Kenneth Steven considers the introduction of wild animals into the Highlands of Scotland, reflecting in poetry at the end of each Essay.
A consignment of eight reindeer landed at Clydebank near Glasgow on April 12th in 1952 thanks to a Swedish Sami Mikel Utsi who hailed from a long line of reindeer herders. There were eight reindeer and they were from Mikel Utsi’s own family herd in Arctic Sweden. The crossing had taken four days and by all accounts it had been pretty rough. Those first eight beasts spent the next month in quarantine at Edinburgh Zoo and then they completed their journey to Highland Scotland and the area of ground that had been granted for them. There are echoes of the old stories of attempted re-introductions of reindeer: low and wet ground, the prevalence of insects. It took time, but in 1954 Mikel Utsi was given permission for free grazing up to the summits of the northern corries of the Cairngorms: in other words, where they needed to be. Further clusters of reindeer were introduced in 1952, 1954 and 1955.
Several hundred reindeer were born in Highland Scotland between 1953 and 1979, that year when Mikel Utsi passed away. Wild reindeer were again living freely in the country that had been theirs centuries before. And the herder who’d brought them here, whose dream had come true, he was able to bring people out into what might just have been another piece of his childhood landscape and tell them of the ways and the stories of the Sami.
Presenter Kenneth Steven Producer Mark Rickards
A Whistledown Scotland production for BBC Radio 3