My grandma had a cottage at the foot of Glen Lyon in Perthshire. It was a cosy little place, nestled onto the far end of a row of cottages, leaning into sparse fields and crowded from behind by a sprawling forest. This forest was a utopia to a nine year old like myself, and a seven year old like my sister. Every day we snuck beyond the lichen-spotted gate of the back garden to go explore the real garden.
We would hardly be a few metres into the trees before moss, dirt, ferns, ticks, broken branches and sharp gusts of wind would rouse our senses and spin us into a glorious world of endless adventure. For many, the idea of adventure has to be premised on a sense of newness – for us, we could repeat the same actions, follow the same paths we had stomped into the earth ourselves, notice the same quirks of nature and never lose the vitality of the adventure. Repetitiveness had no dampening effect on the excitement the environment gave us.
As we jaunted up the gentle slope we would use the same markers over and over again to ensure we found the correct route: ‘There’s that big stone with the crack I got my foot stuck in, turn left!’; ‘Okay, just through that huge rhododendron bush,’; ‘D’ye want to go up or around the scrambling rock-face?’; ‘Oh – that’s the tree stump where we thought that bee was going to sting us. Too far. Back that way!’
We recycled our nature, never draining it of fun by five, ten or a hundred of the same observations. We’d scoop up big branches draped with withering skeleton leaves and, with the length of them sitting on one of our shoulders each, walk them up to the den. Sometimes when we reached the den the cuffs of our jeans would be full of mud, and we’d squelch as we crouched down to fit into it.
The den was an upturned tree, wrenched out of its earth by a storm years ago. Its roots reached out in front itself, slowly drooping back down to tickle the dirt they used to sit in – nature, in its beautiful way of doing things, left an entrance just about our size, so we made it more homely by padding out the roof with leaves to bring shelter and shoving branches in to strengthen the structure. I would enter first to crouch in the den, sitting as light sparkled in through gaps and thin leaves, and my sister would linger in the entrance complaining there wasn’t quite enough room for both of us. I would give her a turn going in on her own and she would smile and footer about with the slaters and slugs we shared the den with.
On brisk days the leaves would whistle and hush, only to be drowned out by calls of "lunch is ready, come on!" from a few hundred metres away. So we’d leave our den for another day and run back along the familiar route, still getting fun and excitement out of the journey but perhaps slightly distracted by the warm thought of chicken broth.