Hindsight: In Search of Lost Wilderness

'Essential reading for lovers of the Great outdoors'  Roger Cox, Scotsman Magazine

Longlisted for the 2022 Highland Book Prize

In 2019, Jenna Watt took part in the stalking of a hind on the vast Highland estate of Corrour: part of an immersive attempt to understand the ideas that lie behind rewilding, and what it means emotionally and physically to participate in Scotlands deer cull. Piece by piece and chapter by chapter she unravels the story of that one day spent hunting the hind, interlaced with her discovery that her ancestors were deer stalkers, game keepers and ghillies on a Highland estate, who once took part in increasingly controversial land practices like muirburn and species persecution.

This exploration leads her into the complex and often conflict-ridden world of the rewilding movement. She meets the Wolf Man of the Highlands, who wants to introduce the first wild wolves back into Scotland for over 300 years; a mountain ecologist who ranges alone across the landscape to track the environmental impact of deer on Scotlands upland ecosystem; landowners who are reintroducing species like beaver onto their estates; and a female deer stalker, who is trying to introduce more women into the male-dominated world of stalking and game-keeping.

In the process, Jenna comes to better understand the meaning of wildness, the shifting baselines of rewilding, and, in a world beset by climate change and species extinction, how to cope, both as an individual and as a society, with the concept of ecological grief.