Rewilding the Caledonian Pinewood Forest of the Scottish Highlands

The fall of one of the last remaining wilderness landscapes in the UK

During the last ice age, over 14,000 years ago, Scotland was a frozen land, covered in thick glaciers. Once the ice had melted, approximately 7000 years ago, forest ecosystems were able to establish themselves on the exposed bare rock. In the Highlands, the Caledonian Forest, which was characterised by Scots pine trees, became a huge wilderness of about 15,000km2 (1,500,000 ha). Among the trees were great herds of grazing animals – including wild cattle and horses – which were preyed upon by lynx, wolf and other predators. This great forest was home to an intricate web of life and humans had little, if any, influence over it.

About 6000 years ago, not only did the climate in Scotland become wetter, which caused the disappearance of some areas of Caledonian Forest, owing to the development of peat bogs, but humans had also started to greatly impact the landscape by clearing forests to live and grow crops on. By the 1700s the Caledonian Forest remained in only the most remote places, but this too was mostly felled, often for shipbuilding and construction. Many of the forests of the Highlands had their fate sealed by the 1800s, with the beginning of the industrial revolution, when forests started to be viewed more concretely as an economic asset (e.g. for use in iron smelters and the creation of charcoal) rather than a natural resource that needed to be preserved. Also in the 1800s, sheep farming became a key economic activity, with landowners notoriously clearing people from large areas of the Highlands to make way for sheep. The constant grazing of the land, combined with ongoing forest clearing meant that very little of the first could regenerate. The intensification of such activities lead to the ecological capacity of the land being exceeded for many years.

By the 1950s only about 1 per cent of the original Caledonian Forest remained in about 80 small isolated patches from near Ullapool in the north, to Loch Lomond in the south and eastwards towards Aberdeen. During this time, much of the wildlife that depended on the forest was also lost, either through hunting or because there was just not enough forest left. The last wolf was shot in Scotland in 1743, meaning all of the large animals had gone, except for red deer, an animal that has symbolised the Highlands since the 19th century. Since the beginning of the 21st century, and the scrapping of sheep farming subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy, sheep have indeed declined, but deer numbers have been steadily growing as a result of not having any natural predators. These numbers have put significant pressure on forest ecosystems for the past 70 years. Today the Highlands have over four hundred thousand deer.

On a restoration mission - Introducing: Trees for Life

The Trees for Life (TFL) Charity is a conservation charity that, for the past 25 years, has been dedicated to rewilding the Scottish Highlands (See figure 1 below). By enabling the restoration of the globally unique Caledonian Forest, using innovative conservation methods, the charity envisions a revitalized forest that provides space for wildlife to flourish and communities to thrive. TFL’s view of rewilding, therefore, is very community centric, where people are seen as part of the landscape.

Key to the Trees for Life success is its focus on collaborative working with a combination of organisations, landowners and the wider community. For example, TFL work with strategic partners (e.g. Woodland Trust Scotland, Forestry and Land Scotland and Rewilding Europe, among others) to increase knowledge and understanding about forest restoration and to influence policy, approaches and attitudes about rewilding. TFL collaborate with conservation partners to deliver forest restoration and other conservation work on the ground through both pragmatic and innovative projects and activities. They also work with volunteering partners to involve a diverse range of people in forest restoration projects.

In terms of funding, the organisation is financed through a combination of traditional charity supporters, as well as grants from foundations and trusts for specific projects and CSR (corporate social responsibility) support from corporates.

The inspiration behind the project

Trees for Life was founded the early 1990s by Alan Watson Featherstone, a Scottish conservationist. Realising that the Highlands were significantly below their ecological potential – where the land, which was once covered with uninterrupted expanses of ancient forest interspersed with peat lands, had become homogenous and bare hillsides – Alan created a 250 year vision to restore the Caledonian forest. According to Alan McDonnell, the Trees for Life Conservation Manager:

Even from when Alan started, that was the vision. It wasn't about let's just have some Pinewood's here because they look nice and we like squirrels. It's been about a certain ecosystem and restoring that and everything around that in all its complexity.

The organisation originally sprung out of the Findhorn Foundation – a spiritual community focused on sustainable living - where the focus of the volunteering was not just on the ecological aspect of restoring the Caledonian Forest but also about cultivating a spiritual or openly emotional connection with nature and the land.

The early version of the charity was based on getting volunteers to come to the Glen Affric region and plant trees on land owned by the Forestry Commission, thanks to a pre-established relationship with the Commission. As Mr McDonnell captured:

Alan’s Idea was simple: Get volunteers, have a chat with the Forestry Commission, raise some money. And he just went and did it. We didn't even have a nursery. Back then he would have bought the trees

Restoring from all angles

Whilst Trees for Life began with planting trees using volunteers, it has since broadened its approach to help further achieve its vision. A major milestone was when in 2010 the organisation purchased its own land in Glen Moriston and started rewilding 4000ha of Dundreggan. As Mr McDonnell recounted:

Since our early days, the charity has moved through three quite distinct phases. What initially began as an informal model putting together groups of very committed volunteers going out to Glen Affric and staying in an old ‘bothy’ to plant trees, we have now created a formalised base for the organisation in this area where we have focused on establishing a tree nursery and purchasing land.

