Davey Fire Eater and I are on the forest track high above Glen Shiel on the slopes of Sgurr a BheaIaigh Dheirg, the peak of the red pass, one peak along the ridge from the Five Sisters of Kintail. We are a good team, me and Davey. He is energetic, fiery, determined – a climber with a bit of the circus about him. As for my qualities, you’ll have to let Fire Eater be the judge of them. We are good, anyway – fast enough for the Forestry Commission Work Study team to use us in their studies sometimes, and for Davey and me to make the big pays he needs to roar around the dance hall circuit at the weekends, breathing fire.
The job was to rig the Skyline cable from the tractor with the tower and the winches and the logging plate on the forest road up to the spar tree high on the mountain side. The spar tree we stayed back with a wire rope to a clamp on the roots of a tree above it, and from high on the spar tree the Skyline ran down the mountain, supported by wires from pairs of trees alongside all down the rack. We climbed trees, fixed cables and dragged clamps and pulleys up the mountain to build a temporary aerial ropeway, and when we were done Davey on the winches and me with the choker chains high on the mountain brought huge Douglas Fir or Spruce mill logs lurching and bouncing down the mountainside, hanging from a carriage that ran up and down the Skyline, landing on the growing log-stack on the roadside. Every morning as long as we were running the Skyline we’d be up the mountain in the snow, maybe, lighting diesel fires to warm the old winch tractor, firing it up so we could start to earn that big pay packet. I tell you this so you will understand the way we knew that country, working high in the forest, looking down on Glen Shiel.
I would be up on the mountain, where it was quieter than it was for Davey working the tractor winch, straining on the levers to balance the haul-in and the haul-back drums to keep the noses of the flying logs up in the air. Between logs I could sometimes stand around, listening to the trawlers out in the Minch coming over on the walkie-talkie, or looking down into Glen Shiel from the strangely rectangular forestry plantation towards the Glen Shiel deer forest, part of Lord Burton of Dochfour’s 40,000 acres of the Highlands. From the top of Glen Morriston at the Cluanie Inn to the end of Glen Shiel at Shiel Bridge is about 12 miles, and there might be almost nothing moving there. Sometimes you might see Eddie ‘Lub an Eorna’ and Angus shepherding on the foothills of the Saddle, or maybe the ghillie Ian Campbell sounding the horn on his Landover to bring the deer down to the flats in the bottom of the glen for the hay that kept them alive over the winter. Otherwise there might be no-one there all day except maybe a few stalkers in the autumn or a few hikers now and then. Sometimes a buzzard or a couple of hoodies.
The sun would throw strange shadows when it was dropping in the west, traces of houses and small fields below the cover of bleached grass around the braided river. Sometimes the place-names illuminated too – the shepherd Eddie MacRae’s nick-name came from his old home place, Lub an Eorna, the meander of the barley, way below me, suggesting farming in a more fertile past. Now there were grasses, a bit of heather, and deer, and sheep. The only trees were the conifers around me, except maybe a birch on a crag where its seedling had escaped the remorseless nibblings of the sheep and the deer. The forest was then a desolate treeless waste, or a magnificent wilderness, according to your tastes and your level of ecological awareness, though in recent years some trees have started to regenerate lower in the glen.
There were three houses in the glen. Then they demolished Eddie MacRae’s house to build the tourist road that replaced General Wade’s military road, the road built by the English to suppress the area after the Battle of Culloden. The tourist road left Wade’s road fragmented and the odd stone bridge to nowhere arching the River Shiel , the river growing as it flowed down the glen, fed with the water that trickled and gurgled everywhere from the regular rains clouding down the mountainsides. The forest ranger followed Eddie and both moved down to the coast, leaving only the Black Officer, an ex-soldier, living alone, crafting deadly knives in his solitary cottage, morose and sinister except when in drink, then only sinister. His cottage burned down with him in it one night and after the embers cooled the glen was dark at night from end to end.
When Dr Johnson and his friend James Boswell visited the area after Culloden he met the MacRaes in a clachan or village somewhere round here below me. When the Highland clearances were over there were only sheep and deer and the few people who hung on as shepherds or ghillies staffing the new fashionable deer forests. The other glens around are desolate too. All the people live now in a narrow strip alongside the sea, on the shores of Loch Duich, because after the clearances a few people hung on along the coast, squatting on the rocks, feeding their families on the abundant herring in the loch. These villages are relics from the clearances. My friend Findlay Chisholm of Letterfearn must have been descended from the Chisholms of Glen Cannich, fortunate to have found refuge on the shore of a loch rich with herring shoals when they were dispossessed from what is now the eastern part of the Affric Highlands Rewilding project.
Now only a few shepherds or stalkers work in this empty landscape, a few foresters, and the walkers, many of them awed by the beauty and grandeur of the landscape, many having absorbed the great myths of the Scottish Highlands. The tartan myths obscure the true scale of the devastation of the people and the culture and the biosphere that has taken place in this, truly the saddest landscape in Britain to those who know its history and have not been snared by that tartan romance of pipes and porridge, Balmoral and John Buchan, who understand that a culture and a language and a population have been wrecked in these places, as well as the ecology. All to bring to life the visions sparked by Landseer’s painting of the Monarch of the Glen, creating mock castles and sporting playgrounds for the rich, who cared no more for the locals than they did for the Cherokee or the natives of the Far Tortugas.
Ironically some of those few hundreds of people who still own most of the Highlands are involved in the fashion to rewild huge areas in the Cairngorms. Fervent rewilders may feel uneasy twinges seeing once again the unaccountable rich and powerful transforming the Highlands into a different kind of playground, as they did with the deer forests and the sheep runs. Luckily many of us are also delighted by their rewilding, although some cynics wonder whether they may have plans to call this carbon offsetting and use it to greenwash atrocities committed elsewhere.
