Season in Strathglass by John; Fowler

of boars on vegetation, such as tree regeneration, and the prospects of farming them. Boar steaks.
    I walk on with one more river to cross – a burn, rather. A hop and a leap onto the grassy bank on the other side bring me to a stile at the woodland edge, with open moorland beyond. Wreckage of a footbridge a little off the track indicates what must have been another route, now abandoned. Here the burn is spanned by two parallel tree trunks, or possibly old telegraph poles, with a few rotten planks nailed across and a gap where the remainder are missing. A single small pine and a leafless, warped birch tree stand guard.
    Ahead is an intrusion – a pylon. Tall, unfriendly, gaunt against the lowering sky. And not alone but one of a chain carrying the electricity transmission line from Beauly southward to connect with the grid. I see the wires looping from pylon to pylon in diminishing perspective down towards Tomich and beyond. Ugly enough as they are, there is worse to come – the electricity company plans to replace them with giants up to twice their height to carry power from the new wind farms mushrooming in the north. This is not a prospect I like and nor do many of the locals. There's going to be an inquiry.
    It's cold. The path deteriorates as it ascends steeply towards the pass, cut into channels by winter weather and the lack of maintenance. Rivulets run down it.
    The wind freshens. Murky clouds rear on the horizon and a veil of precipitation drifts over the hills as dirty weather sweeps in. Soon all to the west is blotted out. Light fades and the first flecks of snow float on the wind, thickening by the minute until it's a perfect welter. The hoped-for view down from the top of the pass seems ever less certain and it takes little self-persuasion to turn back for home.
    The sheltered wood is an altogether friendlier place than the open moor. Softly falling snowflakes drift through the trees. A lattice bridge (unmarked on the map) is a good place to pause, to watch the agitated waters of the burn below and warm cold fingers round a cup of hot soup from the flask.

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    Liz lives in a grass-roofed ecological house in the hamlet of Knockfin. She's a scientist, a botanist, and the boars were her idea. She calls them her ‘piggies’.
    There are canoes under a canopy at the door and a stack of wood at the side of the house. Behind the house, the hillside rises steeply to a line of birches, with the ground in between covered in grass and heather and swathes of bracken.
    Liz says nobody likes bracken. It spreads like wildfire, kills all other plants and it's practically indestructible. But she reckoned her piggies would do the trick. They root out and eat the tough rhizomes in the soil and they feed on the young shoots when they first poke through and fronds begin to unfurl –just the thing for the hillside behind the house, where she could study their impact on the vegetation.
    Not everyone was as enthusiastic as she. Folk envisioned wild boar running loose and attacking them on their country walks. The community council split over the question and it was only when the Forestry Commission offered a piece of woodland near Hilton and funding to go with it that the project could go ahead.
    Most of the animal management and care is done by Rae, a local forester, but Liz takes her turn at feeding time. She admits it can be a little scary. When the sows sense her presence they scurry from the wood, snuffing and puffing around her, to be followed by Boris the boar ambling down at a more stately pace. He's harmless enough, she says, but he's big and she's small and slim and she feels uneasy in his presence.
    â€˜Come and see them,’ she says. ‘Come at feeding time.’

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    Rae loves his pigs. You can see it in his face. Catherine and I join him on a visit to the piggies. There's a thin covering of snow as we drive into the woods over a bumping trackRae swings open the metal gate and leads us into