Sheiling hut / stone cairn.
Sleeping in my van, I find myself thinking about home.
What does it mean to belong to a place? To a particular stretch of land?
I've been encountering huts all along this route — shelters, shielings, roundhouses. To exist in wild places is not simply a matter of endurance. There must always be shelter. There must be rest. The feeling of safety, I'm realising, is at the heart of what we call home.
Land is Art. The Body is a Gallery
journal extract:
‘The landscape itself is the Artist.
Time and Space are curators.
The body is the gallery through which the living world can perceive itself.
We don’t need to create, we need to learn to perceive.’
Heather Hut / Thatched Round House
On my hike I stumbled across a tiny, old, circular dwelling with stone foundations and turf sod walls under a heather-thatched roof. ‘Shielings’ were a fundamental part of Highland life for centuries where the practice of transhumance, (moving livestock to upland summer pastures and lowlands in winter) meant these temporary shelters were scattered all across the hills. This place was very special, offering great insulation from the elements. As a structure, it represents a completely different relationship to land, as a seasonal, non-possessive home related to the rhythms of animals and pasture rather
than to fences and deeds.
Continuing my route, I came across a replica roundhouse, built in 1999 by young people from the local Abriachan youth group. They had been clearing invasive spruce from the site, uncovering hut circles thought to be Bronze Age archaeology beneath. The initial heather thatching was done by a thatcher called Brian Wilson. Historically, roundhouses like this would have stood here in around 2000BC.
Clava Cairns
The variety in each standing stone is very prominent as depicted. Each has so much character, reminding me of an earth body. It appears these stones were selected for colour, featuring larger, redder stones to the south west, and smaller and whiter to the north east. They indicate a complex design rather than ad hoc additions, exhibiting a precise astronomical alignment with the winter solstice. On the shortest day of the year, the setting sun shines directly down the entrances of the passage cairns, illuminating their interior chambers. Sites like these are examples of the oldest Land Art remains known to us.
cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos
"whoever owns the soil owns it all the way up to the heavens and down to the depths of hell."
(old common law)
I’m reminded of the book Feral by George Monbiot. The book argues humans innate need for wildness to escape the ‘monotony of over-civilization’ and to reclaim a sense of enchantment.
It outlines that the Cairngorms here were once part of the ‘Amazon of the UK’. Today only a few small pockets of these ancient Scots pines still exist - this place (Uath Lochans) being one of them.
It also talks about the process of reversing the damage to ecosystems by stepping back, allowing natural processes to take over, and letting ecosystems thrive without constant human intervention.
Scotland has an extreme concentration of land ownership, where roughly half of all private rural land is held by around 432 individuals. Many large estates are registered through offshore companies, deliberately obscuring the identity of its true owners. Monbiot describes this landscape of "aristocrats, oligarchs, bankers and sheikhs" as a primary barrier to ecological restoration, with land kept for deer stalking and commercial forestry rather than nature recovery.
I am reminded that even in ‘wilderness’ places such as this, the land is still a commodity to be ‘owned’, and controlled, and my concept of a truly ‘wild’ place has many layers to it.
A land may be shared, but it seems the idea of posession remains typically underlying to human thinking. This is an unsuprisingly colonial approach for the UK, yet fundamentally this top-down structure strikes me as completely upside-down to how the natural world actually functions.
Tues 24 Mar 2026
Scotland notes.
- 8 days solo trip through the Scottish highlands living in my van.
Having travelled across the globe exploring connection to land through materiality and ecology, I am setting off on a journey to explore the lands which neighbour my own birthplace. As a person of both Sri Lankan and British descent, I am asking myself what it means to be from the UK, from a place and from a land.
- a rough itinerary
London - Glasgow
1. Cairngorms - Uath Lochans and Glen Feshie (hike)
2. Clava Cairns and Loch Ness
3. Abriachan Forest - Carn na Leitire Summit Cairn loop
4. North West Highlands - Bones Caves - Knockan Craigg
5. Fairy Pools - Assynt - Stac Pollaidh (hike)
6. Ullapool - Isle of Skye - Fairy Pools
7. Skye - Old Man of Storr - Quiraing Loop (hike)
8. Skye - Fairy Glen - Loch Garry
- Glasgow - London
(total approx 1800 miles)