The Affric Highlands Rewilding Project is an exciting initiative that will cover half a million acres of the Highlands including the wastes of Glen Sheil where I worked all those years ago. Much of the inspiration has come from Trees for Life, a charity devoted to rewilding the Highlands and therefore dependent on public support, already acquiring land and working on projects in the area and elsewhere in Scotland. The Affric Highlands project is also an initiative of Rewilding Europe, a not-for-profit organisation founded in the Netherlands in 2011 and now working on at least 10 landscape-scale rewilding initiatives in Europe. The Affric Highland Rewilding includes many of the local landholders in the project, and they have worked to involve and inspire communities, with expert psychological advice. And much land including the magnificent Five Sisters of Kintail and much of Glen Affric is already owned by the National Trust for Scotland which has done so much to revive the biosphere in places such as the Mar Lodge estate.
The biosphere in this area has been reduced by deforestation and overgrazing until in places it is the merest skin. In some parts I suspect if you include some fungi and microbes in the thin gritty soil, and the thin layer of yellowing grass with odd patches of heather, you have a biosphere only a few inches deep, maybe a foot thick. Rewilding will protect the soil from erosion and leaching by the constant rain, as the trees grow and shelter the heather, bilberry and dwarf willow that will become the forest understorey. The trees will grow to maybe forty feet high; certainly birches can grow to twenty feet or so very quickly. Soon this skinned landscape will have a thick luxuriant biosphere, with all sorts of species making a comeback. Even the air in the forest is part of the biosphere, evaporating and condensing moisture and carrying the aerial plankton. Midges are a very important part of the highland ecology.
The mention of rewilding may start you thinking about wolves at this point, but the most important species to return will be man. In my time there almost no-one worked in the glen. The sheep and the deer needed minimal assistance to maintain a landscape almost stripped of vegetation, its fertility sluiced by constant rain on inadequately protected soil. The productivity of the depleted ecology was very low and most of those who made a living in these glens were in some way subsidised either by farming subsidies or by rich landowners. Rewilding is a process of recreating the ecological richness that once existed here. It needs to start with trees fixing carbon, using the power of the sun to begin rebuilding the ecological richness that was stored here. This richness is the renewable part of what you might call our natural capital, which is replenished by rewilding.
Now that this area is part of the great Affric Highlands Rewilding Project, which covers this area, the even more desolate west end of Glen Affric, and the slightly more populated glens of Cannich and Morriston, this half a million acres will be repopulated not just with trees and all the wildlife that moves in when forests reclaim a devastated (if spectacular) landscape, but with people too. When the natural capital of the region begins to build up again there will be more opportunities for people to make their livings there. But it is an integral part of rewilding that people must live sustainably in these landscapes, working in ways that do not deplete this natural capital. Rewilding cannot be allowed to be just a fashion. It has to be a shift in our attitude to the natural world. Those who own or manage land must learn to recognise that we are all stakeholders in this planet. Being rich enough to be able to say that you own part of the planet should not give you the right to deplete its natural capital. Rewilding must involve rewilding people as well as landscapes. We have been behaving for too long as if we are not part of the natural world that we exploit. Rewilding doesn’t just involve creating patches of wilderness; it must mean that we learn to understand that wherever we live we must not just co-exist with nature but relearn that we are part of it. We should no longer be able to treat parts of Herefordshire, for example, as if farming is essentially hydroponics , where you cultivate every available square metre of substrate, add the chemicals, harvest the crops, and bank the ‘profits’. We need to combine food production with supporting the planet’s natural capital to build up here too, because those ‘profits’ are in part actually being taken from that natural capital.
I have been reading Professor Partha Dasgupta’s report on ‘The Economics of Biodiversity’, commissioned by the British Government in 2019, which explains authoritatively what many of us have known for years – that striving for economic growth is to exhaust the earth’s resources, that Gross Domestic Product is a faulty concept that is “based on a faulty application of economics” that does not include “depreciation of assets” such as the degradation of the biosphere. We need a new economics that accounts for the natural world as our capital, our savings, not as our spending money. He describes our impact on the planet as ‘impact inequality’ and states that:
“There are therefore four avenues available to humanity for transforming the Impact Inequality into an Impact Equality. They involve finding ways to: i) reduce per capita global consumption; (ii) lower future global population from what it is today; (iii) increase the efficiency with which the biosphere’s supply of goods and services are converted into global output and returned to the biosphere as waste; and (iv) invest in Nature through conservation and restoration to increase our stock of Nature and its regenerative rate”
The role of rewilding, in this analysis, is to increase our stock of nature and its regenerative rate. If rewilding transforms a biosphere a few inches deep into one forty or fifty feet deep across half a million acres of the Highlands, it will be starting to redress that impact inequality. Left alone the Highlands would rewild themselves, but it is urgent enough to need the active participation of people who will find through rewilding a place to live and work in and with nature, and a new identity as nurturers of nature. The old calculations of profit and loss, where short- term profit calculations mask the long-term degradation of the biosphere, will no longer apply, because their work and their very culture will be based on the understanding that to survive we have to see nature not as a decoration or a recreation but the living fabric of the planet without which we cannot survive. That is the job of rewilding. Ultimately the wild cannot be the opposite of the cultivated human landscape. It all has to be rewilded, in the sense that we all have to become part of a thriving biosphere rather than its exploiters.
Meanwhile you can forget about the wolves. For the present they are beside the point. Soon we will have restored ecosystems that may have a place for them. When we have rewilded ourselves and found our place in nature, we will realise we need the wolves. They will appear when we are ready for them.
Great piece; worthy sentiments.