Passio 2

The Land

Outside his farmhouse Robert pointed to a line of sitka cresting a ridge to the east and explained that the harvest, the tree harvest or clearfelling, fails every three years. He told me how many of these plantations are owned by airline companies as sites of carbon offset.

It was on a landscape art project in the first half of 2025 that I had a long conversation with Robert Neill who farms beyond Nisbet. Robert is a highly knowledgeable and experienced farmer committed to maintaining the highest standards in food growing. In 2025 was appointed Vice President of the National Farm Union Scotland. He completely rewired my switchboard with respect to understanding land ownership, land use and agriculture in 21st century Scotland.

I find clearfelling to be disgusting. Completely unacceptable in fact. I can’t understand why we’d want to have a beautiful landscape ripped to pieces, albeit in ever changing patches, simply so that somebody who lives far away can make some money on the fly. By landscape I don’t just mean scenery, though we all love beautiful views (and why not?). I mean the layers of natural and human history that have shaped the land over time. The question we need to ask is the same we should ask about the siting of windfarms. Is this the right place to grow, fell, grow and fell these matchstick trees or is there a better place? Fundamentally we might ask whether there’s a less destructive way for remote capital interest to make money. It’s as simple as that for me. 

Normal trees with abnormal trees in the background

​I’ve read different policy papers and planning documents that try to convince me of the important economic benefits that commercial forestry brings in its wake. I don’t believe a word of it. My plan for Southern Scotland works on a scale of one hundred or even five hundred years. You plant native trees, as far as possible, or friendly immigrants, then you turn the place into a massive Sub Arctic lung where people can come from all over to walk and enjoy the benefits of the forest, the wildlife and all the rest of it. This doesn’t really fit in with ‘the end of the financial year’ approach but there’s no harm in mentioning it at various forums if only to annoy the right people. project for Scotland though nobody nowadays seems to have vision or ambition beyond the end of the financial year.

There are these signs around the place explaining how ‘operations will be carried out to the highest standard etc. etc. to ensure the ecological conservation etc. etc.’ They’re just rubbing your nose in it. I was walking once with a friend on the path leading from Southdean towards the source of the Jed Water. A bleakscape of felled trees opened up on our right. Some of the guys were still working the lorries so I asked one of them why they leave the odd tree sticking up after they’ve levelled everything else. ‘For the owls’, he said. Then he grinned and admitted that it would be a very stupid owl to want to sit on the long bare pole of a sitka trunk hoping for lunch from a sterilised landscape. I wonder if any of my readers have tried to walk into a sitka forest, either standing or felled over several generations? The forest itself not a pretty place to be. You can’t properly walk in unless they’ve cut out a clearing. The felled sites are a jumble of trunks and hollows, resembling a landscape recently shelled and bombed (of which more later). In the forests trees are packed so close together that hardly any light reaches the forest floor. Nothing grows there, no moss, ferns, plants, shrubs, flowers. No beasties for our owl to feast upon. The soil is toxic. By contrast the deciduous woodland is positively Edenic.

The question then arises - how do you make meaningful art on this topic of degrade landscapes? I should mention here that I’ve been investigating aspects of the Scottish Borders landscape in the broad sense of the word for about twenty five years, through sound, photography, moving image, text, even printmaking, and regardless of the value of these outcomes I’ve come to my own deep understanding of the complexity of this region of rural Scotland. Over time the same questions arise. What do you want to say about the land, about landscape and environment? What do you want to respond to, why and who’s interested (apart from me)? Well actually it turns out that lots of people from all walks of life are interested in what goes on in the land. Perhaps artists are well placed to create work that explores the concerns of all of us who care about what goes on. That’s enough to keep me going. The trick is to ‘say’ something interesting, anything at all, without preaching or banging a drum.