Peace, quiet and wind-swept solitude in Scotland's highlands

By Patrizia Schlosser Jul 5, 2011, 3:07 GMT

Kincraig, Scotland - As if frozen, it sits among the bushes and stares with its green-yellow eyes from between the leaves. The wildcat is a shy loner, home only in those places where it largely is left in peace.

In the rugged pine forests of the Scottish Highlands region, the cat creeps around among the underbrush. A visitor needs a lot of luck to try to spot one out in the wild.

'You are more likely to meet up with a tiger in Siberia,' says Douglas Richardson. 'There are a lot more of them.'

The 53-year-old game warden's workplace is in the southern part of the Highlands, in the region of the Cairngorm Mountains, a landscape of lush green valleys and a panorama of rugged peaks.

At 4,528 square kilometres, this nature protection preserve is Britain's largest national park. It is here that the highest mountains in Great Britain rise up.

It's a nearly four-hour bus ride from Edinburgh to Kincraig, a hamlet of 500 souls on the edge of Am Monad Ruadh - the red mountain, as the Cairngorm Mountains are called in Gaelic.

The closer the bus approaches Kincraig, the fewer the passengers on it. 'Kincraig? What are you doing here?' the bus driver jokes as some tourists disembark.

Behind the town, in the dark-green forests with their black-and-white striped birches and gnarled pines, there thrive such wildlife as wood grouse, squirrels and red deer.

It is here that the Scottish crossbill is at home, a species of finch that lives only in Scotland. In the bogs, the calls of the ptarmigans can be heard. In the many rivers and lakes, called Lochs, otters and sea eagles are out looking for prey. Yet somehow all of this does not feel like a wilderness.

Instead of being devoid of humans, one finds here the type of visitor typical in a recreational area - joggers on the forest trails, families who are marching from a parking lot to a picnic area, and people simply out walking their dogs.

The Cairngorm region does appear idyllic. But those seeking a wilderness must look beyond the tidy villages like Kincraig, the hiking trails, parking lots and information signs.

The path there leads cross-country over countless sheep pastures. Thousands of the animals are grazing in the fields with mountains in the backdrop. The mountain slopes are covered with huge boulders.

The higher one climbs, the more barren the scenery becomes and the warning signs posted by the tourism office about the dangers of the mountains suddenly make sense.

With only the sound of one's own breathing, the path leads upward. A few stunted pines are clinging to the slopes, and beyond that the landscape has changed into a kind of Arctic wilderness.

The barren mountains look like waves piled up and rolling towards the horizon. Only the heather thrives here, giving the slopes a purple hue. Eagles and other birds of prey are circling above the mountain peaks.

'Miles and miles of lavender-coloured solitude,' is how novelist Virginia Woolf described the Highlands in her notebook during a visit in 1938.

Short, chilly summers and long winters with lots of snow - the climate in the Highlands has made the higher-elevation areas into a broad expanse of tundra covered with lichens and moss.

'The weather here is unpredictable,' hotel owner Mike Welding says, shaking his head. 'One moment the sun is shining, and the next it is raining.'

But when the rain showers suddenly cease and the sunlight breaks through the clouds, casting spellbindingly long shadows across the mountains, it is then that this landscape displays its charms. It is a tough kind of beauty, a melancholy wilderness.

'I have never passed through anything more lonesome,' German writer Theodor Fontane wrote in describing a journey between Perth and Inverness in 1858.

In fact no region in Britain remained so undiscovered and inaccessible for so long than the Highlands. 'Even by 1700 people in London knew no more about the Highlands than they did about Abyssinia or Japan,' German travel writer Peter Sager says in his book on Scotland.

Even if the Highlands were always thinly-populated, they were not always so devoid of human habitation as they are now. The weather-beaten stone ruins of the former houses are testimony to a dark chapter of Scottish history.

Starting around the mid-1700s, the large landowners drove the tenant farmers and small-scale farmers out of the Highlands in order to use the land for sheep farming. Entire villages were wiped off the map and their inhabitants forced to emigrate to North America or Australia.

Today, around 80 per cent of Scotland's population lives in the cities of the Lowlands, the southern part of the country. The Highlands remain a barren, intimidating landscape - and one of absolute wild beauty.