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On the craggy ridge of a moor, our ghillie Innes inches along the sodden ground with his elbows, his belly dragging through inhospitable growth. The glen is scattered with dark mounds, temporary shelters of upturned peat for the birch, juniper, oak, rowan and alder saplings, that alternate with Scots pine, to take root. In his sights is a stag marking its territory, trampling the newly planted saplings underfoot.
He is alone and shows little signs of fighting off competition – his modest antlers are no trophy. The light is fading, and the damp cold is working its way through the weathered skin on Innes’ hands, into his bones. He aims and with a clean shot takes the animal down with a bullet straight to the heart.
He now faces the thankless task of getting the beast off the hill. Sadly, there are still no large predators in the Highlands of Scotland who would make easy work of this and dispose of the carcass. Innes must drag it through the moorland until he reaches a path. The moon is well up in the night’s sky by the time he finishes, and he could almost howl at it.
This is Alladale Wilderness Reserve, an hour’s drive north from Inverness, just inland from where the grey sea washes its salty breath upon a quiet coastline. Under the guardianship of Paul Lister, philanthropist and environmentalist, and a handful of dedicated men, these glens and vales are being nursed back to their original glory from the brink of ruin. Through a meticulously planned and executed program of reforestation, rewilding and the restoration of peatlands, they operate from a simple ethos: Leave the land in better condition than you received it.
“I have been on both sides of the debate about land use in the Highlands. My family were involved in commercial forestry, but over time I came to understand that the ecosystem of the Highlands was broken; the natural forests were gone, the soils depleted and the large predators were extinct. When I acquired Alladale in 2003, the aim was to repair some of that damage by restoring the native flora and fauna.”
Paul, who has also founded The European Nature Trust, like all great visionaries, has clarity of vision that extends to those whom he chooses to surround himself with; a cast of exceptional characters all united for a cause to ”let nature do what she wants to do”. Innes is no exception.
Straight-talking and unimpressed by media attention, once at the helm of a traditional sporting estate his energies are now concentrated on bringing this wilderness back to the point where they might initiate a controlled release of wolves and bears into the fenced reserve. His pragmatic attitude belies a deep affinity for nature and acknowledges the entire cycle of life and death, predator and prey, and what sacrifices are necessary to achieve the balance of a sustainable ecosystem. Over time, established woodland accessible to red deer will ensure better winter survival and a healthier herd, and the welcome addition of native roe deer.
Overseeing the planting of 800,000 native trees, funded under the Scottish Government’s Rural Development Programme, he has watched the bare hills once soured by heavy rainfall leeching out the soil’s goodness, slowly return to life. Standing over one of the many damns he made that stem the relentless flow of water off the once degraded peatlands, he cuts the figure of a doctor just returned from a night shift at A&E.
This is the man who would save your life should you find yourself stuck on the side of a hill in the howling wind, unless you were messing with his saplings. Guests can still take their chances at stalking here in one of the well-appointed lodges; but it is old school in an environment that only favours the brave.
Alladale Wilderness Reserve is the first of its kind in the UK, more along the lines of Shamwari Game Reserve than a traditional hunting lodge. Presently 23,000 acres, Paul’s vision is to reach 50,000 acres and then initiate the rewilding of large predators, specifically wolves. Successfully trialled in Yellowstone National Park, the wolves catalysed a mass restoration of its eco-systems.
In George Monbiot’s TED talk he describes how he stumbled upon the ”widespread trophic cascades” that resulted from the rewilding of wolves. The deer had reduced the vegetation to almost nothing; once they were hunted again they radically changed their behavior avoiding valleys and gorges. The bare hillsides became forests, and the birds followed, smaller mammals returned and fed on the carrion left by wolves, then came the beavers, also eco-system engineers building dams. Doug Smith of Oxford University is presently preparing a paper on Alladale: Encouraging nature to come back.
