IT’S been a long time since I put on skis and took to the hills. They’re Nordic touring skis and they’ve been languishing at the back of my garage for more years than I care to remember. Other than last winter we’ve not exactly had the kind of conditions that make mountain ski touring a joy and a couple of half hearted attempts to ski on less than brilliant snow conditions simply made me vow to take to snowshoeing whenever there was snow on the hills.

And that’s what I’ve been doing over the past few winters, stomping the hills on snowshoes whenever there’s been a snow cover, and stomping the hills whenever there’s been no snow, which has been most years.

I used to ski a lot. Indeed at one time I was the Nordic ski co-ordinator for the Scottish National Ski Council. I spent winters working as a ski instructor and even raced in Nordic events but I felt more at home on the hills, just using the skis as a fun way to get around. I’ve no idea how the equipment has developed in recent years, or what the difference is between Telemark Touring and Nordic Touring, but all the snow in recent weeks has encouraged me to look out the old gear and check how fit it is for purpose.

On close examination I reckoned the skis could do me a while yet. They’re pretty old Asnes Nansen Mountain skis, with steel edges and Rottefella 75mm toe bindings, but my boots looked well past their sell-by date. The leather had gone very stiff and the toepiece was pretty worn so my first job was to hunt down a pair of boots that were compatible with the skis and bindings.

And what a job that turned out to be. Everyone wanted to sell me stiff and heavy plastic Telemark boots, boots that are more suited to the pistes of Europe than lightweight hill touring in Scotland. In actual fact I already have some Telemark boots but I’ve rarely used them. For the handful of times I have skied in them I felt as though someone had encased my feet in concrete blocks. Horrible things. When I walk the hills I wear lightweight boots or lightweight trail shoes, so I wanted something appropriately light for my ski touring too.

Eventually Rob from Mountain Spirit in Aviemore found me one remaining pair of Crispi 75mm leather touring boots and by luck they were my size. They weren’t cheap, but no ski gear has ever been cheap, so I treated myself to a Christmas present. I was set to go.

On the first available day I drove up to Cairn Gorm but it was packed. It was also cold and cloudy and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face so I backtracked and went where the weather looked a bit better and where there were less people. I put the skins on my skis, clipped my new boots in place and stomped up the old Burma Road past the Allt na Criche Christian Centre near Aviemore. Other than in the lower few hundred feet where the snow was a bit thin conditions were excellent and I made good time all the way to the top, then up the ridge to the Corbett summit of Geal Charn Mor.

So far so good but would my downhill techniques cope with years of not ski-ing? Much to my surprise they did. I guess ski-ing is like cycling. Once you get the hang of it you never lose it but while I managed to get back down to the Burma Road track without any great difficulties it was then I discovered muscles I’d forgotten, particularly on the front of my thighs.

Because the track is fairly narrow you have to more or less schuss down it – there isn’t the room to do turns. Every so often I would slow myself down by snow ploughing and it was then that my thighs would begin to seize up. By the time I got back to the car I was euphoric, but I could hardly straighten my legs. My wife had to prise me out of the car when I got home, but the old legs will get used to ski-ing again, and more importantly, I’ve got the bug again. My new boots will be put to good use this winter, provided the weather gods keep providing the snow and if all goes well I might even be tempted into buying a new pair of skis as a kind of après-Christmas gift!

Best wishes to all of you for 2011.

Sir Jack Hayward is a past Chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers and he owns the Dunmaglass Estate on the northern edge of the Monadh Liath. He doesn’t live there, he lives in Bermuda or the Bahamas or some other sun-kissed tax haven. That maybe accounts for the fact that he doesn’t mind part of his estate, a huge area of fragile, wildlife habitat that lies 2000 feet above sea level to be industrialised by almost three dozen wind turbines, each higher than the Big Ben clock tower. Or perhaps, more likely, he doesn’t mind because he will earn an estimated £9 million over 25 years by allowing yet another subsidy-motivated power company, Renewable Energy Systems (RES) to build miles of bulldozed tracks, pour hundreds of tonnes of concrete into swimming-pool size support bases and string up electricity cables to connect this so-called green power station to a national grid.

RES, incidentally, aren’t paying Hayward this vast amount of money out of sheet altruism, and neither are their motives fuelled by a desire to save the world from the effects of global warming. The company is in line to make profits of over £120 million from the Governments renewables’ slush-fund – a hoard of cash that is paid for by you and me.

The industrialisation of our wild places is being paid for by every electricity consumer in Britain. That’s partly why out bills are going through the roof. The Government’s Renewables Obligation, a financial support policy to stimulate demand for renewable energy, is driving this all-out windrush and needs fundamental reform. Our politicians need to do their bit for the wild lands of Scotland, as well as saving energy. The two should be compatible but we need to see incentives for renewable energy based on community need rather than commercial greed. Such incentives must be geared to support smaller scale local community schemes along with better support for offshore renewable energy generation.

