The Survivor Tree

When the Borders Forest Trust bought the Carrifran valley in 2000, this rowan was very nearly the only tree standing in it. Centuries of grazing had stripped the glen bare to the tops and the rowan held on where nothing else had. Its photograph went onto the fundraising leaflet under the line 'Where one tree survives... a million trees will grow', and some 700,000 trees have gone in around it since. By the usual measures it is unremarkable. No source dates it more precisely than under a hundred years, nobody has recorded a girth, and in a hedgerow you would walk past it. What it has watched is the reason to come: a stripped valley turning back into native woodland from the inside, one planting season at a time, until the survivor on the poster stood inside a forest. Woodland Trust Scotland made it Scotland's Tree of the Year in 2020, and it was the UK entry in the 2021 European Tree of the Year, finishing eleventh. You need a car. The small Carrifran car park is signed off the A708 between Moffat and Selkirk, by the farm gate just west of a cattle grid, and a clear path runs up the valley from there. Access is open across the whole site, though the made paths are the sensible line, and dogs go on a lead from 1 April to 31 July for the nesting birds. Keep going and the same walk carries on up towards White Coomb.