From‘ Landscape Roamer’
The judges said
Highly Commended
Wyl Menmuir best outdoor book
From‘ Landscape Roamer’
When I left the house in which I was staying at Moniack Mhor, just after six in the morning, I could see clear across to the Cairngorms. Huge clouds scudded across the mountains, whose colours shifted constantly beneath them. I was alone in the house and the landscape over which I looked showed no sign of people at all. The top road, when I reached it, was quiet too, occupied only by hares and their leverets, which brought my focus away from the expanse of the far-distant Monadhliath Hills to what was going on right in front of me. The hares, alert to my presence, disappeared through the juniper scrub into the conifer plantation that ran alongside the road, where they have their forms, though their young continued to dance on the asphalt. As I came closer, to walk by, they too scattered, only to regroup on the road behind me.
In Scottish Gaelic, the old term for hares was geàrr-fhiadh, a literal translation of which might be‘ short deer’, though the name is most often shortened to geàrr. The Gaelic word fiadh, though, refers to both the animal, deer and to the wild more generally, so perhaps the hares might be better translated as‘ short, wild ones’. In the folklore of the highlands, and across much of Celtic Britain and Ireland, both hares and deer were said to shapeshift into human form and at this time in the morning, with no one else around, in a landscape that is often, and rightly, described in hyperbolic terms, I could believe they might, that out of our sight they would be capable of becoming all manner of things.
Quarter of a mile down the valley, I saw deer proper through the gaps in a fence that separated the road from the pines, though it was only after I had been looking through the trees for some time that I became aware I was being watched. Even then, it took a while to discern the deer from the mottled grey trunks. When they emerged into my vision it was like seeing the pattern in a magic eye puzzle rise out of the page. I saw their eyes first, wide and alert, their heads and then their bodies which, until then, had been indistinguishable from the forest around
The judges said
“ The author examines in detail both obvious and less obvious aspects of our relationships with trees – delving far deeper than you might have imagined. With gentle charm he has captured the sounds and smells of wood in a range of imaginative scenarios. Pulling an eclectic series of personal encounters together with a single thematic thread, he weaves a tangible and accessible narrative. He has combined an eye for detail with a capacity to make broader generalisations which avoid becoming trite.” It’ s a marvellous book and worthy winner.
them. Once I had made out a single deer, I found I could now see at least five more in my peripheral vision, all standing stock still. I had assumed, until the day before, that the high fences were there to keep the deer out of the woodland, but a walker I had passed explained to me they were there to keep the deer in. This woodland was part of a deer farm, which seemed somehow perverse in a country where deer numbers have rocketed and, in many woodlands, they are culled regularly to avoid them causing catastrophic damage.
The forests of Scotland’ s highlands are to be listened to as much as looked at. Down by the loch, a pair of whooper swans seemed to have missed the memo that the time to move on had passed, though it had been a strange year for weather. Two cuckoos called to one another across the teardrop shaped water of Loch Laide in uncanny, un-echoing voices, louder by far than the willow warblers and skylarks, the snipe and siskins, goldcrests and treecreepers, pipits and stonechats, redpolls and crows I had noted on my slow walk down the valley, an abundance of birds that made my heart soar.
Just inside a block of conifers, a curlew churred invisibly. I had seen her out of the corner of my eye earlier, flying just below the cloud line, her curved beak dipping just beneath the grey. Looking for her again, I saw instead a silent hen harrier, which emerged briefly from the tree line below the small peak Carn na Leitire before ducking back in.
I felt watched by two red kites that were there each time I looked up, circling high above in huge overlapping ellipses, throughout the sixmile walk to Reelig Glen. I lost them when I left the road and found myself among the giant conifers of the place known locally as the Faery Glen on account of its seclusion and the sense of otherworldliness one gets walking among the moss-covered boulders and the ruined remains of nineteenthcentury buildings and bridges in the valley. I climbed down the gorge through redwoods whose trunks shot straight up to dizzying heights, and where I felt over and again the sense of awe I often get when walking among living things that dwarf me. Walking at the feet of huge trees is an experience not unlike encountering whales close-up, unexpected and breathtaking.
Highly Commended
The Borders – the Lands we Share, Andrew Bibby
A personal journey through an overlooked corner of our uplands, the author is both open-eyed and well informed. A shining example of what the meditative process of‘ just’ putting on foot in front of another can produce. A thoroughly good read.
Winter 2025 OUTDOOR FOCUS 21