time to reflect on how the Highlands got so quiet:

The Scottish Highlands are wildly magnificent, but a hilltop monument reveals the dark tale of how they got so quiet.

THERE IS SURELY no place as grand to walk as the Highlands. The mountains push taller than anywhere else in Britain, the glens carve deeper, the lochs sweep further, and the sense of wilderness is nowhere more intense. It is a place of golden eagles and roaring red deer stags, of colourchange mountain hares and elusive wildcats.

Even little peaks like Ben Bhraggie have immense wheels of view. From where I’m standing on its summit, just 1302 feet above Golspie on the east coast of Sutherland, I can see a long dash of shoreline running northeast. To the south is Loch Fleet, where a sunlit river pours gold into the Moray Firth and out to the North Sea beyond. Inland, the heathery curves of hill dip and soar again and again, melting into the furthest distance.

The view must be even bigger 100 feet above me, from the stone eyes of the huge statue that locals call the Wee Mannie. It is dedicated to George Granville Leveson-Gower, the first Duke of Sutherland, born 1758, died 1833, and the inscription reads: ‘Of loved, revered

and cherished memory. Erected by his tenantry and friends.’

But closer inspection reveals bits of stonework are littered on the ground and the plinth is armoured with tough metal mesh. ‘Fear for duke’s statue as vandals strike again,’ ran the headline in The Northern Times in 2011. The story reported how two of the metre-cube sandstone blocks that support the duke had been levered out. Five months earlier there had been a similar toppling attempt, and before that someone had sprayed monster in green letters across it. Back in 1994, the Highland Regional Council received an official application to have the statue demolished: ‘The Gentleman on top of this pillar is perhaps one of the most evil men there ever was,’ said retired councillor Sandy Lindsay. ‘He has no honour in Scotland, and he is despised in the Highlands.’ The National newspaper reported that Lindsay wanted the monument ‘ broken into pieces and scattered on the hillside, so that people... could walk on Sutherland’s remains.’