A wide belt of Corsican pines runs along the coast at Formby in Lancashire. These were the first large woods I ever saw as a child; mysterious and inviting and promising excitement and adventure. Beyond the pinewoods lay marshes and then sand dunes - the highest hills I knew for many years - and finally the sea. Wandering this landscape I discovered the joys of exploration, solitude and nature. To me it was wild and vast. As a child the concept of wilderness didn’t really exist. I just accepted what was there and assumed it was as it should be and always had been.
As a teenager I discovered, via school trips, Snowdonia, the Lake District and the Peak District. These national parks were a real revelation. The mountains seemed huge, the wildness almost infinite. Although I read natural history books I didn’t grasp anything about ecology or natural systems. I wanted to identify what I saw but didn’t understand how little I knew about how it all related. It didn’t occur to me that these wild mountains could be anything other than natural and untouched. I saw sheep - plenty of sheep - but had no idea of the effect they had.
Once I’d discovered the hills my outdoor desires changed from woodland exploration and bird watching to climbing to the summits and striding out along the ridges. I discovered wild camping and started carrying a tent into the hills, revelling in nights out in the silence and splendour of the mountains.
My second revelation came with my first visit to the Scottish Highlands. I wandered up onto the Cairngorm Plateau and stood there amazed at the scale of the landscape. I can still remember the sense of shock. I didn’t know anywhere this big existed. All those hills to climb! All those wild places to camp! Suddenly the English and Welsh hills didn’t seem so big after all. I set out to climb all the Munros in what I again assumed was a pristine wilderness. I read Fraser Darling and Morton Boyd’s The Highlands and Islands to learn about the natural history of my new favourite place, but the words about deforestation and the degrading of much of the landscape didn’t sink in. I didn’t ‘see’ it when I was in the hills. The bare glens looked natural so I thought they were.
A change in my thinking came not in the Scottish hills but in the High Sierra. Here, in John Muir’s heartland, I discovered real forests and real wilderness when hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Already impressed by the small transverse ranges and the deserts of Southern California I was now faced with hundreds of miles of roadless wilderness. The rugged alpine mountains were magnificent but it was the forests that really impressed themselves on my mind. Many of the individual trees were magnificent but it was the extent and naturalness of the forest as a whole that most affected me as the trail rose and fell, climbing high above timberline and then dipping down into dense forest.
Timberline! There was a new and magic word. I fell in love with timberline, with that band between the bare mountains and the forest where the trees grew smaller and more widely spaced until they faded away completely. I noticed how timberline varied with the aspect of the hills - higher on the warm southern slopes, lower on the colder northern ones. No straight lines here.
The forests continued all the way to Canada. I had never spent so much time in the woods. Back home after the walk I missed the trees and started to wonder why our forests were so small or else were block plantations that didn’t look or feel like the woods of the High Sierra and the Cascade mountains. The Pacific Crest Trail had changed me. I started to think about the tree stumps I saw sticking out of the peat in those bare Scottish glens. I started to wonder why in so many places the only trees were on steep slopes in ravines or on islands in lochs. I noticed the lack of a timberline like that in the High Sierra. Once I started to ask these questions the answers appeared quite quickly and I began to properly understand the concepts of deforestation and overgrazing. I didn’t though, think that anything could be done about it and my growing interest in protecting the hills was still solely about preservation. Restoration was a concept still to come.
My second American long walk, down the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico on the Continental Divide Trail, reinforced my love of big forests and big wilderness. I was reading conservation writers now - John Muir, Edward Abbey, W. H. Murray - and thinking about their words. In the USA I read about restoration projects in wild areas. Back home developments in Scotland helped my thinking develop. The year I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail the Scottish Wild Land Group was founded, a year later the John Muir Trust came into being. I joined both. The year after I hiked the Continental Divide Trail the then Nature Conservancy Council bought the Creag Meagaidh estate and began the process of forest restoration by reducing grazing pressure. The forest could return.
