THE FRANDY TREE
To walk the old ways of Glen Devon is to feel the land’s memory underfoot. The path that leads to the Frandy Tree is no true path at all, but a desire line, a water-mark of footsteps left by others who have sought out this same sentinel. It is a route read in the dip and sway of the land, through tussocks of moor-grass, bleached bone-white by a high, unpitying sun. The air, thin and sharp, carries the scent of peat and the distant, mineral tang of the reservoir that drowned the old glen floor. The Ochils rise around you, their slopes the colour of a fox’s pelt, their silence broken only by the bleat of a stray ewe or the soughing of the wind – a sound that has its own language here.
And then you see it. The Frandy Tree is an ash, and it has been seized by lightning. Its form is not the slow sculpture of wind, but the jagged calligraphy of a single, violent moment. The trunk is a contortion of wood, twisted back on itself as if in memory of the shock. A deep, black scar runs down its flank, a wound of carbonised bark that speaks of immense heat and energy. Yet it lives. From the bent and tortured limbs, new growth pushes out in a defiant spray of green. It is less a tree than a survivor, a fixed point of resilience in a landscape of constant, subtle flux.
This ash is a tree of myth. In the old Norse cosmology, the world was held in the boughs of the great ash, Yggdrasil, the conduit between realms. To stand before this lightning-struck specimen is to feel that ancient connection. The lightning was not just a weather event; it was a message, a touch from the storm-god. It recalls the story of Odin, who hung himself from the world-ash to gain the knowledge of the runes. This tree wears its own rune, a mark of celestial fire. It holds that searing memory in its grain, a story of survival against overwhelming power. The wood remembers the fire from the sky.
There is a different quality to the sound in its high branches, a rustle of broad, compound leaves that is softer than the hiss of pine. You find yourself listening, not just with your ears but with your whole body, leaning into the charged presence of the tree. It is a place to pause, to breathe, to recalibrate your own hurried human rhythm to the slow, deliberate pulse of the wood. The Frandy Tree does not offer easy answers, but a jagged wisdom – a profound sense of perspective, a rootedness that anchors you, for a moment, to the deep, mythic geology of the glen.