Swedish heiress and Scottish estate landowner drives mass nature restoration in Highlands

Lisbet Rausing, an heir to the Tetra Pak fortune and long-term resident of Scotland, is part of a new consortium of landowners clubbing together to embark on large-scale restoration of nature.

A Swedish heiress and philanthropist in the Highlands has joined a consortium of landowners to drive nature restoration and improvements to the ecology of Lochaber at a large scale.

Lisbet Rausing owns the the 57,000- acre Corrour Estate and has long championed the restoration of nature on the land by reversing generations of over grazing and commercial forestry plantations in a bid to boost biodiversity.

Now Corrour Estate has joined Loch Abar Mòr – a consortium that transcends traditional estate boundaries to regenerate land at a greater scale. Work will begin across a total of 80,000 acres to make land more ecologically diverse and, as a result, more resilient to climate change.

Restoration of nature on the Corrour Estate near Fort William will now be expanded across neighbouring land to accelerate impact and scale of the 'rewilding' work to boost ecology and biodiversity. PIC: Andrew/Flickr/CC.

National Trust for Scotland, Glenaladale Estate, The Woodland Trust, Glen Nevis Estate and the Nevis Landscape Partnership have also joined the project. While all have been committed to nature recovery in the past, the project will allow progress on a wider and faster scale across the next 50 years.

Donald Rowantree, the estate manager at Corrour, which sits east of Fort William, said: “We’ve been working to restore natural habitats at a landscape scale for some years, and this partnership offers the opportunity to expand that work across ownership boundaries. The sharing of knowledge and expertise will also allow our resources to go further and be more effective.”

Lisbet Rausing, the Swedish heiress, academic and philanthropist who owns Corrour Estate. PIC: CC.

The Rausing family bought Corrour in 1995 from the grandson of Sir John Stirling Maxwell, a Tory MP for Glasgow at the turn of the 20th century and a founder member of National Trust for Scotland. Later, he was chairman of the Forestry Commission.

Ms Rausing, a science historian, academic and co-founder of Arcadia and Lund Trust, which works to ‘green’ people’s lives in the UK, has described Corrour as her “family’s greatest joy”. They first experienced it during a riding holiday across the Highlands.

Since 2015, the estate has worked to reduce deer numbers, plant native woodland, restore peat bogs and reintroduce red squirrels on land that was historically used for field sports.

Over the next 50 years, the Loch Abar Mòr partnership seeks to create a rich mosaic of habitats “alive with nature” that cross traditional land boundaries.

Peter Cairns, executive director of rewilding charitable company SCOTLAND: The Big Picture and convener of Loch Abar Mòr, said efforts of individual landowners to restore nature on their property “very often stopped and started” at the estate boundary, with the work more effective when working collaboratively and at scale.

He said: “We are delighted to be able to harness the appetite for landscape-scale nature restoration in Lochaber and in time, translate this into meaningful change on the ground.”

First projects of the partnership include deer management across all estates and restoring native woodland, alongside rivers and watercourses, to benefit Atlantic salmon. Meanwhile, montane woodland on Corrour Estate is being expanded.

Mr Cairns said it was committed to working with Lochaber communities to ensure that ecological recovery works in tandem with employment, learning and recreation opportunities with an expectation that jobs would be created as a result of the project.