My eyes open I could no longer walk the bare Scottish glens without thinking of the forest that should and could be there. Sometimes I regret this. It was nice being innocent and thinking this an unspoilt wilderness. More often I look for any signs of recovery and relish them when I see them, whether it’s a single sapling poking through the heather or a fenced enclosure of planted native trees intended to create a natural forest. Overall I prefer not to have fences or planting but if they are the only option I don’t object. Eventually I moved to the Cairngorms, to the area where there is the largest extent of wild forest remaining, and one of my greatest joys is to see this forest regenerating and spreading.
I still return to North America every so often to experience again the vast wilderness areas. Each time I see these glorious forests I think that with will, determination and effort Scotland’s wild areas could be so much more natural and wooded.
Backpacking and wilderness
For me backpacking and wilderness go together. Backpacking is all about venturing deep into wilderness and experiencing nature at its most pristine and perfect, but what exactly is wilderness and how do you know when you are there? The answers may seem obvious but legislators and conservationists who have tried to define wilderness have found this surprisingly hard.
Generally the conclusion is that wilderness is land without human habitations and little sign of human activity.
In the USA there are designated wilderness areas, deemed to fit the definition of the Wilderness Act: ‘An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’.
As there is little land ‘‘untrammelled by man’’ (and what a lovely word untrammelled is) in the UK we prefer to talk about wild land rather than wilderness though the distinction is unclear.
According to the John Muir Trust wild land is ‘uninhabited land containing minimal evidence of human activity’ while the National Trust for Scotland is rather more expansive, saying ‘Wild Land in Scotland is relatively remote and inaccessible, not noticeably affected by contemporary human activity, and offers high-quality opportunities to escape from the pressures of everyday living and to find physical and spiritual refreshment’.
There is a problem with these definitions. They leave out large areas of Britain beloved by backpackers, including much of the Lake District, Snowdonia, Peak District and Yorkshire Dales, not to mention many coastal areas. Popular long distance paths like the Pennine Way, West Highland Way, Offa’s Dyke and Cleveland Way don’t run through much wild land by these criteria either. Yet surely they do. The land in these national parks and along these trails doesn’t feel tame, which it must be if not wild, but feelings don’t come into official designations. Camp high on Cross Fell on a night of storm and wind, with the clouds racing across the moon and heavy showers hammering on the tent, as I have, and tell me this is not a wild place.
Many years ago I came up with my own explanation of wilderness: ‘If there is enough land to walk into, enough room to set up a camp and then walk on with that freedom that comes when you escape the constraints of modern living, then it is wilderness, in spirit if not by definition’.
For backpackers I think this still holds. Trying to classify wilderness precisely doesn’t work, as it shouldn’t. The wild cannot be contained, defined and corralled into a neat box. If it could it wouldn’t be wild. As well as having a physical reality, wilderness is also an idea, a feeling, a set of concepts that come together to shout ‘this is wild’. This idea is especially important in Western Europe where we do not have the huge areas of pristine land found in the Americas. Yet we do have many pockets of wildness that fit my description, places where you can feel you are far from civilisation even if it lies only a few miles away.
Camp deep in a wood with the only sounds those of wild life and the wind in the trees and you are in the wilds despite the nearby roads and villages. Climb into the Lakeland fells to camp by a high tarn and you are in a wild place though you could be back down in the pub in a few hours. The distance doesn’t matter; it’s the situation that says where you are. Strolling country lanes to camp on a crowded roadside campsite only touches the edge of the wild. Walk just a few miles on and camp in solitude beside a hill stream and you are part of it. In distance and time you are almost in the same place. In feeling and experience you are in a different world.
I realised this when I camped in the Grand Canyon on the Arizona Trail. I was crossing the Canyon on the popular trails, which are spectacular but crowded and with strict regulations about where you can camp. I had planned on camping at the Bright Angel Campground at the bottom of the Canyon, a lovely but organised, safe and tame campground with picnic tables, neatly laid out tent sites, toilets and fees. However the site was full so I followed a ranger’s suggestion and walked a few miles away from the campground along the Clear Creek Trail to an area where I could camp wild.
