A mecca for rewilders: the communityled project restoring Scotland’s southern uplands

About 6,000 years ago, most of southern Scotland was covered by broadleaf woodland, interspersed with patches of rich scrub, heath and bog. In stark contrast, the landscape today is dominated by close-cropped, severely nature-depleted hills, punctuated by sharp-edged blocks of non-native spruce plantation.

Now, thanks to the Carrifran Wildwood,

one of the UK’s first communityled rewilding projects, patches of habitat resembling Scotland’s primeval forest are staging a comeback.

Carrifran, now nearly a quarter of a century old, gives us a glimpse of a world that once was. But it also shows what large parts of this land could be: a sink for climate-heating carbon, a flood-mitigating sponge for freshwater; a generator of biodiversity, and a source of wonder, identity and hope for people, locally and globally.

Carrifran’s revival began on 1 January 2000, when the project’s founders and their friends – including me, then a local biology student – broke the thin soil and planted the first 100 saplings.

Nearly a quarter of a century and 750,000 planted trees later, the project is achieving ecological lift-off. The valley is now shaggy with diverse native trees. Freed of grazing pressure, wildflowers are flourishing: even on a cold early March day, the first primroses, wood anemones, coltsfoot, and emerald green honeysuckle leaves offer bursts of colour. On the high ground, peatbogs are healing and rare arcticmontane scrub and heath are thriving. The whole place now echoes with birdsong, and golden eagles can often be seen wheeling above the crags.

Philip Ashmole, a zoologist, was one of the visionaries who launched the project in the mid-1990s. “We wanted to make a small repayment of our debt to nature,” says Ashmole, 90. “We just felt there should be somewhere people could go to see an undisturbed woodland ecosystem, looking and functioning as it did over much of Scotland before humans made a significant impact.”

Ashmole, his wife, Myrtle, and a group of local friends – environ