Gone with the Wolves

Matteo Crawford got in touch with us at the start of the year and his plan intrigued us: self documenting the real Scotland – the landscape that has been shaped by centuries of human management. What's more, he planned to do this by bike. We were intrigued, so kitted him out with a Switch Rack and Panniers to carry his camp and camera gear. Over to Matteo to tell us the story in his own, carefully observed style. 

The tundra plateau approaching Bynack More

• “an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region”
• “a neglected or abandoned area”
• “a position of disfavour, especially in a political context”

I find it hard to consider anything that is not a complete, ‘naturally’ functioning ecosystem a wilderness — and since 1650, when the last wolf was killed in Scotland, we’ve not had a terrestrial apex predator.

Gone With The Wolves is something I’ve been writing and thinking about for years. I wanted to examine how cultural romanticism obscures ecological dysfunction; how land ownership shapes ecological futures; and how Scotland’s idea of wilderness is bound up with colonial and class histories. This project repositions wilderness as both an environmental and political concept — lenses which the definitions above allude to, albeit indirectly.

Douglas the estate conservation officer.

The idea is deeply important to me, and I think I shied away from working on it visually for precisely that reason. Still, earlier this year I got my shit together and began planning a journey into the field. This spring, thanks to huge support and enthusiasm from Tom at Restrap, I finally got myself out into the hills. 

Conducting the fieldwork by bike was essential to the project. The one truly wild element left in Scotland is weather, so traveling by bike and sleeping in a tent provided total immersion, and gave the project an almost performance layer. I'd opted to do it in May, which is usually one of our two good weather months — though, lo and behold,  the weather really got me.

I decided a week would be a good first ‘test’. I chose the Cairngorms as my first area to explore, since the region harbours much of our remaining Ancient Caledonian Pinewood. During the days I had clear skies, sunshine, and incredible views. It barely rained all week.

Come nightfall, those same clear skies came back to haunt me. When the temperatures at 500m above sea level dropped to -5C three nights in a row, my very underpowered sleeping bag was of little use. One morning I woke to the surrounding hilltops graced with a dusting of fresh snow. The next dawn, snow encircled the foot of my tent.

Unsurprisingly, sleep was hard to come by. A lot of lessons were learned though. Not bring three books; how best to position my bags on the bike; that I’d likely be too tired at the end of each day to play the tin whistle packed next to my tent poles; concentrate when reading the comfort and extreme temperature ratings on sleeping bags. Silver linings and sleeping bag liners.

Early morning clouds on the cliffs above Loch Eanaich

As a test trip, it was successful — more so than I had anticipated. I managed to get a lot more images than I’d hoped for. I met so many interesting people, and realised that in the seven or so years since I had been in the area last, it had changed for the better. Many estates historically dedicated to hunting have converted to rewilding and natural regeneration projects. Vast areas of the Cairngorms are now committed to this.

Making my way through Glentromie I met Douglas, a conservation officer for Wildland. He'd passed me an hour before in one of two Landrovers and, knowing the estate's hunting legacy, I'd taken him and his party for shooters. He surprised me by saying that the group was from several other estates in the area committed to conservation, and he was giving them a tour after three years of their rewilding in the glen. This encounter happened on day one, and was hugely motivating, even if there is something bittersweet in the fact rewilding is now as profitable an endeavour for landowners as shooting once was — and that profitability is likely the only motivating factor.

Last light on Sgòr Gaoith

During my seven days in the field I saw only three deer, testament to the fencing and culling programmes in place to ensure natural regeneration. As a tree lover, deer in Scotland are one of my nemeses. That said, I wouldn’t have minded seeing a few more, as contradictory as that may be to my politics. There is nothing quite like witnessing a deer float above the undergrowth in a series of effortless and ethereal leaps. There is also so much beauty in seeing huge swathes of the landscape dotted with seedlings and saplings, new woodlands re-establishing themselves from the gene pool of our once widespread ancient woodland.

There were trees in place of saplings from the time I was last there. I finished this test-trip exhausted, rejuvenated and inspired. The conversations I had with conservation managers I'd met by both chance and appointment gave me hope, a feeling reinforced by what I saw. Having spent much of the week sleepless due to freezing overnight
temperatures, I didn't anticipate that this summer would be one of the hottest on record.

The repercussions of this stark and unrelenting heat are some of the worst in recent history. This summer bore witness to one of the worst fires ever seen in the Cairngorms. Fires in the highlands are not an uncommon sight. The heather burn has been protected in Scots law since 1926, largely to promote and maintain the sport of grouse hunting.

The highlands of Scotland are already a highly altered landscape, and the recent fires are largely a consequence of humanity and its inaction toward the climate crisis. The area of the Cairngorms that this latest wildfire ripped through was home to so many important trees, including those patches of surviving Ancient Caledonian Pinewood I mentioned prior. The flames have done considerable damage to decades of local conservation efforts, and even worse damage to the gene pool of this already struggling ancient woodland. Having just roamed the area, and not two months later watching it burn with a fury, I feel it's important to recognise quite how bad this is.

Conservation is already an uphill battle; always has been. The ever worsening climatic conditions are one thing, and this wildfire is a glimpse of things to come. But with Andy Burnham, the new PM in Westminster, opting to open up two new oil fields in the North Sea, what fucking world is he on?

This should act as a call to arms for all of us who use the landscape, whether for work or play. I left this trip feeling inspired by the efforts that had been made towards restoring a huge area of the country to a more ‘natural’ state. Most of the glens I passed through were unaffected, and for that we can be thankful. It will be decades before the Abernethy will recover, and if we don’t heed these signs of distress, we’ll be mourning more areas of natural beauty in the years to come.

I had planned on heading elsewhere for my next trip, but with all that has happened, I will go back to the Cairngorms. I want to further explore the affected area, and talk with land owners, managers and conservation workers. Gone With the Wolves allows me to combine my education in environmental sciences with my art practice as a photographer; with this project, I want to invoke the landscape which could be. I'm keen to shine a light on land ownership struggles in Scotland — historic and contemporary — as well as our lack of political autonomy.

I can’t shake a foreboding feeling that the observer effect, where the act of observation impacts the observed, is in play here. For one of the most terrible fires to occur right in the area I chose to begin this project, years after first thinking about this work, is a terrible coincidence. In many ways, this catastrophe highlights many of the issues and themes key to the project. I’m glad I got out there before the summer, and captured some of what is no longer here.