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Map will explore lost woods and wildlife of the Highlands

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The lost woods and wildlife of the Highlands are set to be rediscovered thanks to a new Gaelic place-name map.

Led by conservation charity Trees for Life, the project aims to promote the cultural importance of Scotland’s native woodland heritage.

Poet Alec Finlay will create the map by exploring place-names relating to woodlands, animals, geology and human dwellings in Glen Affric, Glen Urquhart, Glenmoriston and Glen Garry.

It will be used by schools and community groups, and to encourage tourism to less well-known areas.

The initiative will be launched with a two-day, 20-mile symbolic journey this weekend called “Turas Nan Craobh – A Journey With Trees” – from the Dundreggan Conservation Estate in Glenmoriston to Fort Augustus and Invergarry today and tomorrow.

Native trees will be transported by two ponies and planted at key sites where place-names evoke a particular tree.

Alan Watson Featherstone, Trees for Life’s founder, said: “Place-names contain a record of past ecology and can shed light on the woods and wildlife that once thrived in the Highlands and could do so again, with a little assistance from people.”

During the journey from Glenmoriston to Invergarry, members of the community, school pupils, artists, heritage and walking groups, and Trees for Life ecologists will follow sections of old military and drove roads. Gaelic storyteller Ariel Killick and poet Alec Finlay will take part in special events.

Participants will plant trees in gardens, school grounds and community green spaces, and in places where place-names evoke trees, such as Achadh-nan-darach – field of the oaks – on Abercalder Estate.

Alec Finlay’s subsequent research for the map will seek to identify place-names that indicate the past presence of woodland or animals, such as Creag a’ Mhadaidh (the wolf crag) in Glenmoriston, and Beinn Eun (hill of the bird) in Glen Affric.

Old maps, photographs, artefacts, census information, newspaper articles and older people’s knowledge will all be drawn on.

The map will be created in stages, with place-names revealed as new findings are uncovered.