Song of the Rolling Earth : A Highland Odyssey

SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH: A HIGHLAND ODYSSEY is the story of the founding of Aigas Field Centre (see http://www.aigas.co.uk) west of Inverness in northeastern Scotland. Aigas was the first residential centre created in Scotland to do informal education of both children and adults in the natural history of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. When Sir John Lister-Kaye, the eighth baronet of that ilk, completed this book in 2003, his Aigas Field Centre was then 25 years old. It still flourishes in late 2008. Indeed my wife and I and 18 other American Elderhostelers spent 2 1/2 weeks there in September- October 2008 tasting of its innovative environmental riches. ***

Aigas is an established hotel, residential restaurant, classroom and base from which to make excursions by bus, train and ferry to Skye and Orkney, to the Culloden battlefield where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his irregular highlanders were smashed by a Hanoverian regular army and to habitats of golden eagles, otters, loons and turkey-sized grouse called capercaillies. House of Aigas is also the home of Sir John Lister-Kaye and his family. In his second-storey study Sir John writes and edits the many books he has produced about Scotland's Highlands and islands, their ever threatened animals and plants, their enduring, adaptable people and their troubled natural history. ***

SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH is part autobiography, part special pleading for "restoration ecology" and all poetry. ***

From his earliest years John Lister-Kaye, scion of a Yorkshire English family whose wealth was based on coal, was fascinated by nature: worms, birds and butterflies. He came to detest the destruction of marshes and forests that the industrial revolution had wrought upon all parts of the United Kingdom. Even gorgeous Scotland, long romanticized by Sir Walter Scott and others as one stunning Loch Lomond after another, had in fact been systematically ravished ever since the end of the last Ice Age. First the hunter-gatherers used fire to clear the forests and plied their primitive weapons to exterminate the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger. Agriculture next drove back the wild habitats. Urban man polluted land and streams. Species of plants (tobacco, potatoes) and animals (Hereford cattle) were transplanted without thought from one country to another, imports always competing with, often exterminating natives. ***

But in April 1996 Sir John took hope from a talk given in Edinburgh by Sir Martin Holdgate: man can now (and indeed must) heal what his ancestors have done to the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere. The technique is "restoration ecology," consciously cutting back on pollutants and generally preserving what little bio-diversity we have left. ***

This is the mission of Aigas Field Centre: to show on the sprawling mixed landscape premises both on foot and in lectures and through excursions farther afield how heather has replaced forests and how far too many deer ceaselessly trample or eat trees when they try to re-establish themselves. Long gone from the highlands are wolves, beavers and bear. The second arrow in Aigas's educational quiver is to show students how they can make a difference. Some locally extinct species are now being cautiously re-introduced from neighboring Norway. All this is lyrically laid out in SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH, a phrase borrowed from Walt Whitman.

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