It’s a curious thing but on the one hand we have a Government that pays subsidies to farmers to look after the land in more environmentally-friendly ways, and on the other hand they are paying huge subsidies to power companies to destroy it in the most environmentally un-friendly ways. There appears to be a total lack of joined-up thinking coming from Whitehall and Holyrood. It’s such a shame that was not reflected in the ballot boxes of the last General Election, but it could have a bearing in next year’s Scottish election, especially if Jim Mather and co continue to approve such schemes as this one at Dunmaglass. Mather was also the minister who approved the Beauly-Denny power scheme. It’s time he went, he’s screwing up Scotland’s wild landscapes in no uncertain terms.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at the opening ceremony of an international Adventure Travel Conference in Aviemore. When I discovered I had to share a platform with a Government minister I was concerned. When I was told that Government minister was Jim Mather I pulled out. I’m afraid I couldn’t bring myself to listen to him banging on about what a marvellous place Scotland was for adventure sports, while he was intent in ruining some of the wildest parts of it. But that’s hypocrisy and that’s politics - the two go hand in hand, and I wasn’t going to get involved in it.

So it came to me as no surprise that despite thousands of objections Mather has approved this scheme at Dunmaglass. The development is sickening in its scale and insensitivity. The turbines will be seen as “pale, moving man-made vertical elements in a landscape with few obvious influences of man.” Those are not my words but the words from the RES Environmental Impact Statement. The same statement also casually proclaims that up to 11 golden eagles could die. It doesn’t say how many red kite, ospreys, buzzards, merlin, raven, grouse or geese might die and it avoids confronting the fact that in places like California and Spain thousands of raptors are killed annually by spiralling turbine blades.

When the plans were first announced I visited Coignafearn and was shown around by the estate keeper, Sandy Day. Since this estate was bought by Sigrid Rausing a few years ago it has seen a remarkable transformation. Woodland is being regenerated, the sporting estate is being managed on ecologically sustainable principles and Rausing’s “Coignafearn Vision” is a wonderful strategy for its future as the sustainable heart of the Monadh Liath. Golden Eagle have been encouraged to stay on the estate and attempt to breed for the first time in 30 years.

Sandy took me high on the hill overlooking Coignafearn and with some pride told me what had been achieved in a comparatively short time. He then swept his arm over the near horizon and indicated the scale of the Dunmaglass Power Station, a project that will totally undermine all the efforts that have been made to manage this one time Royal Deer Forest. The proposals are arrogant, greedy and insensitive – an affront to both man and nature.

The three estates that neighbour Hayward’s Dunmaglass, along with thousands of hillwalkers and ornithologists opposed this scheme. Mather’s approval of it and his mumbo-jumbo about “a great year for renewable developments” should ring alarm bells in the ears of everyone who appreciates wild land. If that includes you, then consider joining the John Muir Trust and supporting its Wild Land Campaign.

MANY thanks to everyone who has emailed and posted on Facebook about The Hebridean Trail which got its showing on the BBC last night. All the kind comments are much appreciated. The Outer Isles really are fascinating and well worth a visit. Tremendous variety, great landscapes and seascapes, and some wonderful ancient sites.

For anyone who missed the programme it’s on the BBC i-Player for a week from today.

I’VE just written my last column for the Sunday Herald newspaper. After eleven and a half years of writing a weekly hillwalking piece for the paper I’m now going to have a bit of free time on my hands and I’m rather looking forward to that. Travelling the length and breadth of the country to climb a hill, photograph it and then write it up, on a week to week basis, has almost dominated my life over the past few years but it’s been a discipline that I’ve very much enjoyed and I’m certainly going to miss it.

One thing that writing this column has emphasised to me is the fabulous diversity of landscape we have here in Scotland. I’ve also realised that while we have a lot of wild land we are losing that intrinsic wildness very fast. Bulldozed tracks and the emergence of large scale windfarms are the most common culprits and we need more and more people to stand up for wild land in Scotland. That’s one of the reasons I’m delighted to be a Wild Land Ambassador for the John Muir Trust and I hope be able to help the Trust with their Wild Land campaign over the next few years.

But today, after penning my last column, I’ve been looking back over the past dozen years and recalling some sensational days on the hill. When Andrew Jaspan, one of our finest newspaper editors, asked me to write a column he gave me a very open brief – go for a walk in the hills every week for us and write it up in a way that will encourage Sunday Herald readers to try it for themselves. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. Occasionally I’ve nipped over the border into the Lakes or Northumberland but essentially these weekly offerings have been about the hills of Scotland, the places that I know and love the best.

