In Pursuit of Spring
Dunkeld Cathedral sits beside the River Tay in one of the most bucolic locations I have come across - even on a stark winter’s day. What survives of the building has seen over a thousand years of change - saints have come and gone, renovations, collapses, reformations, shifts in liturgical order - and yet it still stands next to the muscular calm of the river marking time with its ebb and flow.
I find myself looking up at the rising west end and thinking about the time it must have taken to build this place - the cusping, the shaped hood moulds, the grotesques, the stiff leaf carving, the blind arcading.
“Build me a cathedral!,” somebody must have said - and then all the human resources, finance, stone, timber, skill and faith came together to create something so seemingly impossible. Generation after generation contributing to a vision none of them would see completed. The moral imagination of a society made visible in stone.
Not more than a mile away from such intricacy stands another rarity - this one less architectural, but no less monumental. The Birnam Oak stretches out towards the Tay - a vast, hollowed bowl of timber, its trunk split and contorted, its limbs propped and sprawling, bark thick as armour. It feels less like a tree and more like a living remnant of another age.
It was Birnam that became the turning point in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After his violent ascent to kingship, Macbeth is told he will remain safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane - a prophecy that appears impossible. Forests do not march. Trees do not uproot themselves. And yet the impossible happens - his opponents cut branches from Birnam Wood and carry them as camouflage towards Dunsinane Hill. The forest appears to move. The prophecy is fulfilled. The moral imbalance created by Macbeth’s unnatural force corrects itself.
This oak was a sapling when Shakespeare wrote those lines.
Macbeth achieves his crown through violence against the moral order of his world. What the oak represents for me is the inevitable reassertion of that order.
I walk around the tree in awe at its size, but my eye is drawn to something smaller - an acorn resting in the leaf mould. How mighty is this thing that fits within the palm of my hand? Those who can carve hood moulds and cusping, those who can mobilise labour across generations to build a cathedral - none of them can build this. Not one of them can summon up the knowledge that turns seed into living fibre, timber into filigree forms. Only an oak tree can do this.
Both cathedral and tree are parallel testimonies. The cathedral reveals what human beings can achieve when they organise themselves across generations. The oak reveals a deeper order - one that regenerates itself without committee or finance or proclamation, through the moral architecture of nature itself - and, in a shapeshifting age that Macbeth might recognise, there’s something deeply comforting about that.
Weather: 5 degrees celsius. Sunny Intervals
Observations: Snow drops, Oyster Catchers on the river, rabbits by the riverside.
Total Miles Travelled: 625 miles
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