The Dumyat Hill Race, so the story goes, originated from a £1 bet made by a Stirling University Psychology Professor in 1972 that it was impossible to get from the campus to the top of Dumyat and back again within an hour. The Professor lost his bet by three minutes and the race has been run just about every year since. The female course record now stands at 36 minutes and the male record 32 minutes.
The land on the north side of Dumyat was recently purchased by a forestry company who are planting broadleaved woodland. As part of my entry into the hill race, I am offered the opportunity to sponsor a tree on Dumyat for five pounds. I would be given a what.three.words location for my sapling and given regular updates on its progress. The Scottish Government has presumably already paid for these trees to be planted through the Scottish Forestry Grant scheme. The tree planting will also generate certified UK Woodland and Carbon Code units, which, they say, could help my business to address its residual carbon emissions. There is a lot you can do with a tree – have you ever thought of giving your employees a personalised tree e-certificate – “the gift of a tree can help set the tone of your green office culture, with each employee receiving a personalised e-certificate of their tree.”
The leaders disappear quickly as the route climbs sharply into Hermitage Wood and up into Yellowcraigs, at times more of a scramble than a run. Then we break out onto the hill ground for a long, undulating pull towards the summit. A Kestrel hovers near the route, scanning the grasses for movement, looking for voles to bring to hungry nestlings on a nearby crag. By the time I set eye on the rocky summit the leaders are already on the way back down, throwing themselves down the scree and rocks with an abandon that will prove far beyond me. At the summit cairn I try to quickly scan northwards to see how the planting is progressing but the topography is not favourable.
I didn’t offer a fiver to the forestry company with my entry – foresters are getting a reasonable deal out of Scotland, and standing at a what.three.words location trying to figure out which sapling has been assigned to me has little appeal. Some years ago I spent a summer working on micro-climates and Whinchat breeding territories in the Ochils. At the end of the season I spent many hours at GPS locations searching for temperature loggers stuck to small posts that I'd walloped in early that spring but which were quickly swallowed up by vegetation.
I had made it to the top in good time but inch back down the track losing many positions on the descent, other runners leaping over my shoulders as I tentatively plot my way down the basalt outcrops. Somehow my time is texted to me before I've finished the complimentary post-race stovies: at least I would have won the bet against that professor too. In the post-race mingle there is a stall advertising the Dumyat woodland scheme. The native woodland looks well-designed, sensitive to existing ecological features, and will be quickly colonised by various shrub-favouring species, including Whinchats, a bird that is nationally declining but is making a decent fist of it in the new native woodlands popping up around the Ochils. Even so, the narrative still manages to stick in the throat: tree planting as restoration implies that open ground is inherently of less value than woodland. The carbon and biodiversity consequences of these projects are more complex and marginal than is acknowledged, and there were pockets of existing tree species which could have made their own woodland plans with time and effective Roe Deer control. This one is about as good as tree planting projects get, and yet it's still hard not to quieten the thought that the attraction of tree-planting is mostly a function of our desire for visible action and an aesthetic preference for woodland over open-ground.
Into the early 2000s the high tops of the Ochils still held Golden Plover and Dunlin, and the farmland on the fringes of the Ochils once crawled with Curlew, Lapwing, Redshank and Oystercatcher. Those days are long gone as a result of a swelling crisis for our ground-nesting birds that is no fault of these foresters. Yet, I still search the stall for any mention of this ecological history of the Ochils, some footnote about what these hills once were. Of course I search in vain: open ground is opportunity now; there is no need for back-story. Perhaps there's little point in harking on about what we've lost anyway; it was just a hill race. I certainly lacked the courage to point any of this out to the environmentally-conscious runners that found mollification as they browsed the forester's stall.
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