The Last Keeper

Deep Dive

Killing the Shepherd: The Last Keeper

Scotland’s history is romanticized for centuries of bloody feuds, warfare, and forced displacement. In the glens today there is unfinished business, fuelled by modern agendas; well-meaning rewilders, urban land reformers, and distant corporates plundering carbon markets.

Reminiscent of the Highland Clearances of the past, Indigenous communities are increasingly an inconvenience for the urban political class and their vision of progress. The targets are farmers, gamekeepers, ghillies, and deer stalkers whose families have been working the land, in some cases, for centuries. The land provides jobs and wages which they use to buy food and pay bills; keep families living in small communities fill local schools with children; and provide active wildlife and habitat management.

It’s a war for control, class warfare where traditional wildlife conservation may become as much a victim as the fragile rural communities themselves. The Highland Clearance was a thing of the past but is cultural genocide a part of the future? The answer is echoing through the Glen.