The call of the wild
Is there such a thing as a one-day wilderness? Absolutely – and a new map can help you find it.
“Every inch of Britain has felt the sweep of humankind – but it doesn’t feel here like we have fully tamed it.”
INHOSPITABLE. DESOLATE. SAVAGE. Look up a definition of wilderness and you’ll find a parade of off-putting terms. But you can only imagine that whoever wrote the dictionary secretly adored the wild and wanted to keep it for themselves, for it doesn’t begin to explain its power on the human soul. If you’ve ever stood on a lonely hilltop, above a view that touches only on mountain or moor, with just the breeze and birds for company, you’ll know what I mean. Maybe the cycle of worry slowed a little, the maelstrom of world politics faded, and things just felt a little more right. Whether you call it peace, or joy, or perspective, or no words exactly describe it, chances are the wilderness had a profound effect.
And in the last few years Scottish Natural Heritage has been applying science to the idea of wild land, to the delight of all who yearn for it. They divided the nation into millions of ‘cells’, each one 25m2, and using maps, aerial images and people working on the ground, they assessed four criteria: the perceived naturalness of ground and vegetation; the ruggedness or physical challenge of the terrain; its remoteness and inaccessibility from roads and ferries; and the absence of modern human artefacts like pylons. These defining elements were then combined to produce a map of Scotland’s wildest areas: a glorious 3,798,815 acres across 42 sites.
And I’ve just walked into one of those 42. It’s no revelation that swathes of the Highlands and Hebrides classify as wilderness, but SNH’s research threw out some surprising pockets of lonely country, including three in the busier reaches of southern Scotland – like here in the Talla-Hart Fells. Not heard of them? Nor had I, but these hills rise just a half hour from the A74(M) near Moffat and within two hours of Edinburgh and Glasgow, putting muchneeded wild within reach of many devotees.
It’s a fragment of wilderness – just 36 square miles compared to over 600 for the Cairngorms – but that means you won’t need to pack a bivvy bag or a flint-eyed thirst for hardship to reach its remotest spots: you can be home by teatime if you like. And once you’re up in the hills, as I discover on the faintest trod of a path beside Loch Skeen, it doesn’t feel small; it feels encompassing. There is no clue that the A74(M) exists, or the town, attractive though it is, of Moffat. I wouldn’t even know that the road I walked in from, just a couple of miles away, exists. It’s magicked away in a steep, deep fold of glen, like a white rabbit vanished into a conjuror’s hat. The only tarmac-grey in sight is the crag that roughens the green cliffs to the west of this freshwater pool, the highest upland loch in southern Scotland, over 1500 feet above sea-level. Its island was once a nesting site for golden eagles and its depths are home to Britain’s rarest freshwater fish, the vendace, a species that dates back to the last Ice Age and survived in only two locations in Britain – and now here, after introduction in the 1990s. As promised by SNH’s research, there is little sign of human intervention in this landscape. There is little more to see than an old drystone wall guiding me up Lochcraig Head, even though the panorama already balloons across many rows of moorland ridges with the stuffed-out contours of plump armchairs. We have changed this landscape – every inch of Britain has felt the sweep of humankind – but it doesn’t feel here like we have fully tamed it. It’s an enormous ecosystem of hill and sky that will outlive us by millions of years, and walking here is a quick way to feel reassuringly tiny.
Earlier this year SNH published detailed descriptions of each of the 42 wild lands, including how each one makes people feel. They’re right about the sense of sanctuary and solitude, the awe at its arresting and inspiring qualities, and also the risk of “a sense of anxiety”: it is slightly unnerving when the paths fade and the land gets grander.
My walk into the loch began on a carefully engineered trail, one you’d have trouble losing and which many people climb to look at the Grey Mare’s Tail. At 200 feet it is one of the highest cataracts in Britain, captured in verse by Sir Walter Scott who was, perhaps ironically, thrown from his horse into a peat bog on his first visit to the falls, before describing it as “White as the snowy charger’s tail.”
