“NATURE AND RUNNING ARE HEALING BEYOND ANY WORDS I COULD EVER WRITE”

Among the pines and along the wild shoreline, Chris Carse Wilson finds escape and healing on the trails that have intertwined with his life for two decades.

- 

I'M STANDING ON THE EASTERN EDGE OF Scotland, looking out over the rugged North Sea coastline. The next landfall, more than 600km in the distance, is Denmark. It’s particularly cold today, autumn slowly turning to winter, the morning sun hanging low over the choppy, cresting waves, my breath clouding in the air.

This is Tentsmuir Forest, at the very northeastern tip of Fife, on the coast between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. I can see the spires of St Andrews Cathedral to my right and hear the muffled crack of military gunfire to my left, at the Barry Buddon firing range over the wide mouth of the River Tay.

To run here, through the trees or along the beaches, is to feel immersed in something reassuringly solid; but this forest is barely a hundred years old. There are patches of older woodland, but the vast acres of Scots and Corsican pine were planted aggressively from the 1920s, in the rush for homegrown timber between the world wars. Before then, this land was a forest only in the medieval sense of being an area closed off by royals for hunting; later, it was perpetually waterlogged and a breeding ground for mosquitoes and malaria.

The long, flat beaches meant that Tentsmuir was an area at risk of Nazi land invasion, and today there are still hundreds of concrete antitank blocks dotted along the shore. Further back, buried in the sand and nestling in wiry grass, are pillboxes for machine guns and even the odd torn, rusted metal target, punctured with bullet holes from decades ago.