Seil author James Fenton shares these excerpts from his just published book on the landscape history of the Highlands.
There are the Highlands of the imagination, a land of hills and moors, lochs and rivers, coasts and islands, all untrammelled, still pure in the mind.
Some of the mountains are craggy and overbearing, others more homely, rounded and smooth, albeit wild during a snow-blasted blizzard or in endless mist and rain.
Reality by James Fenton
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The moors are wide open, windswept, heather clad. There is room to breathe and space to live.
A golden eagle might soar above; an antlered stag may be outlined against a clear horizon. The woods are of wide-crowned, blue-tinged pine trees set apart by heather, the trunks a golden orange in the evening sun.
The long, straight, wave-covered lochs are trapped between the hills, but some, snake-like, wind their way into the sea.
Our rivers, likewise, wind in long meanders to the coast, their tributaries tumbling over rocks and falls, in a hurry to join them, bringing white scars to the hillsides in times of spate.
We have the glories of a sunset over an island-studded sea, the sun setting in the west and, behind, the starkly-edged, gold-rimmed cloud wrack heralding another storm.
In the evening, there is the coming home to a heart-warming peat fire after a long walk during a short winter’s day, with a ceilidh of song, dance and drink to round things off.
“This is the Highlands of the tourist brochure, which as a result of the writings of Sir Walter Scott, are now symbolic of Scotland as a whole: a landscape where nature is still in charge, that has escaped the trappings and ravages of the modern world – one likely to remain strong in the imagination of the exiled Highlander,” he writes.
It is also the landscape beloved of film-makers in their historical dramas, providing a romantic backdrop to the events portrayed. But keen-eyed observers know that in such
films it is hard to avoid the occasional anachronism of a Sitka spruce plantation in an era way before the tree was introduced to Scotland, or a track in what would then have been a trackless land, he continues.
“This is because unspoilt land – land unsullied by modern intrusions and where nature still rules – is now hard to find in the real Highlands. Instead, are the Highlands of reality: pylons and poles traversing the landscape, masts and wind turbines atop many hills, and bulldozed tracks up the glens. Many hills and moors are a mosaic of
burnt vegetation, lochs are now reservoirs with dams and ugly drawdown zones, and there are fences and plantations for miles, the scars of forestry ploughing and the pervasive rhododendron and Sitka spruce.
“Outsiders can bring with them perspectives alien, or at least not suited, to the area’s distinctive ecology and ecological history, together with their own cultural baggage: for example, the concepts of biodiversity crisis, ecological restoration and rewilding have been imported unthinkingly from the south.
“Their voices are loud, and over time even the Highlander begins to believe what they are hearing: a landscape degraded by themselves and their forebears, not enough trees, too many deer, too many sheep, too much burning, damaged peat bogs.”
James says that even if you do not read the book’s text, it has more than 200 photographs to tell the story, including eight photographic case studies.
He also says that it is the only book giving an overview of landscape change in the Highlands since the Battle of Culloden and that it challenges the common belief that the Highlands have been deforested by people, the open hills of the Highlands instead being one of the most natural areas remaining in Europe.
Landscape Change in the Scottish Highlands: Imagination and
Reality by James Fenton can be ordered straight from the publisher, Whittles Publishing, or from good bookshops.