OUTDOOR BOOK
CHRIS TOWNSEND Along the Divide
A rainbow brightens the sky after the storm on Ben Lui
Chris Townsend’s book
Along the Divide, is the
story of the author’s
700-mile walk along
Scotland’s Watershed,
the line of high ground
where fallen rain runs
either west to the Atlantic
or east to the North Sea.
Here, in an extract from
the book, Chris describes
the environmental issues
that inspired the walk.
S
ince moving to Scotland I’d become increasingly
concerned about the conservation of nature
and wild land and become involved with the
conservation movement in Scotland, initially for
the Mountaineering Council of Scotland (now
Mountaineering Scotland) (and, since the walk,
the John Muir Trust). Just how wild and unspoilt
would Scotland feel if I walked it from one end to the
other on the Watershed? What was the potential for
Peter Wright’s “ribbon of wildness” to really mean
something? Years of looking at wild places, here and
abroad, and reading natural history and conservation
books meant I knew that nature in Scotland was in
a poor condition in too many places. Overgrazing,
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forestry plantations, industrial developments and
more had led to a degraded landscape with poor
biodiversity. Once seen and understood this was hard to
ignore. American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote
in his seminal book A Sand County Almanac, “One of
the penalties of an ecological education is that one
lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage
inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.” Walking
down a treeless glen with little wildlife I know exactly
what he meant. Maybe I would find a Watershed walk
made me sad at what has been lost. At the same time I
knew of all the organisations working on protection and
restoration, giving hope that there is a positive future
for nature and wildness. Maybe I would see enough to
feel optimistic.
I was aware too of the wonderfully named but really
rather sad idea of “shifting baseline syndrome” by
which each generation assumes that the current state
of nature is the norm. This can lead to people protecting
damaged land rather than trying to restore it or even
trying to recreate a damaged landscape. Reading
accounts of what forests and wildlife were like in earlier
centuries, and of the effects of the Clearances and the
Coming of the Sheep and then the deer stalking and
grouse shooting estates, made me realise that very little
of even the best of what I would see on the Watershed
would be near what it could be. It was from such reading
that I knew how empty and bare too many glens are of
people and wildlife, knowledge reinforced by walking
overseas in places where nature was much healthier.