Golden Eagle, Aquila chrysaetos. ©David Whitaker, Highland Wildlife Photography 2014 / NatureScot The news that an estate in the Highlands has lost part of its general licence to cull birds after a golden eagle was found dead and poisoned is yet another chapter in the...

Pic credit: Lairich Rig / Tom Weir statue: detail, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Tom Weir was a world-class climber and mountaineer who was among the first to explore the previously forbidden ranges of Nepal in the post-war years. But he also had as much enthusiasm...

I’m rather late coming to Nan Shepherd – I’ve only just finishing reading her most acclaimed work, The Living Mountain (six years after she appeared on an RBS banknote, when I should really have noticed). But then everyone, including Nan Shepherd herself, has been...

John Muir, the ecologist and national parks trailblazer, was my first piece in a series on Scottish pioneers of the outdoors last week (see here for the article). Muir was a giant in outdoors terms but he is also very much in the past (he died in 1914). The subject of...

So tomorrow (April 21) is John Muir Day – the birthday of ecologist, naturalist and writer John Muir who was born in 1838. And it got me thinking. His influence is everywhere – the John Muir Way runs near my house, the John Muir Trust helps protect some of my...