Wild Land News no 59, Winter 2003/2004

Mountain access? Trust us! Article

David Jarman reports on an unwelcome intrusion

One not very fine day this summer, my new daughter-in-law from Lincolnshire demanded to be taken up her first Munro. Where better to start than the Tarmachans? And ignore the guidebooks, much the best way to tackle the Tarmachans is from the actual pass at the far end of Lochan na Lairige. This lets you do a proper horseshoe round the main tops, with no retracing of steps. For an appetiser, you get the pleasant ridge of Creag an Lochain, which has the merit of being almost pathless, so that you can gain the Munro without feeling you are doing Ben Lomond from Rowardennan. The ridge is grassy but quite well defined, and it has impressive views from the dentillated rim.

Or it did have. We parked at the lairig, set out into the driving rain, and soon found ourselves marching side by side with a bizarre double electrified stock fence, freshly installed by proud new owners, the National Trust for Scotland. We had no option but to keep this contraption close company, and I apologised to Louise for the visual intrusion, which hadn't been there on my last visit. I fondly imagined that, if its purpose was to keep deer off the broken crags and allow woodland to regenerate, the fence would soon deviate off across the slopes. But it didn't. When the going got tougher, it transmogrified (a word which scarcely does justice to the elaborate engineering involved) into a deer fence, still electrified, and proceeded to march along the crest of the ridge, straddling its several sharp dips with massive underplankings. Only when we bore away into the broad col to Meall nan Tarmachan did we escape an edifice so baleful as to have us wondering if Group 4 had won a contract for a new private prison camp here. The only other electrified fence over a mountain ridge I have ever come across was a long-abandoned knee-high experiment by the Agricultural College hillfarm at Tyndrum.

Now the summit of Creag an Lochain (842m) is, if not a Munro Top, certainly in the ticklist for those so inclined, and for the sane amongst us an undoubtedly attractive place of public resort. Access to it had been severed by the National Trust in its wisdom - but not for long, for the direct action brigade had already been out with their wirecutters, thus rather defeating the point of the whole exercise.

The point of the whole exercise being what exactly? Not just to restore native woodland with tall herb vegetation, which is of course incredibly scarce in the Southern Highlands, but to attempt to regenerate a natural treeline at the highest altitudes to which trees can grow in Scotland. Here this might mean birchwood thinning out to montane scrub, especially ground-hugging dwarf willow. A natural upper treeline can still be seen in Norway and the Alps, but nowhere in Scotland except possibly on the Scots pine-covered crags at the foot of Glen Feshie.

I asked NTS Property Manager David Mardon why the fence had to be electrified? - to let black grouse and ptarmigan fly through it without breaking their wings as they do in rylock mesh (a pioneering experiment, laudable if perhaps excessive). And why did it have to follow the crest? - because this is the ownership boundary, but in any case to run it downslope would risk burial by deep snowbanks which would let the beasts over it in winter. And (bottom line) how long would the fence have to be there? Decades, he candidly admitted, perhaps indefinitely - an issue for a future generation. By contrast, JMT expect to remove their exclosure fences on Knoydart sooner rather than later, despite concerns that this will severely check the regenerating woods.

So what would happen if and when the fencing is removed? A Big Free Picnic for the deer? Seriously, two of Scotland's leading woodland ecologists have expressed their doubts to me. They suggest that montane scrub would never have been extensive in terrain populated by agile herbivores, and would always have been restricted to inaccessible cliffs, or to creeping beneath the shelter of the heather. So prison-camp fencing might be futile, really, for species that never grow above browsing height.

Indeed some purists would argue that all fencing is misguided and unsustainable, even temporary exclosures, and that natural woodland can only be recreated by restoring natural ecosystem dynamics, with browsers and predators in balance. I can sympathise with David Mardon - life is too short for counsels of perfection, and if we want to save dwindling stocks of marginal montane plants and habitats, with constraints of tenant sheep farmers and neighbouring deer-stalking estates, perhaps we have to manage our land more artificially. I have walked through lush tall grasses in the highest fringes of the birchwoods and out onto the tundra in north Norway, and it would be remarkable to do this closer to home. But I cannot get away from the shock I felt and Louise shared at this appallingly intrusive fence - especially now I know it will be there for my lifetime.

Apparently there was extensive consultation with hillwalking interests (including SMC, McofS, SCAC) on the principle of this fence and its general location, and the consensus despite some anguish was that the conservation aims should prevail. SNH cofunded the £70K cost along with Millennium Forest and Europe.

The NTS has achieved many wonderful things on the wild land it owns - foremost being the delicate undoing of the excrescent bulldozed track up Beinn a' Bhuird, as SWLG members witnessed a couple of years ago. Here I fear the wrong signals are being sent out. With the new access legislation about to go live, electric-fencing a whole mountain ridge is a precedent that hostile landowners could easily seize upon to frustrate hillgoers. Restoring this rare habitat is undoubtedly worthwhile, but it needs to be addressed much more holistically, by managing browser levels down over a much wider area, and by insisting that any fencing is unobtrusive and short-life. If this site is of such international importance, then SNH or someone should have acquired enough extra land to make a proper sustainable go of it.

As for our walk, Louise kept up the family tradition of first Munros being cold, wet, windy and no view; I divested myself of mitts and overtrousers to keep her in the family; and we were rewarded with a fine wild land prospect of the northern corrie as the cloudbase lifted late on - including the extensive landslip that has shaped the arête of Meall Garbh. A prospect untrammelled by impedimenta such as fences.