The Farthest Shore by Alex Roddie

Author:Alex Roddie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

It was still raining, but we couldn’t stay in the café forever, so we decided to go for a walk. Chris suggested the hike known as the Woodland Trail from Kinlochewe up through the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve to the Conservation Cairn.

There was a gleam of excitement in my companion’s eyes as we got ready in the car park at the base of the climb. ‘It’s been nearly twenty years since I last did this walk,’ Chris told me when we set off beneath the silent trees. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing how the regeneration has progressed.’

The trail climbed immediately into exquisite forest, dense and watchful. I felt as if we were walking along a corridor held tightly between friezes of heather, blaeberry and rowan scrub, with walls of pine boughs overarching us – a fractal textured world of infinite complexity and beauty. As rain dripped from above and I looked through windows in the canopy to see shreds of mist ghosting over the rocky knuckles of the heights, something deeply embedded within me whispered that this was a place of significance. Of value beyond human calculation. I knew something about the background to this nature reserve already, but that did not invalidate this primal, fluttering instinct that said magic dwells here.

The Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve was established in 1951 – the UK’s first NNR – in order to protect the largest surviving fragments of ancient Caledonian pine forest, the woods of Coille na Glas-Leitire. The nature reserve includes much open moorland as well, and, since 2014, the islands of Loch Maree, but the site’s true value lies in the quality of its woodland. In the 1950s and 1960s, conservationists began an experiment in woodland regeneration here, excluding grazing deer and planting hundreds of trees. More recently, activity has shifted to thinning the established tree cover, providing deadwood for a range of species. Tree planting is ongoing, but much regeneration is now happening naturally. It’s one of the UK’s finest examples of successful rewilding. Coille na Glas-Leitire is now a precious habitat for creatures such as the wildcat, golden eagle and pine marten.

‘When you talk to people about rewilding,’ Chris said to me as we walked up through flourishing woodland in an area that had been bare, degraded hillside decades before, ‘sometimes they think it’s all about bringing back bears and wolves, and they get defensive. But it’s more than that. It’s about restoring habitats and ecosystems that we’ve damaged, giving nature a helping hand to recover.’

Soon we moved out of the dense woodland and on to rugged, more sparsely wooded slopes. The wind drove rain into our faces now, knocking us about on the increasingly exposed path, and this little stroll started to feel a bit more like a hill day. As we struggled against the wind, Chris spoke about the background and history of this incredible place – how techniques pioneered here helped to inform and inspire a wave of rewilding programmes throughout the Highlands. Gradually,

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