I have the 18th September marked off in my diary. A reminder to go and vote, not that I'll need any reminder. I want to mark off the 19th as well, to take a day off and, hopefully, enjoy the biggest party Scotland has seen for 300 years. But then it might be the most depressing day ever, depending on your view. It could be a day for escaping to the hills. I’m all too aware that for many hill-goers politics and the hills don’t mix. I respect that view. For most of us the hills represent a release from…

WE don't have many good environmental columnists in Scotland but I would suggest Rob Edwards of The Sunday Herald is probably the best. Rob recently picked up a story about a letter that had been sent to The Scottish Farmer newspaper, a letter that encouraged an official of the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association to make an outrageous statement on Facebook, a statement that could be interpreted as expressing an attitude amongst gamekeepers that many of us hoped had died out years ago. I’ve always enjoyed a reasonable rapport with the gamekeeping fraternity in Scotland. Certainly there have been various individuals who…

2014 could be an important year for Scotland. The Commonwealth Games, the Year of Homecoming, the Independence Referendum and a celebration of an event that will probably miss most people's radar – the centenary of the death of John Muir. I guess most folk who read this will know of John Muir but it still surprises me that so many people here in Scotland have never heard of him. Perhaps that’s not too surprising as he left these shores at a young age and made his name across the Atlantic where he inspired a nation, a young nation that was…

FROM my elevated eyrie by the summit of Morven in Aberdeenshire the world around me lay in two distinct halves – one in glorious light and the other in abject blackness. In front of me lay a gently rolling landscape, a great patchwork quilt of green and golden fields, dotted with patches of woodland, the earth tones intensified by the bright autumn sunshine. It looked for all the world like a Scottish version of Middle Earth – even the tiny village below me, Logie Coldstone, had a Tolkienesque ring to it. To further the analogy, the land behind me, a…

In this article first published in the Autumn edition of the John Muir Trust members’ Journal, the Trust’s communications editor Alan McCombes outlines how the giant wind farm proposed at Stronelairg in the Monadhliath Mountains poses a very real threat to an outstanding area of wild land – and why he feels it is worth fighting against. “Between Loch Ness and the Cairngorms lies a vast, mysterious landscape which has been described as Scotland’s terra incognita. Monadhliath Mountains range across more than 700 square miles – an area larger than the Peak District and not much smaller than the Lake…