“We need a couple of volunteers next week to walk into Garbh Choire”, said our conservation manager. My ears pricked up. It would doubtless be a tiring day, as we’d be retrieving some 1t bags, wooden stakes and rolls of wire netting. But I jumped at the chance because, for some reason, I’d never actually visited An Garbh Choire. To my considerable shame, I might add, given its reputation as a grand and wild place, the home of the Sphinx (Scotland’s most famous snow patch), and it simply being the gnarliest, farthest flung corner of my office. Sandwiched between Braeriach…

Everest summiter, Antarctic adventurer and guidebook author Mollie Hughes explains how she came to love Scotland’s watery landscapes. It was in the dark depths of lockdown that the idea to write a guidebook to Scotland’s wild blue spaces first entered my mind. When access to the outdoors, to adventure, was taken away and I was restrained to my small flat in Edinburgh, I began to crave the open spaces of Scotland. My book, Blue Scotland, was born out of this craving for open, wild, blue spaces, it is an inspirational guide to adventures into Scotland’s waters, our coastlines, lochs, rivers…

“All those trees that were blown over. Are you going to do anything with them?” It’s a question I occasionally get asked by visitors to the ranger hut. Storm Arwen did for quite a few big old trees along the Dee, and almost two years later they still lie where they fell. Folk are always really nice about it, enquiring politely and sincerely, but you know what they’re essentially asking is: “When are you going to tidy up?” I do understand how, from a conventional aesthetic point of view, dead trees might look a bit jarring in an otherwise ‘ordered’,…