Stone Country – Landscapes and Lifescapes

Ben Lawers: a montane habitat Ben Lawers is the parent peak of the Breadalbane mountain range, which stretches like a breaking wave in an east-west tumble between Loch Tay and Glen Lyon. Indeed, geologists often refer to the metamorphosed schistose mass as a vast 'recumbent fold' from the Caledonian Orogeny, a Highland mountain-building era of unimaginable slow-motion collision and uplift, between 490 and 390 million years ago. The rolling plateau landscape is now a long-eroded echo of this era when continents collided on an earth oblivious to conscious observation. Walking the rubbed-down ridges, it is easy to imagine you are walking the crumpled edge of a fold on the planet's discarded origami. The summit peak of Ben Lawers is a southern highland giant and the 11th highest peak in Britain. It has many subsidiary peaks on its long snaking ridge, from the south to north-east: Beinn Ghlas (1,103 m); Ben Lawers (1,214 m or 3,983 feet); Creag an Fhithich (1,047 ...

BROAD LAW The rolling hills east of the modern motorway of the M74 hold much more character and history than they appear from the west, where they are now flanked by forestries of spruce and wind-farms. In medieval times this was a Scottish royal hunting ground – the ‘Ettrick Forest’.  Further east towards the Tweed valley, there are echoes of a deeper Scottish history in the border towns of Hawick, Selkirk, Galashiels, Peebles and Kelso, all on the banks of the historic River Tweed and famous for their medieval forts and abbeys.  Looking west from Broad Law to the monoculture forestry and wind-farms of 21st C Scotland This range of hills, along with the northern flanks of the Cheviot hills, marks the geographical transition to the once-contested border with Northumberland, with its high pass over Carter Bar on the A68. The more useful sense of boundaries are suggested not by the roads but by the watersheds: to the north the waters drain into the River Cly...

As counterpoint to a new series of books coming from Stone Country Press, I thought I'd introduce a few more elements of landscape theory and philosophy on this blog. The new series - Lifescapes - will reflect the mix of outdoor activity and philosophy as a means of expressing contemporary thoughts on various ways of 'being' in the outdoors.  After the mechanisation of farming, the technological monoculture of living off the land has left very few of us living close to the natural world. We mostly hunker in urban centres briefly catching the play of light and nature through city windows. I write this at a tenement window, where occasionally a sparrowhawk throws panic amongst the local finches and pigeons, but it's all very fleeting. Still, the urge to be part of a bigger natural world, even within the city, exists in many pursuits and interests.  From my own perspective, this found active representation (or non-representation, as it might now be perceived...

Loch Lomond, Wednesday 28th December 2016 Mist, water and silvery light: a very Gaelic palette in midwinter between the storms, which these days all have names - we've been through Barbara's tantrums and Conor's backlash, but today was one of those steamed-up car sort of days. Warmish air from the southwest is rolling about Loch Lomond and gathering a chill as it picks up speed towards the snow-patched summit, so I take the clockwise 'wind with my back' option, steeply up the Ptarmigan ridge from Rowardennan, hearing a chuckle in the mist which is either a red grouse or the eponymous bird. Each landmark on the map is a clue to the Gaelic landscape - Tom Fhithich I think may be the raven's beak-nosed boulder or crag half up towards the knoll of Ptarmigan, which just breaks the mist, and assumes the role of target summit for the meantime as the main peak is in cloud. The small hidden tarns are full of slushy grey ice and the 'yellow bealach' is a...

The south peak ('Jean') on The Cobbler, 12th December 2015 Here's an interesting round-song of place-names for Arrochar, in cartullaries and statistical and printed records since 1395: Arrochar/Arochar/Arrochquhair/Arrochquhare/Arroquhar/Arachar/An Tairbeart Iar/An t-Àra ... I was walking uphill wondering what sticks, what's in a name, why do they change, does the landscape care, who are the caretakers of a place-name? We might just be flecks of mica flashing briefly on a sun-struck pebble in the streams, but names are important to us in our brief mappings of our landscapes. Our human territories are marked by names, sign-postings, marker boulders, paths and cairns, amongst other structures, both textual and physical. 'The Cobbler' mountain - Arrochar's finest and most distinctive peak - is a curious example of the fluidity of naming the landscape; of confusion, habit, fashion, politics, class, and misinformation. The confusion starts even w...

Scottish Natural Heritage has published its 2014 map of Wild Land Areas of Scotland - designated areas of coast, upland and undeveloped land - or 'wilderness' - which should be considered inviolate. Some of the areas are notably under protection via bodies such as National Parks, the John Muir Trust, or the National Trust and other private bodies, but the worrying note is that since the draft map was published in 2013, 0.8% of wild land has been developed (20.3% down to 19.5%). If it continued at that rate we'd have no wild land left by 2039 . . . The conclusions of the report and mapping were as follows: The concepts of wildness and safeguarding of wild land enjoy strong support from the public and many stakeholders in Scotland. Areas of wild land are widely acknowledged as important assets, providing a number of significant ecosystem services that support a range of social and economic benefits and outcomes.  Despite the inherent subjectivity of the concept, t...