Defining The Wilderness

A huge majority of people want Scotland’s wild places protected, which begs the question, why aren’t these places defended more effectively?

- Jim Crumley

SOMETIMES the word “wild” seems to get in the way. If that strikes you as an odd sentiment coming from a nature writer, of all creatures, you should also know that it strikes me as odd to be writing it down.

After all, in the course of writing 30something books, not to mention more than 100 Scots Magazine articles – titled Wild About Scotland – I must have deployed it to my own ends many, many times.

Two simultaneous events conspired to generate a head of steam for this train of thought, after which I had more or less decided that the word “wild” becomes a problem – at least when we seek to define it for legal reasons, such as when it is applied to a specific landscape in order to make the case for a specific degree of legal protection.

The first event occurred when I was walking beside a body of water. By any definition of the word I can think of, what I was looking at was wild. Nature agrees with me. There was a cluster of around 100 grey seals on a midstream sandbank. Their voices drifted over the water, that seductive threnody that lured centuries of mythical seafarers to their doom, and continues to urge nature writers to poetic endeavour.

Not long before I started watching the seals, I had been watching two sea eagles. Not long before that, I had been watching dolphins. I am no fisherman, but I know for a fact that salmon love this water. I also know that otters love this water. Self-evidently, wildfowl and waders in vast numbers love this water.

One shore is steeply wooded as far as the eye can see. Ospreys nest in these woods and young sea eagles roost there.The other shore is walled in by miles of reed bed where marsh harriers nest. By any Scottish standards that particular habitat is not just wild – it’s unique.