers of a buzzard tensed in a visual shriek as it swoops in a fast curve across the road, level with our headlights. Ultimately, the strength to hold on comes down to one thing: you have no other choice.