Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 100

in this case Liechtenstein. The legal knots took two years to untie. But,
as Alan says, 'when you have a 250-year vision, you have to learn to
relax a bit'.
Like most of the land in this region, the estate (with the exception
of two small corners under forestry and sheep) was used for deer
stalking. For a few weeks a year, a handful of people dressed in
tweeds and brogues, steeped in Balmorality (see p. 149), travelled to
Dundreggan to shoot stags. Otherwise, with the exception of the
stalker (the deer manager), it was almost unvisited. But like the high
sheep pastures in Wales the land had been scoured, and the last scraps
of native forest were slowly succumbing to senescence. Without pred-
ators, fed by the estates in the winter, culled only lightly, the population
of red deer had exploded. It has more than doubled in the Highlands
since 1965.
The great Caledonian Forest, which once covered much of the
Highlands, has been reduced, by people, sheep and deer, to around
1 per cent of its greatest extent. In some of the places where trees still
exist, the youngest are 150 years old. The oldest were growing before
the Battle of Culloden, when the political changes that destroyed
much of Scotland's remaining forest began.
I arrived at Dundreggan - Dul Dreagain , Dragon's Hollow - on a
day of fleeting sunlight and black clouds. Successive fronts were roll-
ing up the Great Glen, driving the classic mixed weather of early April
into the surrounding braes. Alan led me through a forest of ancient
juniper bushes, twisting and bulging into fantastic shapes like zoo-
phytes in The Garden of Earthly Delights .
After we had seen the boar, we walked through the old birches to the
rocky ridge on which the last pines of the estate grew. Reduced - irst
by the shipwrights who logged the forests here, then by old age to a few
hooked crones hunched over the hillside - these trees, which had clung
to the rocks for a quarter of a millennium, were reaching the end of
their lives. Great ginger branches had begun to shear off the trunks,
tearing holes in their wide crowns. Young rowans grew high in the
forks, sown there by birds. They too were among the last of their kind,
as only those out of reach of the deer survived. On the track Alan found
a pine marten scat, glittering with the iridescent wingcases of beetles.
Beyond the trees the bracken gave way to low, deer-cropped hea-