Leaving the somewhat tempting lights of the campground and nearby Phantom Ranch with its bar and restaurant I followed the narrow winding trail below great cliffs as darkness fell. The instant the lights of Phantom Ranch vanished I felt back in wild country. Camp was on a flat stony platform just off the trail, where I simply threw down my foam pad and sleeping bag. The walls of the canyon rose above me, a hard blackness darker than the soft black of the sky, in which a myriad stars sparkled. There were no lights, no sounds, no sign of people. Phantom Ranch and Bright Angel Campground were just a few hours away but no longer existed in my mind. For this night the Grand Canyon felt it belonged to me. At dawn I woke to the sun slowly lighting the colourful cliffs as the Canyon came back to life. I lay and watched the light and the glory return and felt incredibly grateful to be there rather than at Phantom Ranch. It was the finest camp of the whole walk.
Similar feelings of excitement, wonder and wildness can be found all over Britain by walking that little bit further away from bright lights and warm indoor cosiness.
Once wilderness is seen as a feeling and a concept, an ideal perhaps, then various factors can change how wild a place seems. The weather and the time of year are significant here. A storm adds wildness to any place, as I found on Cross Fell, while winter changes the nature of the land. Under snow tame domesticated land can become like the Arctic. One February, after exceptionally heavy snow, I set out from my front door and camped not far away on a rounded undistinguished hill, exploited for grouse shooting with heather burning and shooting butts. I could almost see my house from the summit, but all around spread a white wilderness, almost every sign of humanity hidden by the snow. It looked wild, it felt wild; it was wild. There are many such places that are transformed by storm or winter into wilder places that echo with what they once were. And many more that feel wild under blue skies and warm sun. Seeking them out is a large part of the joy of backpacking.
Rewilding the hills
How wild and natural should the hills be? Do you want them tame and docile so the walking is easy and secure? In an online comment one walker said they liked sheep in the hills because they make walking ‘very pleasant’. Now, sheep-cropped grassland certainly is easy to walk across but it’s also an artificial and biologically degraded landscape. Natural landscapes are wilder, more diverse and, for the walker, more challenging. Where the terrain is impossibly tough - dense forest, tangled bushes - the answer can be a path. I’d rather see a narrow trail through a wild and natural landscape than sheep-cropped terrain where it’s easy to walk anywhere. And if there’s no path then I’d rather find a way through the difficulties than have them tamed.
A bigger question is how to achieve more natural and diverse wild lands. Just what does that involve anyway? Ideally I think it means leaving land alone, leaving it to be ‘self-willed’. However, whilst that’s fine for pristine and near-pristine places it may not be for more damaged ones. The question then becomes: ‘how much interference and management is acceptable?’ In turn this raises the question of how long you want to wait and whether the rewilding of a landscape can be speeded up. The answers vary depending on your outlook and aims. Aesthetically I think any management should be as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible. I also think such management also produces a more natural landscape in the long run. However I accept that in some places it just isn’t possible, at least at present.
In Eskdale in the Lake District some extensive tree planting is being undertaken by the National Trust. Because this is sheep country the planted areas are fenced and the trees are caged. This looks highly unnatural. In time I guess the cages and fences will be removed and the forest will look more natural though it will still have straight lines dividing it from the bare land outside. Less obtrusive is the work being done by Trees for Life in Glen Affric. Again planting is involved but the trees are not caged. The new forests are simply fenced in to keep out deer. Again the line between the rich vegetation inside the fence and the sparse boggy vegetation outside is stark.
Contrast these schemes, both of which I support, with that of the RSPB in Abernethy in the Cairngorms, a huge nature reserve that stretches from the forests around Loch Garten of ospreys fame to the summit of Ben Macdui. Having heard that the RSPB was to plant areas that as far as I knew were already regenerating and pretty natural anyway, I contacted the RSPB to find out what was going on and was invited on a field trip so I could see for myself (thanks to Regional Director George Campbell for organising this and also to Senior Site Manager Jeremy Roberts and Ecologist Andy Amphlett).
