REWIND, REWILD

You may think of the Scotland as a place of large open landscapes, with hillsides freckled with purple heather and occasionally topped with dense banks of trees, but really, this vision is a creation, rather than what nature intended.

Scotland was once covered in a huge blanket of Caledonian forest that was home to birch, hazel, pine and oak trees, and though native trees can still be found in pockets of the country, they are far from what they were – according to NatureScot, Scotland’s Nature Agency, just 4 per cent of Scotland’s total land area is covered with native woodland.

The changing landscape is due to many factors: the farming practices of early agricultural settlers, the introduction of non-native plantations in the early 19th century, large-scale sheep farming, the popularity of gaming