Forests in mind Blarbuie Woodland at Argyll and Bute Hospital

摘要

In the Victorian era an asylum was built at Lochgilphead in Argyll to house and treat the mentally insane of the South West Highlands and Islands and Dunbartonshire. Thousands and thousands of trees were planted around the grand stone buildings, in lines and clusters and belts - trees from Britain and Europe and Asia and North America, evergreen and coniferous. In hindsight one can question the reasons many of the hospital patients came to be in there, and the treatment they experienced, and one might also question the purpose of the surrounding and enveloping strips of woodland, but somewhere in that mix of hospitalisation, treatment, and enclosed sanctuary was a desire to help people and to deliver a professional service to the benefit of society. Once there were five hundred people residing there; Gaelic speakers alongside those from the urban industrial west of Scotland. Now there are less than a hundred, but the ethos remains, and the woodland remains.