From the hilltops to the Solway,
a portrait of a glen
Ian Carter
Whittles Publishing, 2025, 206 pages
Paperback £17.99 | ISBN 978-184995-597-4
Review by Barry Larking
My first real experience of any sort of wildness as this island knows, was in the mid 70s when I spent a weekend near Loch Doon, Ayrshire, in the midst of the Galloway Hills. By that date much of the landscape had been transformed (to put it at its kindest) by state forestry. When I tried to speak about this to Derek Ratcliffe (1929-2005), aware that Galloway had been his original stamping ground decades before me, he said little; but I could feel his emotion down the telephone line. When Ratcliffe first ventured into this wonderful region as a young man, taking his first steps in those studies upon which his stellar reputation rests, these hills were one vast upland sheep walk, refuges for raven, peregrine and a few golden eagles, persecuted elsewhere. Nothing like what it became in little more than a generation.
Ian and Hazel Carter re-located to Galloway this decade, moving into a house that once belonged to Bryan Nelson (1932-2015) and his wife June. Nelson was a distinguished ornithologist, an acknowledged expert on northern gannets, who also somehow found time to edit a useful guide, Bird Walks in Dumfries & Galloway etc. (1989). However, for his reference work on the huge region stretching out before him now, Carter immediately cites Ratcliffe’s magisterial Galloway and the Borders, published posthumously in 2007. It is an inspiration, but Carter needed only a small canvas on which to place his response to this newer natural world he found before him, hence his subtitle; his new life in a glen that is his muse. The domestic setting, leads outwards towards those hills and vast plantations but does not limit his perspective on our present understanding, at the human level, of what nature is and can mean much closer and intimate to us.
Home plays a significant part in Ian Carter’s storytelling – for this no reference book, nor exactly, an autobiography. He and Hazel explore and discover; much of the local interest comes to them; their garden is one of the best locations in the glen for a menagerie of mammals and lots of birds that queue up to be fed. This leads to many interactions. A toad adopts the garage as a fait accompli to being trapped; bats snuggle up noisily inside the bedroom cavity wall. The ‘professional’ scientist lets go of non empathetic observation. This stuff gladdens the heart, like tea and toast in a farm kitchen.
Carter had a successful period in working as part of the effort to re-introduce the Red Kite to the UK (that led to his writing The Red Kite’s Year [2019] reviewed in these pages) and much a less happy time working to achieve something like similar success with the benighted Hen Harrier, that lead to another book (The Hen Harrier’s Year [2022]) and frustration with official policy; perhaps any policy… Having spent his professional life in conservation delivery, time to let go of the bureaucratic windlass and just muse and enthuse.
“Even the idea of setting aside a particular piece of land to do its own thing is an intervention of a kind …But the moorland here between the plantations offers something subtle but delightfully different. … It has fallen through a gap between human endeavours: not farmed, not planted, not nature reserve …”
It is as if someone just torched a pile of ‘management plans’, this joyous letting go.
Interventions of humankind are an unavoidable subject of any nature writing that isn’t escapism. Change has been too rapid, fluctuating or confounding; sometimes the ‘peace and quiet’ of nature is but a brief pause between often bitter arguments. We had a word for this quietness once – Idyll. Much of what keeps many of us going forward, I suggest, is an attempt to re-create that sense when we are within nature. Wild Galloway (a hat tip to George Borrow?) isn’t focussed on ‘nature politics’; issues do arise (pointless wind turbines defiling nature’s space, Sitka Spruce just out of place almost anywhere) but like some of the best of this kind of writing, Wild Galloway beckons us out of that armchair. Smile, make the effort, all is not lost.