Perthshire's autumn blaze

It would be remiss of me to allow autumn to pass without getting all lyrical about the colours. But after the wordiness and (some have commented) gloominess of my previous post it may be better to let my photographs do the talking this time around. At this season I can think of nowhere better in Scotland to enjoy the spectacle of natural fireworks than Perthshire. The highlands arrive abruptly on crossing the boundary fault a few miles north of Perth and all of a sudden fertile rolling dairy pastures are left behind and ahead lie the thickly wooded glens and inclines for which the county is justly renowned.

Perthshire boasts some superlative specimen and heritage trees including strong contenders for the tallest, oldest and stoutest in the land. Most famous among them is the wizened and hollowed old sessile oak that grows at Birnam. A pity it is not nearly ancient enough to have been witness to Macbeth's nemesis but it is a relic of the oak forest that Shakespeare set marching upon Dunsinane, thus fulfilling his witches' divination. In more recent times the Birnam Oak has been dwarfed by a monstrous neighbouring sycamore, a mere stripling at 300 years old.

On the opposite bank of the river Tay from Birnam, Dunkeld is one of those places where all the ingredients for Pre-Raphaelite picture postcard perfection have conspired to come together. No wonder that John Everett Millais was drawn time and again to visit, painting landscapes like Chilly October that are typically autumnal in tone. The town is laid siege by trees on all sides; trees that serve as lofty roosts for ospreys in the summer and that smoulder with golds and ochres and snag the lingering mists in autumn. A meeting place of rivers and pocked with small lochans, Dunkeld is a natural amphitheatre in which the trees somehow muffle the droning traffic of the A9 while accentuating the mewing buzzards that wheel high overhead.

There, I am already breaking my pledge not to be wordy! I'll shut up now and let the pictures speak for themselves.

Picture perfect Dunkeld

Season of mists

'Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -'

from To Autumn  by John Keats

English poets have always been bewitched by autumn. Shakespeare, Keats, Browning and Blake, Clare and Rossetti, dozens of others - they have all turned their pens to sonnets and odes in honour of this most poetic of seasons. They have personified it, as Keats does above: 'Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;' They have found deep melancholy in its declining days, beneficence in its harvests, gothic frisson in its festivals and rituals. And, of course, they have mined it for countless metaphors of death.

Autumn is a long season and an extravagant one. It begins in abundance, the swelling coffers of the crop. It is fat and wealthy and dripping with gold. Keats' bees are duped into thinking warm days will never cease because 'Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.' But plenty begets excess. Excess begets wastefulness which, in its turn, begets decay. By way of this profligate sequence Nature re-stocks the pot for a repeat showing. There is eternity in rottenness, the indestructibility of elemental matter.

Autumn is ripe for poetry because of the way it assaults our senses. Keats knew it and reaped it in some of the most concrete poetic lines he ever wrote. He makes us taste the plump hazel shells 'with a sweet kernel'; we watch with him the long autumn sunsets that 'touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue'; we hear the 'wailful choir' of gnats and the bleat of full-grown lambs, and we are there with him by the cider-press, patiently watching 'the last oozings hour by hour'.  It is a rich pudding of a poem, every line as o'er-brimmed as the cells of his bees.

To Autumn is not a long poem by the standards of the romantic poets but, over a reading of its three stanzas, months have gone by. We are not told directly of the passing of time, it is more subtle than that. With each verse the temperature of the adjectives becomes colder. The industrious bees of the opening verse have, by the poem's close, given way to the gathering swallows, twittering in the skies. And there Keats breaks off, on the brink of the birds' departure. It is a master stroke on which to leave us. The laden apple trees under a 'maturing sun' have been harvested and in their place a winnowing wind stirs the chaff on the stubble fields.

I sat reading To Autumn on the waterfront in Dundee the other day. The sky was distinctly autumnal and a ragged mist snagged in the trees on the opposite shore. I know there are brambles and blackthorn bushes heavy with ripening sloes on that shore. As I read a sudden breeze brought a skittering of crisp sycamore leaves along the path, blotched yellow and black. They passed, the breeze vanished and the sun was once more warm. It was a little taste of what is to come. We are on the cusp.