Polly Pullar tells the powerful story of a challenging personal journey, which had it not been for the restorative powers of nature, might have ended very differently. Words by Polly Pullar, Images by SCOTLAND: The Big Picture. It’s January, the season when a fox’s hormones fuel the urge to breed. At night I lie in bed and hear their eerie yattering as they wander on their nocturnal forays, their soundtrack accompanied by tawny owls – they too are preparing for breeding. The wood is also thick with the aroma of red deer.  My son Freddy and I are following a…

Words, sounds and pictures from lockdown in a rural place. I am sitting by a river near to my house. I sit by that river and the longer I sit, the more I notice. Just the white rush of small rapids upstream to my right at first, but after some minutes, more layers creep in. A slosh of waves on boulders to my left. A bass drone of the main flow ahead, submerged. A small slapping at my feet, where long tendrilled mosses sway in the backwash. A dipper zips past, busy making springtime plans, a robin tries in vain to…

Finding stillness in nature is both immersive and rejuvenating, and can bring nature close to hand. Lucy Wallace is finding solace under lockdown in the sights and sounds of her garden. I’m going to start this piece somewhere very wild and currently out of bounds to me. I’m sitting by the footpath in Glen Feshie, and I can hear my group’s voices echoing in the trees ahead. They’ve stopped for lunch and spirits are high. I’m not sure if they know I’m there, but I can see gangling shapes between the pines, bouncing around in the way that teenage boys…

Many of us who love the hills and wild places are finding solace or keeping sane at the moment by reflecting on our most treasured outdoors memories. Here Ben Dolphin reflects on five walks that changed the course of his life. Every walk you take contributes to your knowledge and experience, whether you’re aware of it or not. Most of the time the learning is subtle but it’s there nonetheless, happening quietly in the background. But there are also walks that go way beyond mere enrichment of your walking experience and, although it might not be apparent at the time,…

In this time of physical constraint and uncertainty, when we cannot head off on adventures as we once did, exploring a chart can take us on a rich journey of story and imagination. Join Merryn Glover, then, in a little Map Gazing. ‘Here Be Dragons,’ does not appear on OS maps. Sadly. Just imagine! You are running your finger along the route for the Speyside Way planning where to camp and have just got past Grantown when you see a warning about mythical beasts! (Perhaps you can tell I write fiction, and sometimes for children.) But even though our maps…

These are difficult times for all of us. If you love the outdoors it can be difficult to be separated from the hills. From his home in Inverness, John D Burns (author of The Last Hillwalker and Sky Dance) looks for the lighter side of confinement and gives us something to smile about. I’m indoors, isolated and trying write my next book on my PC but the words won’t come. I’ve not been more than a few hundred yards from my flat door for two weeks, and the confinement is getting to me. I’m staring at the keyboard, trying to…

In the few days before Lockdown was announced, a friend and I went into the mountains northwest of Inverness for the last of winter. It was remote, miles from the nearest road, but we were mindful of the (then) most recent advice to minimise our risk. We’ve both been off the hill more than on recently, but the weather was tempting and for my friend, a keyworker, this was his last leave for what might be some time. On balance, we were cautious: We allowed an extra day and talked down our expectations for a fairly long and quite isolated,…