[BITList] [From: Mike Feltham] Scotland's new forest

[HUGH]

Dave,

The fruit were apples, pears, plums, and the like.  Nothing exotic. It was 
grown for the market.  Discussing trees with my wife this morning, over 
cornflakes and toast, I recalled taking a photograph earlier in the year, 
along the bed of a burn that flows immediately to the east of where I lived 
as a lad. Until 1865 it marked the Greenock/Port Glasgow boundary.  This 
wasn't/isn't some meandering stream, except in a drought. In my childhood 
and youth it ran in a railed off culvert about 12 ft deep and say 20 across, 
with two cast iron pipes around 12" bore running along the bed from a small 
dam higher up, taking uncontaminated water into the canvas mill on the 
foreshore.  In spate, the burn ran like a torrent almost up to the brim, but 
between times we squeezed through the railings at suitable spots and played 
along the length of it - it runs a couple of miles up into the hills.  While 
in the upper reaches trees grew down to the water's edge, there was nary a 
tree anywhere near the lower bit, and yet, when I took the above photo, a 
minor forest grows along the bed of what remains of the culvert.  Why no 
trees before, and why trees now?

Hugh.