Prepare to be slowly sucked into the life of Argyll Forest Park, on the border of the highland and lowlands of Scotland. This video, the first in a new series by Max Smith, reminds us of one of the wild-ish places left in the UK.
Shot over only two weeks, Mr Smith spent most of this time tracking the forest wildlife in order to find the right location, especially to capture some of the squirrel’s-eye-view footage. ‘We went up there for just under a fortnight. A lot of that time was spent scouting for locations and finding where the animals were. It’s actually quite a lot of tracking, looking at footprints, looking at trees and for traces of animals being there. It was four to five days of actual filming,’ he explains over the phone.
‘The initial idea for it was that, although a lot of wildlife films are really great and really inspirational, they skip from one habitat to another. I really wanted to shoot something that really got you involved in one particular place. It gives you as sense of that place, where you’re almost as close to explore that place as actually being there,’ he adds.
And this film, which has already stacked up almost 3,000 ‘likes’ on video-sharing site Vimeo, is a timely reminder. Over the weekend, environment secretary Owen Paterson took to The Times to defend his plans for biodiversity trading, under which ancient woodland could be ripped up for a housing development - if the developer plants 100 saplings to replace each uprooted tree. (Mr Paterson might have chosen a particularly ill-suited example of biodiversity offsetting - the plans we reported in December to begin restoring south London’s almost forgotten woodlands, for example, might give a glimpse of the other side of the story.)
Argyll Forest Park, where this short was filmed, was established as a forest park in 1935, the first for public use according to the Forestry Commission. Even though Mr Smith’s film gives the impression of a natural wilderness, humans already have a big impact. Mr Smith found that Argyll is already a ‘managed’ forest, meaning some trees are harvested for timber. ‘There were still areas that had been recently cleared. They felt different from the places we were filming in. But as soon as we had gone in [to the forest] a couple of hundred yards, it did feel very different.’
The next episode of ‘A Sense of Place’ will be released within around two months - Mr Smith is still deciding on the location, but is likely to film somewhere near his native Devon, and to chose a location which is a little less wild and include humans interacting with their environment.
UPDATE: After posting this on Twitter, John Weir, an advisor at the Forestry Commission in England, added this interesting comment about the type of trees you see in the video:
@sustainmagazine @HollinsMargaret Great Video. Forest mostly non native trees. Now great for nature timber and economy. Win win situation
— John Weir (@JohnWeirFC) January 6, 2014
It just goes to show that the forest, planted after World War II, may seem wild - but it’s actually relatively new.
Beautiful little video. Looking forward to the next. Max Smith won’t find any landscape in the UK untouched by human hand, there is none. This shouldn’t mean that anywhere might be dug up and replaced with housing. Most modern people usually need, and want to live in towns or cities!