A news item of ours back in February – on the loss of Scotland’s iconic heather moors – has been picked up in the national press. Yesterday’s Daily Mail (25th August) had a full page article on the heather crisis. Read the earlier article for the basic facts, but the main problem is the drop in the number of hill farmers with the sheep population down sharply since its rise during the Clearances. Traditionally grazing on the heather, the sheep contributed to its vigour. With the parallel decrease in grouse moors, Scotland is losing a unique ecosystem at an alarming rate. For the last two hundred years, this country has had over fifty per cent of the world’s heather moor but this is vanishing fast. Bracken is taking over as the biodiversity is lost. Dumfries and Galloway is said by the Scottish Countryside Alliance Educational Trust to have lost sixty three per cent of its heather.

The northern Highlands is the area hardest hit by a drop in hill farming and the sheep it has depended upon. But even in the lusher south west Highlands, as in Argyll, some flocks have been reduced from four thousand to five hundred. Argyll’s heather is visibly in decline.

There is a counter-argument that a reduction in farming and land management would see the land return to its natural state. Toby Ackroyd, coordinator of Wild Britain, is quoted as saying: ‘Sheep are in trouble because of economics but the real benefits are in the restoration of large areas of varied habitat’. And you could say that deserted islands are so much more romantic than the ones with people on them.