Where the wild things are

In our age of climate crisis, the ideal of travel is surely a stay in a pristine and natural environment, where your visit directly contributes to the protection and preservation of the view from your window. In the far north of the UK, an extraordinary organization is at work to make this happen. WildLand – part conservation, part hospitality – has a two-hundred year vision to restore the riches of the Scottish Highlands, a landscape-scale undertaking that is the life’s work of Danish couple, Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen. Encompassing tree planting and habitat management, it is as much a commitment to rural Scotland’s communities, with the building of facilities and infrastructure, as well as the creation of jobs.

As the largest private landowners in Scotland, the Povlsens take the stewardship of their 220,000 acres seriously. The WildLand way, if you could call it that, is a commitment to Scotland’s nature that’s above and beyond. They make things – boat houses, bridges, community cafes – not just because it’s right, but beautiful to do so. Holidaying with WildLand taps into something of the same experience. Everything – places to stay, experiences, the nature at your front door – is elevated into the realms of the deeply special.

Glenfeshie, in the Cairngorms, best encapsulates the organization’s ambitions. Formerly a traditional, Victorian hunting estate, Glenfeshie has pivoted into conservation, with new-growth pines carpeting the slopes of previously barren hills. It’s a wonderful place to be, a vast, poetic landscape of forests and rivers, distant peaks and burgeoning Highland wildlife, pine martens, eagles, wildcats and osprey – plus the occasional walker on their way to overnight in Glenfeshie’s bothy.

Top: The remote wilds of the Scottish Highlands; Above: Aldourie Castle

You don’t have to sleep in a bothy, however, to experience WildLand’s estates. The provision of remarkable places to stay, from the far north at Sutherland, to the shores of Loch Ness, means guests can immerse themselves in the nature WildLand is working so hard to protect. Most of the traditional stone cottages and houses have been sensitively restored by Scottish architects Groves-Raines and share a distinctive Scandi-Scot interior aesthetic that’s the work of designer Ruth Kramer, encapsulating a calm, muted, Nordic take on Highlands style.

At Kennels Cottage, for instance, in place of brash plaids and clashing tartans, there’s a fireside chair by Carl Hansen, draped with Gotland sheepskins. My children have spent many happy Christmases eating chocolate coins beneath the Louis Poulsen dining table lights. Design nuts like me notice these details. Others are simply persuaded by the contented atmosphere that pervades these houses and cottages – in which the right chair is in the right spot, the blanket within reach, and huge, comfortable beds are dressed in softly crumpled linens. It’s a quiet beauty that seems in sympathy with the wilderness outside.

Some of the houses are run more like small hotels, with kitchens providing imaginative menus which might be described as fine dining without the fuss. At Killiehuntly, a farmhouse in the Cairngorms, or at Lundies, a 19th century, coastal manse in Sutherland, the dining experience is rigorously local. At Lundies, that means freshly-caught sea bream, cooked on the firepit and eaten at a long, candlelit table. At Killiehuntly it might be venison with vegetables picked from the walled garden. Communal eating inspires conversation. Last summer, at Killiehuntly, the dinner table was populated with Europeans fleeing the soaring heat for Scotland’s more temperate climate.

Above: The landscapes and properties in the WildLand portfolio

The real heartstopper in the WildLand portfolio is Aldourie Castle, on the southern shores of Loch Ness. It is a 300-year-old fairy tale castle, pink plastered, baronial, sprouting towers and turrets from every angle. Available for private hire, with 12 bedrooms, the house and the grounds were subject to a significant overhaul under the expert direction of architect Ptolemy Dean and gardener Tom Stuart-Smith and with interiors by Charlotte Freemantle and Will Fisher of fireplace and antiques emporium, Jamb. It is both spectacular and delightfully unshowy. Bedrooms feature chinoiserie wallpaper, charger beds draped in hand-dyed antique linen and beautifully faded, 19th century Ziegler carpets. A drawing room lined in pale blue Claremont silk is particularly elegant, while a hallway has become a calm retreat, in which Regency bookcases and deep sofas invite lingering.

Here, guests can wild swim in Loch Ness, lunch in the new boat house, or walk into five hundred acres of surrounding meadows and woodlands, the latter reached via a brand new, and very elegant, ironwork suspension bridge (under which reside, one imagines, some very fortunate trolls.) In typical WildLand style, it’s of a quality and beauty that far outweighs its simple necessity. It is, in fact, a joy. And if this is what WildLand can do with a bridge, imagine what else might be possible?

Above: Loch Ness, Aldourie Castle