Before we headed out to look at the area the scheme was explained and I was shown detailed maps of the forest divided into different types of area. No planting was going on in the mature natural forest or in areas where there was good regeneration I was told. Overgrazing isn’t a problem in Abernethy now as deer numbers have been reduced and sheep removed. However, there is a wide band of higher ground where the sheep used to graze, that runs up to what should be the natural treeline of 650 metres, where there are no trees at all and so no seed source for regeneration. There are also areas of previously felled and then planted forest where many tree species are absent. It’s in these areas that the RSPB is planting small groups of trees to provide a seed source. The planted areas won’t be extensive, just small clumps, and there will be no cages or fences.
Out in the field I was shown some aspen that had been planted on heather moorland. I would never have known they weren’t the product of natural regeneration. Higher up, we found the last tiny pines still well below the 650 metre line. It was clear that there would be no natural regeneration here for a very long time. The RSPB has set a 200 year goal for the return of the forest so even with the planting it will take a long time. For walkers there will be no discernible sign of this management, unlike in Eskdale and Glen Affric. That’s because the RSPB owns the land and has control of grazing, which takes us back to the start of this piece and the question of what sort of landscape we want. For myself the idea of the returning forest is exciting and inspiring. I’ll only see it beginning but that is a joy in itself.
Across Scotland with pylons (and fences, roads and plantations)
This is the story of a walk across the Highlands in search of ugliness. It was my twelfth coast-to-coast TGO Challenge but on this occasion I approached the event from a slightly different and, it must be said, less positive viewpoint. I’d been impressed by David Jarman, speaking at the public inquiry into the Beauly-Denny power line (a string of huge pylons running down the Highlands that has now been built), when he painted a picture of the slow attrition wearing away the wild character of the Highlands. In an email he said ‘amazing how difficult it is to get hold of ‘ugly Highlands’ images - I don’t take them, others I have asked don’t’ in the context of producing a presentation showing the effect the proposed Beauly-Denny pylons would have.
As I was soon to set out to walk from Strathcarron to St Cyrus I thought that maybe I would take some ‘ugly Highland images’. I too had never taken many of these in the past and I knew full well why. When in the hills I want to appreciate the beauty and wildness that remain and try and block out any ugliness or intrusions. For that reason I’ve always planned high level routes, keeping as far as possible to the relatively unspoilt summits and passes and away from the degraded glens. I did the same this time but once I’d started photographing intrusions and damage I found that I couldn’t ignore it as easily as in the past. In fact I found myself looking for opportunities to include fences and bulldozed roads in photos rather than ways to cut them out. I can’t say I enjoyed this different mindset but it did make me very aware again of just how damaged some of our hill areas are. And I did return with a collection of ‘ugly Highlands’ images.
The first intrusion came in the form of a deer fence above Strathcarron complete with high stile and gate through which I could look across the strath to the harsh angular lines of a forestry plantation above which rose the dark outlines of the Achnashellach hills. Soon afterwards, a rusty old iron gate between two tall fence posts reminded me that such intrusions are not new. Over the Bealach Alltan Ruairidh a bulldozed road led to Bendronaig Lodge, an old road that was not too horrible compared with some I was to see. The ugliness faded as I crossed the boggy wastes between Loch Calavie and the Allt Coire nan Each, noting the old tree roots sticking out of the peat showing this area was once wooded, and then traversed the An Riabhachan – Sgurr na Lapaich ridge, finishing with a splendid wild camp on the col with Carn nan Gobhar. Up here the sight of the bathtub rings on the reservoirs either side of this ridge didn’t really impinge on my joy.
