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The Old Oaks of Cadzow Forest by Marista Leishman
IT’S A GOOD GAME that encourages us to think who from the past we would most like to have met. Bookishly, for some it could be the fun-loving Robert Louis Stevenson, or the great Dr Johnson, colossal as to form and phrase.
One of the mighty men of the Clyde was James Watt, ushering in the industrial revolution through the steam engine; Sam Bough, however, painted beautiful scenes, working, amongst other places, in the ancient forest of Cadzow in the park of Chatelherault, near Hamilton.
Associated with this same forest is an early royal: King David I, ruling Scotland in the late 11th and early 12th century, is my choice for that imagined meeting. Even though he and I would have been hard put to it to understand one another. Son of Malcolm Canmore III and the astute and religious Queen Margaret (hers is Edinburgh Castle’s tiny chapel perched on the edge of the rock), David I must be one of the most able rulers we ever had; and, I suspect, one of the most likeable.
His wholesome influences survive in stone and in statutes. He saw to the law so that an even justice prevailed for everybody. He founded the abbeys |
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of Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose and Holyrood, promoting education and agriculture through them; and he encouraged the creation of wealth throughout the country by standardising weights and measures and encouraging the burghs to trade with one another.
This extraordinary administrative machine worked out of a court that was peripatetic. King David I was perhaps more available to his people than are our rulers today; and to make his life tolerable he relied on the royal equivalent of base camps in the form of wooden lodges about the country.
One of these clung to the edge of a gorge of the River Avon near Hamilton. Later generations rebuilt it in stone as Cadzow Castle; but it was here, in older age, that David indulged his hobby for planting orchards and, on the flat ground above the gorge, a forest of oak trees. Today, what we know about the magnificent survivor oaks that still we see, leaning, tumbling and protesting into the distance, each carrying an array of cancelled limbs, new attempts and more conclusions unnaturally reached - what we know about these great fellows is that they are the offspring of crop planting and not of natural regeneration. And so it’s not impossible that, while one hid a Stewart king, another goes back to David I.
Today, of course, we can hardly be surprised as modernity pursues its persistent and noisy way over the adjacent boundary from the trees: the motorway must roar to the south whatever happens. But an ancient stillness persists all the same; such that a group of painters made their own: Horatio MacCulloch, Alexander Fraser, Patrick Naysmith, Sam Bough and others came regularly to paint - and in some cases even to live - near the trees, so powerful they found their influence.
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