Bog Myrtle & Peat

There could be a way around the current National Park controversy. Ayrshire-based social media superstar Matt Cross recently put forward an alternative location for a National Park which might oil the wheels of an increasingly uglified debate. Matt’s idea is to base a new Park entirely on the core of Galloway’s Forest Park – the extraordinary and dramatic wrinkle of hills which lies on the border between Galloway and Ayrshire. Matt has put forward a number of arguments to support the idea, essentially on the grounds that nobody lives in this place. There can be little local resistance to a National Park which is already empty, and the focus of any new Park authority could be based on attempts to preserve and nurture a massive area of “wild land” in the heart of the Southern Uplands. 

Matt’s right – the core of the Galloway Hills is spectacular and eerily under-explored. That’s part of its wonder; you can walk for twenty or thirty miles across these hills in a single day and see nobody at all. This is largely because there are almost no hiking trails out there – you just pick your start-point and go. For that reason, it’s almost unique in a nation of footpaths and simplifications, and it follows that this kind of land access is not for the faint hearted. The experience of walking along the Dungeon Hills to Mullwarchar is primordially terrifying. I’ve been exploring these hills on my own for twenty five years; I know them inside out, but I never lose a slightly terrifying burr of excitement that I’m on the very edge of what it’s safe to do on your own. The only times I’ve felt similar anxiety is in Torridon, the Monadhliaths and in the devilish backrooms of Glen Nevis.

But it’s also clear that this “brink of wilderness” feeling is undermined by an obvious sense of environmental decline in Galloway. Black grouse were common here in the late 1990s – red grouse seemed to lurk behind every tussock of grass back then, and the hilltops were scattered with wonderful white mountain hares. In spring, the bogs would squeak into life with the sound of golden plover which trilled for the first light of morning; dotterel passed through and redshank trailed their gentle, windswept songs for hours at a time, flying from a supreme height and lolling through their phrases like a kind of meditation. In autumn, the hills would resound to the racket of stags roaring and the nibble of ancient billygoats in the vertical, drooling clints. You could have been anywhere from Kerry to Uist, and this Galloway heartland was an avalanche of pride for me as a lowlander.

But things change. Almost every upland species has tumbled into bitter, lonely declines during the past two decades. Despite a number of initiatives devoted to their restoration, it’s very unusual to find black grouse anywhere in Galloway now. The redshank have gone, and golden plover nests are like hens’ teeth. There are no more redshank on the silver flowe, and mountain hares are a positive scarcity on the high tops towards Kirriereoch. A few deer and goats have survived, but these are shot hard and have turned as wild as hail. It’s not the place I knew as a child, and while peregrines, merlins and golden eagles have held their own in these hills, they can hardly be considered an attraction here. The birds are treated as the darkest and most obscure secret; you’ll have no trouble finding them, but you’re powerfully discouraged from talking about what you’ve seen in the hills.

There are many reasons why so much richness has been lost from this part of Galloway, but it’s clear that the current owners have decided to take a “hands-off” approach to managing this wild and extraordinary mound of hill-country. Importantly, we have none of the usual suspects to to blame for this change; no reckless English rewilder or Danish investment fund to despise for the destruction of wildlife and hill-culture in Galloway. All this land belongs to the people of Scotland. It’s managed on our behalf by civil servants and forest agencies.

When the Galloway Forest Park was bought for us in 1947, it was under commitments to be managed for a variety of objectives. Timber production was at the heart of the project, but there were also state-funded rangers and conservationists at work in the hills – alongside the new trees, there was extensive work into monitoring and studying deer, managing grouse numbers and protecting local biodiversity. But the breadth of these commitments gradually fell away, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s when forest management became more centralised in Scotland. The Forestry Commission never formally withdrew from its commitment to optimise the Forest Park for multiple outcomes. It just focussed on timber production to the gradual and complete exclusion of everything else. Wildlife has suffered enormously, and many the old original crofts and properties have gradually been squeezed out of existence to a point at which these hills have begun to sound very quiet. There’s an important distinction between a landscape which feels refreshingly wild and restorative… and land which has simply fallen dead.

In fact, even FLS’s current stance on public access has begun to feel a little prickly. Car parking fees are becoming normal on FLS sites across Galloway (we pay the wages of car-parking attendants who check that we’ve paid to park on land that we own), and disproportionately vast areas of the Park are closed to public access whenever timber extraction is scheduled. After a period of disruption following COVID, FLS gave up on the idea of trying to educate the public about responsible land use. They simply locked vehicle access to a vast area in the North of the Park. Four years after this public land was sealed off, the state-owned “Carrick Forest Drive” is famous as one of the only places in southwest Scotland where you’re not allowed to drive.

I know several people in Galloway who stay out of the park because they don’t know what they’re allowed to do there or when they’re allowed to go. The place is crowded with padlocks and DO NOT ENTER signs, and if I had not programmed myself to ignore these endless bossy proclamations, I would never have seen half of what’s there. So when I read complaints about the exclusive management of highland sporting estates, my heart goes out to people who don’t feel free in their own homescapes… but I can’t help but echo the same sentiments here. The difference is that the Galloway Hills actually belong to us, and yet we’re made to feel like trespassers there.

Matt Cross is right that these hills represent a decent choice for designation – but if National Parks are all about protecting and enhancing treasured landscapes, we need to be clear about what’s threatening them. In this case, we’d be asking the Scottish Government to protect its own property from its own policy. The obvious question should be “why isn’t this massive area of state-owned land already being treated as a flagship project for integrated land use?” 

The same arguments chime with current proposals for a wider National Park in Galloway – we’re struggling here because we are consistently ignored and underfunded. It would be quite unlike Galloway to insist on being put ahead of other landscapes with a gold-plated certificate of designated excellence. We’re famously modest and dour, and I never get a sense that we’re clamouring for celebrity here. We’re simply asking for things we should have been getting all along – and that’s the most puzzling aspect of the entire conversation, because Galloway’s woes are no great secret. The Government has been watching us floundering in decay for decades. Now they want a National Park, they can’t stop telling us how important we are – but we wouldn’t need a cure if we hadn’t been allowed to get sick.