This man-made idyll

Coming from the soft south, I didn’t see a live grouse until I was 19. That was in the summer of 1974, when I took off to the Cairngorms for a couple of weeks to go youth hostelling with a friend. There were new sights around every corner, with dotterel, snow buntings and ptarmigan on the high tops; golden eagles and ospreys flying, ring ouzels and whinchats in the scrubby hillsides, and dippers in the streams.

That holiday also brought my first view of a mountain hare, bouncing up out of its form almost under my feet. More memorable, however, was seeing them in February 1982 when I was a newly recruited trainee adviser with GWCT, sent north to Speyside to learn a bit about grouse with the late Tames Duncan, then our adviser