The next day I descended to the fake loch called Mullardoch with its bleak, bare shores and crossed Glen Cannich below the massive concrete ramparts of the dam. A blizzard on Toll Creagach cut out all views of ugliness and beauty, then it was down to always attractive Glen Affric, though I was more than acutely aware of all the deer fencing and the straight unnatural lines between the protected and unprotected land. Crossing to Glen Moriston I passed through some really nasty clear-cut forest on the way to Cougie before leaving the glen on the old military road and marching to Fort Augustus with a double line of pylons that looked like H. G. Wells’ Martians and were just as alien. This brought me to the start of the climb to one of the most trashed places in the Highlands, the Corrieyairack Pass, noting how ironic are the signs saying that General Wade’s road here is a protected historic monument. Maybe one day we can keep just one pylon – in a city park - as a historic monument and reminder. Warning signs told of the construction of the dam in Glen Doe just to the east, a huge intrusion into what was a vast wild area.
The Corrieyairack is a tangle of pylons, power lines and bulldozed roads and I was happy to escape it for a walk east over the misty, rain-strewn hills to the Monadh Liath. A short section of Strathspey with its main road and railway led to Glen Feshie, one of my favourite places but where I was horrified to discover that the bulldozed road in the upper glen, built without planning permission some years ago, had been renewed in places while in others 4WD vehicles had very recently gouged great ruts in the ground. Escaping the despoiled glens again I climbed lonely Carn Ealar and An Sgarsoch, then returned to tracks and roads at White Bridge from where I walked to Braemar.
Lochnagar was magnificent on a wild day of high winds, hail, rainbows and flashes of sharp sunlight. I circled round high above the Dubh Loch to Cairn Bannoch and Broad Cairn. A reminder of the fragility of this seemingly tough landscape intruded on the descent of the latter, the wide eroded track up its south eastern flanks being in sore need of repair. The bulldozed roads at the head of Corrie Chash are depressing too as are the gouged tracks on Sandy Hillock. From the latter I crossed the rolling heather and peat bog moorland to Glen Lee, where a bulldozed track runs deep into the hills almost to the head of the glen. Once on the track I was on the downhill slope to the coast and stuck on roads the rest of the way. One and half final days of striding out saw me on the beach at St Cyrus staring out at the sea. It had been a good walk, despite all the damage, but someone really ought to do something about it. I guess that means us.
A fragile freedom
The great corrie spread out far below, glistening as the early morning sun touched the rocks that were wet from the overnight rain. A thin white line split the topmost cliffs, the rushing water looking solid and immobile at this distance. Beside where this water slowed and spread, forming pools in the flat peat and heather bottom of the corrie, I’d camped the night before, looking out across the deep cleft of the Lairig Ghru to the bulky mass of Ben MacDui. Now I was high on a rocky ridge that soared upwards into the sky. The dark black oval of Lochain Uaine lay beneath my feet with the soaring spire of its namesake peak rising high above in a sweep of jagged, broken rock.
I went on up the rough slopes, revelling in the sunshine, the beauty of the mountains and the freedom to be here and the freedom of being here, of being able to wander freely in the hills, going where I wished, seeking out what lay round enticing corners, peeking into hidden niches and exploring everything offered by this glorious wild country.
The ridge ended suddenly and there, just a few metres away, lay the summit of Cairn Toul. Here, unsurprisingly, the solitude of the day was broken and I was soon joined by two others, ascending from their camp in Glen Geusachan. Talk initially was of the wonderful landscape of the Cairngorms that spread out all around us but it soon turned darker as the shadow that lay over all walkers in the spring of 2001 was mentioned: the foot and mouth outbreak. My companions had come up from England to escape the closures still prevalent down there. Yes, they said, you could walk in some places, as long as you used certain access points, stuck to certain footpaths and returned to designated points. Regimented, controlled walking was not what they wanted so they’d come to the Highlands to walk in freedom.
Understandably the debate over the foot and mouth closures concentrated on regaining access, driven mainly by the need to bring visitors back and rescue the hard pressed economies of the hills. Why people go to the hills, what it means and why it is necessary tended to be forgotten. I think it’s important to look beyond the economic arguments and consider the less tangible reasons for access rights and why they should never be lost again.
