the burning hills
on holding space for ecological grief
Content warning: this post discusses an active wildfire, animal death, and ecological loss. If you're currently affected by wildfires or grieving a loss of your own, take care with this one.
It’s been eighteen days1 since fire started tearing through the Cairngorms, which holds nearly a quarter of the UK’s most endangered species alongside some of the last remnants of the ancient Caledonian pine forest that once covered the Highlands. The mountains carry their own folklore, too: Am Fear Liath Mòr, otherwise known as the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, is said to haunt the summit since a climber first described hearing footsteps behind him there in 1891.
While I don’t know the Cairngorms on foot, I know the hills through Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain2. The way she describes her experience is so alive and expansive, that I felt I was with her, walking the hills, smelling the pine sap, feeling the cold granite and listening to a silence she describes not as an absence of sound, but as ‘a new element’ entirely.
A experimental short directed by Lucy Cash and Simone Kenyon, shot on 16mm film in Glen Feshie as a somatic exploration of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to express how I feel, but I don’t think I quite know how to yet. But what I can say is my heart breaks thinking of the ancient Scots pines disappearing into smoke… I have felt anger in my stomach thinking about the wildlife becoming ghosts… the capercaillie, the wildcats, the red squirrels, the lichen, and all the other organisms that give and receive on this land.
I think of the survivors, too, who are left standing… and truly, I haven’t quite known what to do with these feelings. How do I transmute this anger? I ask, and push it aside… only for it to come back: why am I feeling this way? I try to set it down, and there it is again: why don’t people care? What can I do? What can we do?
Fire has always moved through this landscape, in small, passing burns, but not like this. I'm told some of the old pines have survived, thick-barked, built for exactly this kind of stress, and the ground may come back thicker than before, the way it has after past fires here. But I don't yet know what's been lost in the peat itself, or what it will take to grow back. Even not knowing what survives, I feel the ache of it somatically. We are part of the same ecosystem, however separate we like to imagine ourselves.
The fires have reminded me how fragile our world is, and how much we’re going to lose, again and again, in the days, months, and years ahead. It’s hard not to feel this swallowing me whole. And then, somewhere in the swallowing, I realised: this is grief. (Let grief arrive, my therapist once told me.)
The only way I know how to move through this is to sit with the trees, speak to them, and hold them in my heart. I imagine an orb of light, orange and gold, pulsing from the tree and from me, until the two lights meet, and for a moment we’re just two living beings giving each other what we need to keep going.
If you’d like to help, consider donating to RSPB Scotland, RSPB Loch Garten Abernethy, Saving Wildcats, Trees for Life, Scottish Wildlife Trust, Cairngorms Connect, or the Cairngorms Trust. For the communities and crews fighting the fire directly, the Nethy Bridge Wildfire Appeal is raising funds to feed volunteers and firefighters around the clock.,
As of today, Mon 3 August 2026.
Anna “Nan” Shepherd was born on February 11, 1893, in East Peterculter and died in Aberdeen aged 88 on February 23, 1981. She attended Aberdeen High School for Girls, graduated from the University of Aberdeen and lectured at the Aberdeen College of Education. Nan was a major contributor to early Scottish modernist literature and published her first novel, The Quarry Wood, in 1928. Nan was a keen hill-walker and her poetry reveals her love for the Scottish mountains. The Living Mountain was her first non-fiction book.
so moving iman 🤍 death follows life, but remember that after death comes life again xx