Finding peace in the Galloway Forest Park

Peace doesn’t always come easily to me, but it comes best when I’m exploring new places on foot or by bike. Our return to Glentrool was a chance to leave stresses behind and be present in the moment, absorbed for a week in this dark-skied forest.

Fortunately, riding bikes as a family leaves little headspace for worrying about anything else. Routes need to be planned, bikes need to be prepped and – when the temperature drops and the clouds open, as they did on our first ride of the holiday – spirits need to be lifted.

We’d decided to ride up Bennan, a peak in the shadow of the Merrick, notable for the radio mast at its summit. Galloway Forest Park was created in 1947, and the mast was built by the early foresters so teams could communicate across the vast areas they were working.

An old guidebook I found said they were planting around five million trees every year at that time, with new technology and machinery speeding up the process. But haste to adopt new approaches can have unintended consequences; it’s now known that monocultures of closely planted non-native trees do little to support biodiversity. They are, in short, a bad idea.