Over a hundred years ago John Muir wrote ‘thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.’ For many of us that last phrase resonates with truth and meaning. ‘Wildness is a necessity’.
Not a hobby, not a casual pursuit, not a fashionable activity. A necessity. Necessary in order to feel whole, to feel free, to feel able to cope with the complexities and restrictions of the modern world. One of the great insults of the foot and mouth debacle was the dismissal of walking and climbing as unimportant, trivial, just hobbies that people could abandon for something else. No mention here of mental and spiritual renewal or physical wellbeing.
An essential component of wildness is freedom; freedom to go where and when you like, freedom from the rules and regulations that govern the world of work and urban living. Take that freedom away and the wildness disappears with it. That’s why disinfection points, controlled access, a plethora of notices and all the other attempts to regulate access to the hills during the foot and mouth outbreak were so objectionable. They destroyed the freedom of the hills, the sense of adventure and the sense of responsibility that goes with mountain exploration even for those who stick to footpaths.
My two companions on Cairn Toul needed that freedom, that’s why they were in the Cairngorms and not the English or Welsh hills. The absence of visitors even in villages and other ‘permitted’ places at the height of the crisis showed that others felt so too, even those who don’t walk far or venture high into the hills. For them, as interviews and letters in the press made clear, the countryside, even farmed lowland countryside, represented a freedom that was lacking in cities. So when the country roads were lined with Keep Out notices people stayed away. Just knowing that they couldn’t stop for a picnic or to wander a few hundred yards to a riverbank or into a forest meant they no longer felt free and no longer wanted to be there.
Days in the hills are a restorative, a way of slowing, relaxing, unwinding, and shedding the stresses of daily life. Watching a buzzard wheeling overhead, figuring out the next move on a rock climb, gazing into a rippling burn, navigating carefully across a mist-shrouded hillside all set you firmly in the present where nothing matters beyond the moment and where you are responsible for yourself. This I think is far more conducive to health and well-being than any amount of happy pills, sleeping potions or other chemical substitutes. A day in the hills, even a physically exhausting one, can lead to feelings of energy and renewed confidence in your ability to cope with everyday life.
Indeed, perhaps it is the physically exhausting, physically challenging days that are the most beneficial because they provide something not usually found in most people’s daily lives. Facing real challenges in uncontrolled wild country can have a marvellously recuperative effect. Just how good can be seen from the results of a two-week wilderness trip in 1972 on which 51 patients from the Oregon State Hospital all suffering from serious mental illness were taken backpacking, river rafting and rock climbing. Some of these people had been in the hospital for over ten years; all were felt to be incurable. However it was hoped that the trip would help them to come to terms with themselves and feel at least some degree of achievement and self-fulfilment. The results were astonishing and far beyond what was expected. Over half the group improved so much they didn’t need to return to hospital.
As well as helping you stay mentally well-balanced going to the hills is also of course a superb way to keep physically healthy. It will never be known just how many individuals suffered in mind or body because of their forced absence from the hills or how much it cost the health service.
Yet how easily the hills were ‘closed’, how suddenly we were told to stay away, as though going to the wilds was an irrelevance, something that mattered little to individuals or society. Most land managers, including some of those who were believed to hold land on behalf of everybody but who proved to be no better than private owners, gave no thought to the needs of those who use the wilds. Farming became the only activity worthy of support or even consideration, even though it was clear from the outset for those who bothered to look into the matter that keeping people off the hills would have no effect on the spread of foot and mouth. The knee-jerk reaction was to shut the land, claiming that walkers and climbers could spread a disease they had no contact with.
To prevent this happening again, to ensure that wild country is always available as a necessary counter to Muir’s ‘over-civilized’ world, the hills need to be viewed as belonging to everybody, to being there for everybody and not as the private playthings of the rich or the property of empire-building conservation bodies. The rights of access to wild land should be absolute. The freedom of the hills has proved to be alarmingly fragile. We need to ensure that it is strengthened.
