Returning to Invergeldie for the first time since the sheep (almost 2,000) have gone is like stepping into a familiar yet different world. The same reds, golds, and greens remain, but there’s an undeniable shift—the place feels bigger and somehow brighter. The air, crisp and sharp, accentuates the colours with an almost ethereal paleness, lending the land a newness that had been masked for too long.
This is a landscape in transition. The rough textures are creeping back, the neatly clipped uniformity of domestication is shedding in favour of something wilder, messier—an organically ordered chaos that only those who truly understand nature can appreciate. The perfection of imperfection. Some will look at the scruffy disarray with distaste, but those who know?
They’ll see the beauty of a landscape reclaiming and reinventing itself.
The wetness is returning too, the land no longer held in a stranglehold of compaction. The violence of recent storms has ripped through, not as an enemy, but as an unwitting accomplice to restoration and recovery. Trees have fallen, snapped, and splintered, their remains strewn across the ground, a seemingly chaotic wreckage that, in reality, is the first step towards a richer, more complex web of life. Deadwood—a term too final for something so full of potential—now lies across the land, ready to house insects, fungi, and feathered friends.
Invergeldie has always been a landscape like no other, a truly magical place. The topography holds you, hugs you, its boundaries stretching to the skyline, enclosing you in a vast, theatre of natural capital dreams. It is a place that deserves respect, that resists control. It does not need management in the traditional sense. It needs space. It needs freedom. And a helping hand in creating a better future for people and wildlife.
For the first time, standing here, it feels like we can see beyond what was – a real inflection point. Possibilities stretch in every direction. After two years of work—eliminating chemicals, dismantling instruments of death, removing archaic infrastructure, and undoing centuries of control—the landscape is able to breathe again. And standing where I am, it feels like one of those very slow, very deep, life-affirming breaths.
This morning, the land feels different beneath my feet. The wind moves through the valley with a whisper of gratitude. The hug of Invergeldie, always big, bold and beautiful, feels a little softer and a lot more grateful. A thank you.