I looked for peregrines launching from the waterfall’s crags, like harbingers of the wild to come, for beyond its churning waters I crossed an unmarked line into the wild land area and the path narrowed and the number of walkers dwindled. As the trail threaded through hummocky moraines I passed a couple of tumbledown stone squares – a blunt reminder that we don’t always triumph
over nature. Built as summer shelters for farmers moving their sheep to upland grazing, the roof was blown clean off one in a storm in the 19th century. The farmer was out tending his flock on the gale-battered hills; his wife had to tie their son to her back and walk miles down into the valley for shelter.
There was nobody in sight by the time I reached Loch Skeen, and the faint path on the eastern shore soon gave out completely, leaving me to pick my own way across the heathery peat, past a decaying sheep skull to that drystone wall.
In the 17th century, the challenge of this landscape was used like a shield by Scottish Presbyterians known as Covenanters. Fleeing religious persecution and fearing for their lives they came to these hills, knowing that the bogs and moraines would be treacherous for the horsemounted government troops on their tail, led by John Graham of Claverhouse or Bluidy Clavers, under orders from King Charles II. Out here the Covenanters could hold conventicles, secret services which became known as blanket preaching for the fabric used to shelter the speakers from the weather.
Watch Knowe is where they kept a lookout and as I climb the neighbouring top of Loch Craig and hit the apex of the hills around the lake at over 2500 feet, the views range far and wide. Like an antique oil painting, its colours are deep and dark. Loch Skeen is a smooth sheet of pewter below; tiny threads of water silver through the peat beside it; and the fells I’m standing on appear to merge unbroken into the Ettrick Hills to the south and the Tweedsmuir Hills to the north, expanding the feeling of wild. A gleam of tiny lochan by Skeen’s east shore is Hogg’s Well, named after writer and poet, James Hogg – born nearby in 1770 and known as the Ettrick Shepherd.
The area is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, bought in 1962 with money from its Mountainous Country Fund, whose founder, Percy Unna, was keen to see the wilderness stay wild (see panel). And quiet lands aren’t just magical places for walkers and climbers; they’re essential to flora and fauna. The richest collection of rare upland plants in southern Scotland grows across these
“The walk is under six miles… but as I look back at the silent cradle of Loch Skeen, I can feel the wild has worked its magic.”
hills. There are downy willows, the purple blooms of alpine Saw-wort, and oblong woodsia, the rusty cliff-fern which was once plentiful in the Moffat Hills until Victorian pteridomania, or fern-fever, hit and crag-clambering collectors reduced it to a handful of colonies. Mountain hares also bound up here, easiest to spot when the snow’s melted but they’re still moulting their winter-whites, and you might spy wild mountain goats, otters by the loch, ring ouzels in the crags and ospreys in the sky.
The ridge keeps high as I tour anticlockwise above the loch, dipping only gently before turning south over Mid Craig, with White Coomb, the highest point in this wild land at 2694 feet, off to the west. The Midlaw Burn runs through a gulch below, known locally as the Hanging Gardens for its winter cornices. It was ice that cut these steep slopes thousands of years ago – so steep that no road or even track makes it through the range – and I’m now tracking above the course of a glacier that ground through the rock. This one was Lilliputian compared to the one it joined, the colossal river of ice that forged the east-west trench of Moffat Dale. When the ice melted it left this valley hanging and the Tail Burn with that long drop down the Grey Mare’s Tail to Moffat Water.
I zig-zag down to cross the outflow of Loch Skeen, ready to retrace my steps back past the waterfall and into the depths of Moffat Dale. The walk is under six miles all in, but as I look back at the silent cradle of Loch Skeen, I can feel the wild has worked its magic. I’m a happier version of the person who walked this way just a few hours ago; soothed by the peace, awed by the views and inspired by the wide spaces of one of Scotland’s wildest lands.