Drawing breath after running the rise I stood at the quiet junction this afternoon, staring into a copse of spruce trees there, that wedge between the burn and the forest road. Unusually on Forestry land these are mature spruce, tall and strong. I climbed down into the copse`s heart and all was dark and silent, but for the Bold burn murmuring, the muffling floor fifty years of soft brown needles. I studied the thick trees` down-sloping branches and mapped a climb in my head. Abandoning this my eye then caught right angles in amongst the tangled diagonals; at seven feet someone had placed a slim pole-like branch between two trees and, rising from the needle carpet to meet it in the middle was a twenty feet long sapling trunk, stripped of branches. Together they formed a fragile, rising cross. Looking down I saw the stone circle of a camp fire, blackened with burnt branches and pine cones. Weeks, months old. Trying to make sense I envisaged a forest dweller lying flat, staring up at the looming, falling cross in some solitary rapture or torment. (Why did I think that ?) And then, as though an archaeologist piecing together a (remarkably well preserved) find, I saw flat stone rows either side that would have held waterproof sheeting down, and I heard again the burn only a few metres away; close-by for washing. But for the intruding forest road above, a traveller had created a perfect bivouac. In my mind`s eye I saw them at night, head protruding from under their open canopy, warmed by a resinous fire, hearing owls hoot, foxes bark and being lulled to sleep by the constant reassuring chatter of the burn.
