I knew about the Black Woods before we moved to Forres when I was 10. Before then I had lived in the nearby village of Kinloss. A friend who lived in Forres and then moved back to Kinloss warned me of how creepy they were.
The Black Woods dominated the small Scottish town of Forres. They covered the hill that lay in the centre of town, just up from Grant Park. Wherever you were in Forres you could see the wooded hill, and the tower - Nelson's Tower - that stuck up from the middle of it. The Black Woods referred to a specific part of the woods that lay behind the tower. The graveyard marked the point that you entered The Black Woods, though really, the whole of the woods were pretty spooky, and yes, the spooky woods really did have an old graveyard inside them. My parents bought a house (89 Drumduan Park) at the base of the hill. My bedroom looked up into the woods.
I didn't know anyone in Forres, and I remember hat first winter there - the winter of 1982 - spending long Sunday afternoons listening to the Top 40 and watching it get dark outside, staring up into the woods, trying to see some mystery, some secret there amongst the darkness and the bark and tangle. I remember waiting for the street lights to come on in the narrow lane between the top of the garden and the stone wall that I always imagine held back the wood.
The Black Woods fascinated and troubled me.
I suppose it was the following summer when I first tried to penetrate the depths of that wood. Attempts at investigation weren't very successful. The woods back in Kinloss might have been creepy, but were also safe. The Black Woods were too large to be safe, and because of this far too unnerving to play in... and we didn't play in there, but we did try to explore them. We didn't get very far in, for a number of reasons - it was far too easy to get lost, and there was a creepy manor on the edge of the woods (owned by new age community the Findhorn Community, but as a 10 year old, the Findhorn Community contained all the possibility of a dangerous black magic coven). Discoveries inside the wood themselves did not quieten down any sense of disquiet, didn't lay any ghosts to rest. There were the bones of some animal we discovered lost beneath tangles of ivy (a fox, a dog?) - and in one of those small electricity substations, a fair way into the trees, someone had scratched into the concrete of some kind of lid, the words SATAN MINE HUMBLE HOME. We called this the Pet Cemetary. One summers day, me and my sister tried to have a picnic in the woods. We went in deeper than we had done before, and found a kind of clearing. There was a rusted bedstead, and the skeletal remains of some long dead motorbike. We tried to eat our sandwiches there, but there was some kind of breeze blowing through the trees that sounded too much like sighing, and the darkness in the trees surrounding the clearing was far too spooky to stay. We walked back out from the clearing, and didn't run. We didn't run as we might have done in the woods at Kinloss (from living skeletons, or werewolves, or whatever ghosts we were hunting at the time) because these woods weren't fun, and if we ran that sense of panic might attract something. As we walked very quickly out (don't run, don't run) it felt like there was something hunting us.
When all my friends had left Scotland (we were all RAF kids, and people moved on all the time) I would lay in my bed at night and listen to the wind through the trees at the top of the garden. I would suddenly be glad that my friends had gone because I wouldn't have to go into the Black Woods any more.
I've been thinking about the Black Woods recently. I wish there was a place like them in Brighton, somewhere old and deep and mysterious. I would like to fall asleep in my old room there on a rainy summer afternoon, start to dream with that ponderous silence that still deafens nearly thirty years after I left.