*In 2003 the Scottish Parliament passed the Land Reform (Scotland) Act, which gives access rights to virtually all land.
Woods and wolves
I was crossing a big meadow when the feeling came over me that I was being watched. I stopped, looked towards the forest a few hundred yards away and froze with a mixture of awe, excitement and, I must admit, slight fear. On the edge of the trees a pack of wolves was watching me. There were six of them, ranging in colour from pale grey to almost black, all silent, alert, magnificent. I stayed still and after a few seconds the wolves began to slowly move away in single file, one of them always staying stationary, watching me. When the watcher fell to the rear of the line another would stop and the pack would continue. After several minutes they vanished into the trees and I breathed out and relaxed. Later in the evening I heard them howling, a wonderfully wild sound.
That incident, far away in the Yukon Territory, remains a highlight of all my days in wild places. I saw wolves once more on that trip and heard them howling many times more. How I would love to hear that sound in the Scottish Highlands! That thought occurred to me several times on my Scottish Watershed walk. The Highlands are wild but could be so much wilder.
During rainy evenings on the Watershed, cooped up in my shelter, I read three excellent books on rewilding and the reintroduction of wildlife. Two were by Jim Crumley – The Last Wolf and The Great Wood - and one, Feral, by George Monbiot. Crumley’s books are about wolves and forests in Scotland and discuss the history of these as well as proposals for the future while Monbiot’s book is more general, though centred on Wales. The message of these books is that for our wild places to become wilder, for their ecosystems to become healthier and more robust, extinct species, especially predators, need to be reintroduced.
Crumley particularly wants wolves, which he sees as being the key to the renewal of the Caledonian Forest. Monbiot spreads his suggestions more widely and accepts that wolves are unlikely in the near future. Lynx however, could be brought back now. Both authors mention the results of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park, which has led to far more positive changes than expected. As well as keeping deer numbers down the wolves have kept the deer moving, reducing grazing pressure. The deer now completely avoid some areas where the wolves could easily trap them, so in those places there is no browsing at all. This has allowed many plants to flourish and with them a host of birds and animals. It is a fascinating and inspiring story.
Realistically wolves are unlikely to be reintroduced in Scotland in the near future, due to the opposition of estate owners and the false picture created about them over the centuries (well described in The Last Wolf). Other less controversial species could be reintroduced though such as lynx while beavers, already present both officially and unofficially (the latter seem to be doing best), could be released in more places. Cairngorms National Park is considering this.
In the meantime the main way for rewilding to take place is to allow natural forest regeneration, which means reducing deer numbers as overgrazing prevents new trees growing in many parts of Scotland. In the absence of large predators this can only be done either by increasing the numbers shot or by fencing deer out of forests. Where deer numbers have been reduced and sheep removed the results are startling as can be seen at the Creag Meagaidh National Nature Reserve where a new forest is springing up. I have seen the results much closer to home, though in this case due to abandonment of rough pastures rather than intentional removal of animals. There are wet meadows close to my home that are rapidly reverting to woodland now there are no cows or sheep grazing them. There are roe deer but not enough to prevent the new trees springing up.
The new forests that appear when overgrazing is ended will not be the same as the old Great Wood of Caledon (Jim Crumley reckons there were actually four separate ‘Great Woods’). It would be impossible to achieve this and anyway what period would you pick as the model to try and emulate? 5,000 years ago? 8,000? A new forest will be just that, new, and it will include introduced species such as European larch and even the much-maligned Sitka spruce. The latter, now the commonest tree in Scotland, would be impossible to eradicate anyway, and Sitka spruce not grown in regimented lines in dense plantations are magnificent trees. Ending the plantation system and the clear-cutting that leaves areas devastated would greatly improve forests. On the Watershed I often saw self-seeded spruce and larch growing outside of plantations and I delighted in seeing these free trees.
Rewilding would result in a more diverse landscape with a greater variety of plants and animals. It could be done very easily if the will was there.