Red deer are an icon of the Highlands but they are destroying its beautiful 'fiadh' landscape

Thousands of visitors are drawn to the rugged mountains and grand vistas of the Scottish Highlands, yet it is almost impossible to imagine these incredible landscapes without deer. The association between ‘wild’ land and one of Scotland’s most iconic animals is so much more than the images seen on boxes of shortbread or Christmas cards. We feel the wilderness when we see deer running.

Red deer roam across the Highlands. They are beautiful creatures whose long limbs and coats of many mountain colours are emblematic of this country and tied to notions of remoteness and freedom. To encounter deer on holiday gives visits a special edge.

One famous stag, Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’, painted in 1851, had a profound impact on notions and ideas of wildness in the Scottish Highlands. As a ‘royal’ – his antlers have 12 points – he has been described as ‘seen in a moment of exhilaration’.

Following the same path

There is wildness in his eyes. Behind him, the landscape of bare rock, storm clouds, scant vegetation and no woodland, is the image many associate with upland Scotland. This ‘ideal’ is still sought out by visitors 170 years later.

When I came to live in a crofting township in Wester Ross, deer roamed at will in small herds. They were troublesome – any unprotected trees or gardens were at risk. But I learned their habits and came to love them. They would billow and surge around the empty hill country surrounding our valley, coming onto my croft in the pre-dawn hours before moving down to the shore to graze seaweed.

Their route was a great circle from mountains to valley, from croft to shore, and back to the hills. It followed local ‘roads’ used by people over centuries. I loved the idea we were twinned by habit, following ‘desire paths’ almost as old as the hills themselves, our footprints joined in space and time.

Male red deer clash in exhausting battles over the females (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

Deep pulsing organic need

My first experience with the rut was just a year after taking on the croft. Shaken from sleep by an alien, guttural roar slipping in through my open bedroom window, I got up and pushed the window even wider into a night of spectral silvers and wolf-pelt greys. In the moonlight, only dim forms were visible – the low hills, a neighbour’s house, our long byre.

I heard the river shushing and the slip of cold air through nearby trees. Then an ululation echoed from the valley’s crevices and folds. Stag-bellow! A sound filled with hormonal angst and deep pulsing organic need. The rutting ground was nearby in a flattish area of deep, wet peat, topped with bog myrtle, heather and curling tussock grasses. Rut-roars bounced from rock to rock as deer spiralled up and down. I felt captured by the very essence of wildness.

Before they fight, stags often wallow in wet hollows, urinating in them before wallowing again. Since that first stag-roar, I have watched them thrash and paw at the turf, dragging their antlers through vegetation until they were decorated like Christmas trees. Once the rut ends, the groups disperse – hinds will go one way, young bucks another, while the exhausted stags recover and refuel.

Like so many, I was drawn here by the great mountain landscapes of Landseer and others. The place of deer in wild country was the norm, and for me they added to Highland Scotland’s iconic sense of place. But after living here for a few years, I began to see things differently.

Large numbers of red deer have had a dramatic impact on the Highland habitat (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

Not wholly to blame

I was angered by the damage done to a small grove of alder on the croft; bark stripped, the trees bled orange-red sap. But every year, in parts they cannot penetrate, hundreds of tiny trees spring up – oak, birch, rowan.

Over the centuries, deer have kept forest regeneration at bay. The depletion of species in the natural world is evidenced by palaeoenvironmental data and later in written records, and although browsing and grazing by deer are not wholly to blame, they have contributed significantly to the problem.

The broader landscape of the Highlands was once made up of a complex mosaic of mixed woodland, pasture and hill grazing – the so-called fiadh or deer forests. Fiadh has several meanings – deer, free, wild – each word encapsulating our visions of the Highlands.

Today, there are around 700,000 deer in Highland Scotland. Numbers rose so quickly in the first half of the 20th century that the government created the Red Deer Commission in 1959. Frank Fraser Darling, the scientific advisor, argued for a reduction from the 100,000 animals counted then to 60,000, but his report was largely ignored. What followed instead was 60 years of weak regulation, obfuscation and arguments between conservation bodies, the commission and landowners.

Little has been done to halt deer numbers. Overgrazing and habitat destruction are so severe in some parts of the Highlands that only a radical rethink of land management and legislation would achieve what many now desire – the restoration of mixed, natural vegetation and communities with people at their heart, in other words, the fiadh of old.

Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands is Annie Worsley's first non-fiction book about nature | courtesy of Annie Worsley

The absence of deer

Our local crofting townships are now enclosed by an enormous deer fence. The protection has already changed the nature of our crofted landscape. Habitats once overgrazed are regenerating; there are more shrubs and saplings; species of wildflowers not seen for years bloom along the old trails.

The absence of deer has enabled a resurgence of growth and increase in biomass in the valley. As a result, there are more insects and birds. Today, crofting continues alongside this unlooked-for form of rewilding.

With good land management, with people and wildlife in partnership, habitat restoration, forest regeneration and the ability to deal with our warming world will be enhanced. I feel hope for the future. And I can still go onto the hill to watch the deer and marvel at the wildness they bring.

Annie Worsley is a crofter, writer and grandmother. Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands is her first nature non-fiction book.