However, this project throws up a whole host of issues around authenticity. How can they know if they are doing things the right way? What proof is there that this is what it would have been like without man’s interference? We cannot – we are a part of the chain and it is only when we engage with nature that the solution presents itself. In this context it is fair to say that, well, it just feels right. Among the few good men who are gathered here is Roy Denning a man with a face so open and kind, lined with years of smiling in the face of adversity, you might call him the godfather of British Nature.
Accompanying us on our walk through the reserve we fall into a more philosophical conversation about the age of man, and what this will be remembered for. For millennia man has incrementally augmented his dominance over nature until he reached the capacity, with the advent of the H Bomb, for its total obliteration. ”The age we have just lived through, might be considered in the future as the chemical age, high level use of DDTs and PCPs which caused great unforeseen damage. Perhaps this is the dawning of the age of preservation, one in which we all recognise the world is a finite resource.” Einstein was first to point this out, ”our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.”
”Ha!” Interjects Jonathan Leake, a well seasoned environmental journalist – ”the deep green issue that dare not speak its name – over population!” It is one thing to cull the animals up here to regain the balance for all species to thrive – it is quite another to extend the debate to humans. For Paul the answer is quite simple, ”this has to be the age of retraction, where less is more.”
Ah but Roy, ever the optimist with a smile, quietly points out that as more and more women are educated so will the population decrease, not to mention the very real threat of pandemics. What is interesting about Roy is that he is grateful to Paul for this opportunity because with government run schemes – whilst the will is there – the feasibility studies take so long, and are so fraught with red tape, that projects rarely see the light of day. Here he has seen the successful reintroduction of red squirrel, osprey, sea eagles, and kites.
With a private or corporate benefactor things are more efficient on every level – success means good business. On this point, and at the heart of Alladale Wilderness Reserve, is an issue that unites us all, man and beast, land and trees: water. It is commonly known that we are made up of 90 per cent water, but it is a little known fact that over 70 per cent of the water that we drink in the UK is filtered through peatlands – the majority of them degraded through mismanagement and erosion.
Enter PEATLANDS+ and the irrepressible Renato Iregui. Originally from Columbia, this is a man on a mission to facilitate a jaw-droppingly simple solution. The best ideas always are. “Neither the restoration of habitat nor the prevention of species extinction is achievable without the mediation of water, both its purity and its flow. If you restore the water table then everything comes.”
Lifting a chunk of livid green Sphagnum moss out of the pooled dam, he squeezes it like a sponge, then flashing a smile, he enthuses, “this is what healthy peat looks like. By raising the water table you reverse the carbon emissions – approximately 10 million tonnes of carbon a year in the UK – and sequester billions of tons of carbon locked away in the developing layers of peat.”
As a part of its land management aims, Alladale hosted a pioneering scheme run by PEATLANDS+ that links owners of drained and damaged peatland with companies who want to mitigate their carbon footprint by doing something proactive on their own doorstep. Working with ICAP they blocked 20 kms of hill drains, on 224ha of degraded peatland, improving water quality and regulating run-off.
Does this provide drinking water benefits and flood mitigation, it creates optimum conditions for hydropower – such as they have on site at Alladale – due to the regulated flow of water. Landholders across the UK can now derive an income from the degraded peatlands they commit to restoring; Alladale is using the money to fund youth education projects locally.
Over eight weeks in the summer children within a 50-mile radius have the chance to participate in The Alladale Challenge; planting trees, scrambling in gorges and learning about wild animal management alongside leadership skills they are the future guardians of this land.
On the eve of our departure I speak with Fenning Welstead, a chartered surveyor whom Paul has known for over 35 years. He describes his daughter’s first kill – building a relationship with the animal as she stalks it, then overcoming her emotions to follow through with the shot, and finally dragging the beast off the mountain. It is a gritty tale about finding a connection again with nature and our role within it. We are not external to it. You simply have to go there to have this fundamental epiphany – it just makes sense.
A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it. ~ Henry David Thoreau
by Nico Kos Earle
all images by Nico Kos Earle
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