perceptions of wild land in scotland

Fri, Mar 22, 2013

With the date announced for the indpendence referendum and rising concern that if the Scottish government does break away from the UK and armed with vastly increased coffers of oil revenue, it will embark on a landscape destructive industrialisation of the highlands, I thought I'd take a look at the Public Perception Survey of Wildness in Scotland (2012).

The survey is made up of three 'market segments'. The first is a representative selection of the Scottish population (Main), the second contains residents of the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs national park (and perhaps The Cairngorms National Park, not clear) (Residents) and the third is composed of members of outdoors organisations such as The John Muir Trust etc. (Orgs)

To put some perspective on the results, Orgs visited the outdoors about twice as much as Mains with Residents falling in between the extremes of access. Also, Mains were more likely to go for a low level walk or to go sightseeing and although what the Orgs do is not recorded in the Executive Summary, I would guess they do what readers of this blog do, i.e. backpack, hillwalk, climb, cycle, run etc. So the Orgs will see the landscape differently from the Mains who mainly stick to the glens and roads.

What was really interesting was how each group perceived 'wildness' in a landscape. The majority of respondants thought land was wild if it lacked people and contained wildlife. A minority (from the Orgs) cited lack of built structure. Residents had a laissez faire attitude to structures, not enhancing but not detracting from wildness. Is this to do with daily exposure to built structure in a landscape Orgs think should be wild? Do Residents 'tune out' the built environment from a wild landscape they see every day?

It's an interesting question whether Residents see structures as part of a wild landscape. Perhaps the answer is in the least popular reason that a landscape is perceived as wild. The weather. I thought this was a strange category but thinking about it, it's rather subtle. Speaking as an Org and a Resident, I would suspect that most Orgs don't see built structures in the same weather conditions as Residents. I think I'm fairly representitive of Orgs, especially in earlier days and when the weather is wild it's fun to spend the day battling into a storm on the hill, retreat in the face of appalling weather and recount the day's elemental battle over a pint in the pub. But what if you're out working in that weather? I think we'd all agree that the power lines crossing the narrows near Kylerhea are a built structure. Giant pylons stand on the hillside on either side of the water, stretching sagging metal cables from one side to the other. Pretty monstrous stuff when you're trying to define wild land but stand on the shore on a really wild day, when most folk are nowhere near the hills and you get a sense of how fragile those things are. When you hear the cables sing and realise if the wind gets any stronger a whole island could lose its power supply. It's days like those that assert a landscape's wildness. Inherent wildness that isn't obvious at first glance but once you've experienced it, lasts as a mental imprint. From then on, that land is wild, to you. It might not be wild to the tourists crossing on the Kylerhea ferry but wildness shouldn't just be a passive concept. It should be active too. Wild land can do things. It can break built structures.

This theory of tuning out the clutter takes another boost from the result that Mains and Orgs consider towns and villages as detracting from wildness, whereas Residents don't. Consider that for a moment. The TGOC can create temporary 'tent towns', albeit not as large as a village but pretty big considering there was nothing there before that particular year's event. Does this large gathering of humanity make the land less wild? Of course it doesn't but how large does it have to get before those who create it consider it does? Because according to the survey they will, if it gets big enough. On the other hand, Residents have an accumulated experience of the landscape that has shown them, over the years, that it's a wild landscape. The presence of a village here or a town there doesn't, for them, detract from the wildness of the landscape. In some ways it emphasises it. When you're on the South Glen Shiel ridge looking north and you see the narrow ribbon of road and the isolated buildings of the Clunie Inn surrounded by wind blasted trees, do they detract from wildness or do they emphasise it?

In some respects, they emphasise it as the survey reveals that the older a built structure becomes, the less its impact on wildness. Bothies, cairns (leaving aside the Gadarene Club), walls etc. don't seem to have the same effect as villages. Even deserted villages are treated differently in our minds than living breathing ones in terms of wildness.

The Executive Summary more or less ends with the interesting conclusion that the majority of the survey respondants agree that wild land is necessary (although the survey doesn't say why) and that it needs protected and also that further action is necessary to enforce that protection. The survey talks about taxation to do so, or charging visitors and presumably using the money to keep that particular area 'wild'. But although most people agree wild land needs protection, only the Orgs are convinced it's under threat. The Mains and Residents are, more or less if taken together, 50/50 about it while the Mains think it's enough to preserve wild land by banning structural development, loading it up with wildlife and then slapping a wild land designation on it. Perhaps that's why they don't consider it under too much threat as they have the answer. Wrap it in protective clingfilm while the Orgs and Residents see deeper into the problems of preserving wild land in a climate of industrialisation where the Scottish government considers every parcel of ground to have a Malthusian 'worth' that must be exploited. The land must work for its worth. Wildness has no use for big business.

So all in all the survey throws up some interesting opinions. It's also short on detail such as which wildlife makes a landscape wild? Which built strucutures are the worst? but it does say this and recommends further work on a more granular treatment of the threat to wild land in Scotland.