Where the (re)wild things are

There are many ways to spend your billions… chasing space travel, buying football clubs or hijacking social media platforms. Or you can begin a rewilding project that you will never see the end of. It will continue long after you’re dead, but maybe future generations will see the good in it and perhaps a small corner of the world will breathe a little easier because of it.

This is the idea behind Wildland Scot, a 200-year vision and project by Danish clothing billionaires Anne and Anders Holch Povlsen, amongst Scotland’s largest landholders.

It was once said that a red squirrel could travel the length of Scotland without its paws ever having to touch the ground. The impact of human settlement and agriculture has made modern-day Scotland a very different prospect.

Scotland is still ‘wild’ to a certain extent, by most of our standards. Once you hit the Highlands it’s actually quite shocking how little human incursion there is, but still, where are the trees (apart from the evergreen spruces and pines)? Where are the shrubs? Where are the animal species long wiped from the land or those once ‘common’ Scottish species whose sighting is now rarer than a snow leopard in Nepal?

Scotland’s native woodlands have been dismantled into tiny, fragmented parcels covering just 4% of the land.

The idea behind Wildland Scot is to restore something of that which has been lost – to return the Highlands to their former magnificent natural state and repair the harm that humans have inflicted on them.

Last year I was lucky enough to visit the Wildland Scot properties. I took a walk with a ghillie and his dog on one of the estates, to learn about the planting and his life culling deer. He told me that once a lynx was spotted there. Make no mistake, lynx have been extinct in the wild for centuries in Scotland. A friend of his had messaged him to say, ‘I’ve just seen a lynx and it’s on your land.’ ‘That’s impossible,’ said the ghillie, ‘r u having a laugh?’. Then his phone pinged with a photo from his friend – most definitely a lynx, and most definitely on their land. ‘Oh s**t’, he eloquently replied.

Rewilding is not a question of just throwing long-gone species back into the wild – wolves, lynx or whatever – it’s something that is done tentatively, with step-by-step consultation with farmers, with locals, with whoever has something to lose. It’s a gradual process, perhaps as slow as planting the trees that you may never see grow to full height.

If you’re wondering where the errant lynx came from, it was a ‘private collection’, released by someone who thought, erroneously, that it would have found a happy home on a Wildland estate. The ghillie was too polite to say who exactly, but there are too few people here; it’s probable that everyone knows who it was. The lynx was moved on, out of necessity. In the words of Wildland: ‘We (Scotland) remain one of the few countries in the world willing to live alongside apex predators’.

Then there is the hospitality. I was lucky enough to visit the properties at the end of last year, in autumn when a slight chill is falling over the land but the beauty of the leaves and the light – that incomparable light – more than compensates any need to put on a sweater. There are a range of Wildland Scot properties – from exclusive single-use Scottish estates to self-catering cottages and truly boutique places to stay. To call them ‘hotels’ would be reductive and inaccurate – anyway, they offer lovely, shared accommodation if you can’t splash out for your own private lodge or castle.

I reflected a lot on ‘luxury’ at these properties and what it means. For me it means time, space and a moment to breathe, with no distractions. There’s pleasant conversation with the people who’ve decided to come and work at these often remote places – sometimes they’re local, sometimes they’re from far-away countries – hearing their very diverse life stories, why they wound up here and what they hope to glean from their time spent. There’s chatting with fellow guests around a communal dinner table, listening to what brought them here, what their impressions are of the place in which they find themselves and what they’ve already seen and hope to see of Scotland.

My short stay at two of these properties brought me into contact with (in no particular order) a US project manager for Meta, an Australian surfer dude, two ladies and their husbands from Saudi Arabia who had got into a hire car in the middle of the night and braved suicidal deer, driving on the opposite side, and single-track Scottish roads, a lovely yoga teacher whose husband had been a private driver for Boris Berezovsky, and a talented Danish woman who owns a small hotel in Switzerland – the designer behind the gentle, calming Scandi-Scot aesthetic at many of the Wildland properties.

All of these people had one thing in common – that each of them had heaved a sigh once they arrived and unloaded something, because they hadn’t arrived at a hotel. They had come to a welcoming ‘home’, where there was no need to overschedule their days – they’d take a walk, bike, explore by car and potter around – taking what the weather and fortune afforded them. They wouldn’t control diets or menus, they’d eat what the chef had decided to make for them that evening, at a communal table. They wouldn’t answer emails or respond to the pressures of modern life. At most they’d read a book, grab a drink from the bar, sit by the fire or observe the setting sun and the fading glow from the window.

And here is real luxury, I feel. Luxury isn’t measured in thread counts or Michelin stars. It’s time. Time just to be, not to do. To really see, not just to look. To truly slow down, to bathe in beauty… where the wild things are.