On the ground activities are still very much the core of TLF’s work including the execution of forest surveys to help understand how resilient the Caledonian Pinewood remnants are. Also, and more recently, the organisation has been involved with wildlife conservation, particularly the translocation of red squirrels to former parts of their range. The intention here has been to establish new red squirrel populations in the north and west of Scotland. The last few years, TFL have gone even further:

Our main premise was that we would just be a ‘doing’ organisation. Whilst we wanted to do more innovative stuff and to stretch the boundaries, the idea of taking public positions on policy and other issues didn't fit with our organisation’s culture at that time. However, in the last five years, we've largely reversed and pivoted on that. We just can't achieve the vision without influencing the outside world.

To do this, Trees for Life joined the Scottish Environment Link; a federation of NGOs that provides shared lobbying positions to government, the Scottish government in particular. Also, in 2019, TFL set up the ‘Scottish Rewilding Alliance’, being formally launched in 2020. The intention of the Alliance is to work with other NGOs, landowners and private businesses who have a similar philosophy and ethos to take rewilding forward in Scotland.

Overcoming obstacles

One of the biggest obstacles that TFL faces is the tension between people and nature, especially about the use of land. For example, the ongoing conflict around the control of deer in the Highlands between conservationists and large private landowners. Conservationists need to control the deer numbers to limit the impact of their grazing on the landscape. Private estate owners rely on a healthy number of deer for recreational hunting, as the deer, according to Mr McDonnell are needed to:

attract clients to come and pay to shoot and stay in a big house and have hospitality. And that's a source of income that a lot of estates have really focused on for maybe 200 years.

This creates very entrenched conflicts between conservation interests and economic interests regarding deer management, where one side is guided by intrinsic restoration/ecological values for the pre-historical landscape and the other side is coming from economic reasons as well as cultural historical tradition handed down for generations.

This is a good example of a cultural clash and at least on the surface, a very different set of objectives per group. And what we found, having started to reach out to these different groups, is that almost everybody is fed up with the conflict. There is an appetite for a different conversation from all sides of that and where we've got those approaches right the conversations have been really heartening.

Ecologists calculate that a red deer population of five per sq km in the wider landscape will allow natural regeneration; in many Highland regions it is currently 20. Owing to the controversy around deer management, Trees for Life has proceeded slowly with culling as well as seeking positive dialogue with neighbouring estates. They’ve also tried non-lethal methods such as bagpipe-playing volunteers acting as nocturnal deer scarers. Trees and deer can coexist and Dundreggan’s deer population is now at a level where some young birches, pines, rowans and junipers will grow more successfully.

Impacts so far

Thanks to the intervention of TFL and the replanting of over two million native trees, the health of the landscape has improved including improvements in soil, organic carbon and water retention. Most of the impacts have been seen in TFL focus areas of Glen Affric and Dundreggan.

You can see the progress there and you can sense changes like in the soil and the leaf fall that's coming through. Also the trees planted have now reproduced and that regeneration has occurred, albeit behind a deer fence to protect them.

Positive impacts on species diversity and numbers are also being seen, including diverse insect communities as well as in bird populations such as the Black Grouse, Redstart and Scottish crossbill. One of the impacts that TFL is particularly proud of is the work being done by their tree nursery team on breeding Aspen plants that can eventually flower and set seed by themselves. Once a more prominent species in the landscape, the Aspen plant has been severely overgrazed by deer and sheep. However, hopefully with this pioneering work of TFL, the Aspen plants can help rewild and regenerate the Caledonian forest landscape.

Safeguarding the future of the Caledonian Forest: The take home

Scaling up is key for the future of this landscape. But how can this be done successfully? According to Mr McDonnell:

You can't do that just by having volunteers. You can't do that tree by a tree. We need to face the outside world. We need to influence other landowners to show them how rewilding can work for them and to look to speak across land use conflicts. We try and open the communication channels with the other side and to say, actually, we think we could both be better off by working together on this.

Success, for Trees for Life, is being able to encourage large landowners to work with NGOs to actively re wildlife large parts of the highlands.

It's all about reaching out across that divide and forming alliances with people who you might naturally fall into being your enemies. So make friends with your enemies and find a genuine win-win, sustainable way forward from that.

Looking to the future: Trees for Life will be opening a rewilding centre in Dundreggen in 2022; a place where people can come and find out more about what rewilding is and to have some experience of it. It will be one of the first rewilding centres in the world.

Interviewee information

Alan McDonnell is Trees for Life's Conservation Manager, overseeing the charity's rewilding project work, including red squirrel translocation to parts of the species' former range in the Scottish Highlands, assessing the health and resilience of the remaining ancient Caledonian Pinewood remnants and the volunteering programme which involves hundreds of people per year contribute to Trees for Life's work.