REGENERATION: The rescue of a Wild Land

Andrew Painting

Berlinn, Edinburgh, 2021, 305 Pages

Hardback: £20 | ISBN 9781780277141

Review by Peter Taylor

Sheep are the keystone species in the Lake District (see book review of Wild Fell, by Lee Schofield) and the prosperity of nature depends upon reducing their numbers in a farmed landscape whilst maintaining the livelihoods of farmers. Red deer are the equivalent focal point in Scotland, where the wild landscape has been primarily devoted to sporting interests and large estates (23% of the land area of Scotland – 4.5 million hectares) is moorland devoted to shooting.

This book is a parallel story to that of Wild Fell, of persistent efforts to engender change – to reduce deer numbers in the face of hostile opposition, often with the same degree of entrenched views among estate owners wedded to so-called traditional game management. Here, Andrew Painting describes the experience of Mar Lodge, a former hunting estate, acquired by the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) in 1995, where he has been chief ecologist since 2016.

I have long admired the ethos of the National Trust. It seeks to balance tradition and cultural landscape with nature conservation. Since the English centennial year of 1995, the Trust has also shown a sustained interest and active involvement in making its landscapes ‘wilder’, including in Snowdonia, in Ennerdale (Cumbria) and at Mar Lodge. The Scottish environment has been perhaps its toughest assignment – on a par with the work of the RSPB on the fells of Haweswater.

In this case, the NTS had a hard balancing act required by the terms of a large private donation to the £5.5m purchase. It was obliged to restore natural environments but also maintain the traditions of a hunting estate. Restoration of the Caledonian pine in the presence of over-grazing deer requires extensive culling – anathema to traditional game management.

Here, Andrew Painting takes us from the remnant Caledonian pine of the glens to the highest Arctic alpine treeless tops of the Cairngorms, in one of the richest recovery projects for natural landscapes in Britain. He explains in lucid detail the conflict between old forms of game management (and the clientele thereby served) regarding deer, grouse and salmon, with their issues of predator control, population regulation, public access and public image, together with the all-consuming issues of land-ownership, species decline, and public accountability.

The 30,000 hectares of Mar Lodge is huge by English standards for land managed with an eye to nature conservation. At the time the NTS took over the estate, remnant Caledonian pine stretched to 835ha and for much of the early years, hardly increased. Painting describes how in 1998, a 3.7ha deer fenced study-exclosure held just 4 seedlings that had risen above the vegetation height of the deer-grazed heather; in 2008 that figure had risen to 44, but by 2018, after significant changes to deer management, that number had risen to 892 and the vegetation of heather and bilberry was 55% taller. In 2020, the total acreage of regenerating pine woodland had doubled.

Against some vituperous local opposition, the estate had increased the cull, bringing in more hunters and instigating licensed night shooting. On the moors, the controversial practice of ‘muirburn’ (controlled burns of heather between October and mid April) ceased and drains were blocked bringing back nesting waders, such a dunlin and curlew. There are chapters on dotterel and hen harrier management, salmon, sow thistle, and downy willow. Gradually, a balanced sense of land management has been communicated to neighbours and supported by the Scottish government. Most encouraging is Painting’s commentary on Cairngorms Connect, a broad coalition of land-owners now linking up with the new approach at Mar Lodge, to encompass 900 square kilometres in total. The future is not assured – there are still 300,000 red deer in Scotland, more than in France, Germany and Italy combined, but it could be described as a lot brighter than it was.

If you regard it as an important factor or not, climate change gets a mention – less as a threat, more as an opportunity. Rejuvenated sphagnum bog is a potent sequester of atmospheric carbon and Mar Lodge’s 30,000 ha hills could sequester 40,000 tonnes/annum of carbon dioxide in its restored forests and 15,000 in the bogs. Painting doesn’t calculate further, but currently, carbon trades at about 60 Euros per tonne in the European Union Allowance, and $3 per tonne for aviation industry offsets. The potential for landscape-scale offsetting has yet to be tapped – and recent experience in Wales where land is purchased by brokers specifically for offsetting (also engendering much opposition from the farming community) whilst not a guide for Scotland, at least indicates the growing interest. 45,000 tonnes/year could bring between $135,000 (aviation offsets) to Euro 2.7m per year! Of course, the sequestering of carbon is happening anyway at Mar Lodge, but some accounting of the additional input via management changes could theoretically attract ‘credits’. To put this in perspective, the UK emits about 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, with estimates that intact peat bogs absorb about 5% of that figure, whereas degraded peat is a net emitter.

I have not done justice to the excellent passages on the area’s natural history, which add to the book’s strong educational value.

Throughout the book the catch phrase that Painting uses is: Regeneration/Reconnection/Redemption. This book is a timely beacon of hope.