When wolves haunted the North Highlands

Beside the A9, south of Helmsdale, an easily missed memorial commemorates the supposed killing of Sutherland’s last wolf. Erected by the Duke of Portland, it names the hunter as Polson and places the event around 1700, although I would be cautious about awarding him the distinction without hearing from the rest of the Highlands. There seem to be enough last-wolf stories to keep several wolves occupied, with different places claiming the final encounter. What interests me more than settling that argument is looking beyond the memorial into country where wolves once lived, and remembering that their absence is partly the result of considerable human effort.

Reading older accounts, you begin to encounter them across places we now explore without giving their former inhabitants much thought. Cape Wrath was described as ground where wolves hunted in great numbers, while Cromarty was remembered as wooded country overrun by them. In Caithness, tradition attributed the burning of forests to attempts to drive them out, and stories associated with Handa explained that people carried their dead to the island because wolves disturbed mainland graves. Whether every detail withstands scrutiny is another matter, but together these accounts convey something of the fear surrounding the animal. A nineteenth-century writer even recorded a tale of a Highlander killed near Ledbeg after lending his dirk to a friend, an unfortunate act of generosity in a story where being unarmed proves fatal.

With encounters like that filling the accounts, it is easy for the wolf itself to disappear beneath its reputation. Yet the creature moving through this landscape was a social animal, generally living within a family group whose members hunted, raised their young and communicated with one another through scent, movement and sound. The howl that we so readily associate with danger also helped separated wolves find their companions and warned neighbouring packs away. Across the country we now call the Flow Country, they could pursue deer, take smaller prey and scavenge, travelling through a landscape whose distances would present little obstacle to them.

Wolves still live in France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere in Europe, which makes their disappearance here feel rather less like the inevitable passing of some remote age. I find it difficult to picture the North Highlands without the sheep, roads and settlements that shape our experience of them, but imagining wolves among those familiar hills leaves me wondering how much we have come to accept as complete. Beneath a darkening Flow Country sky, a howl carrying across the peat would give us a very different sense of the country around us. In the audio blogcast, we explore more of the stories behind their disappearance and the uneasy relationship that helped bring it about.

To learn more, listen to the blogcast or book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.