It’s perhaps pertinent than that my last column has been about a walk in my home patch here in Badenoch. There’s been a lot of good work going on developing the footpaths around the villages of Laggan, Newtonmore and Kingussie, and the route I’ve described in my final column runs between Kingussie and Newtonmore and could form a tremendous finale to the Speyside Way. I suspect it’s going to be a very popular route in the years to come.

So my warmest thanks go to all those who have been reading my Wild Weekend column over the years, and particularly all those who have written to correct me on my geology or history or whatever. Writing a column like Wild Weekend should never be a one-way process and thanks to you it hasn’t been. I hope we can continue our correspondence through the conduit of TGO magazine where I’ll be contributing my monthly columns and gear tests and Wild Walks – and videos! Thanks go also to the various editors and the team at the Sunday Herald who continue to put out a good newspaper despite very, very difficult trading conditions.

I also hope to be shooting a lot more videos for the TGO website, which recently won the Best Online Presence category at the Scottish PPA Awards. And I’ll be doing a bit more television work in the new year with two series at the planning stage as well as my regular pieces on the excellent Adventure Show for BBC Scotland. I’ll also be writing a regular piece for The Scots Magazine so life will be as busy as ever… oh, and why I am not writing any more columns for the Sunday Herald? Cost cutting - the unfortunate buzzword of the times we live in. Ho-hum…

I first visited the mountain biking trails at Glentress near Peebles about eight or nine years ago. I’ve never been an enthusiastic mountain biker but every so often when I feel the middle-aged urge to do something serious about my inflating size, I’ll haul the bike out, dust it down, pump up the tyres and go for a spin. I usually come home promising to take up running again…

But a visit to Glentress a couple of years ago really inspired me to take up cycling a bit more seriously. Gina and I had been walking in the hills near Peebles and we were looking for a café. I remembered the excellent café at Glentress so that’s where we went. Home-baked cakes and good coffee went down well but what I recall from that visit was the fantastic buzz about the place. People of all ages, from toddlers to OAP’s were out on bikes, the café was full of folk enjoying themselves in the fresh air and I went home thinking I should come back here with my bike.

On my first visit I had discovered that local bikers, along with the landowner, the Forestry Commission, were working hard to make Glentress Forest mountain biking trail network the biggest single tourist attraction in the Borders. I think they have achieved that. Indeed, one of the journalists who was with me on that initial visit, a man who knew much more about biking mountain than me, reckoned the trails at Glentress could rival any mountain bike trails in the world. This is what he wrote: “Riding single track-narrow paths by another name – is the pinnacle of mountain bike riding. It is, by turns, technically challenging as you negotiate narrow bridges and tight chicanes and terrifying as you whoosh down steep descents through dense woods. For a long time, singletrack trails have been the preserve of fabled mountain biking destinations – Utah, the South Island of New Zealand, Chamonix – but thanks to the Forestry Commission, you can add Scotland to that list.”

One of the aspects of Glentress that has added significantly to the success of the place is the Hub, the café and cycle hire centre that’s been built from scratch by two very personable young women, Emma Guy and Tracey Brunger. They’ve worked extremely hard to build the Hub’s reputation and in doing so have helped raise the reputation of the mountain bike trails too. But now, it appears, their landlord, the Forestry Commission, want rid of them. The women have failed in a tendering process to operate the Commission’s new £9 million visitor centre at Glentress. 30 jobs will be lost and their award-winning business will be scrapped.

Not surprisingly, mountain bikers are incensed, claiming that the Forestry Commission is ripping the heart out of Glentress and that no fancy visitor centre could ever replace the warmth and welcome bikers get at the Hub. “We have ten years of experience, we know this area inside out, we have an incredible track record in this area. But now we have been told that we are not good enough,” Emma said. “This decision is a real kick in the teeth for us after spending ten years of our life and a considerable amount of money building up this business.”

Mountain bikers from throughout Scotland are now planning a campaign to save their favourite caff and it might be a comforting thought to them that the Forestry Commission has been in this kind of situation before. I recall a number of years ago that there was a threat hanging over the renewal of the lease of the very popular Mountain Café in Glenmore in the Cairngorms when the Commission built their visitor centre across the road. After some protest the Commission backed down and I would urge them to do the same at Glentress. Scotland has few enough world class centres and Glentress, along with the superb Wolftrax at Laggan and Aonach Mor mountain bike runs at Fort William have ensured that Scotland is now a world class destination for mountain bikers.

Forestry Commission Scotland has apparently said that the decision not to accept the Hub’s bid was made by a panel of assessors but one wonders how many of those assessors were mountain bikers or if any of them know what outdoor folk want in a centre like Glentress. I suspect not. The Forestry Commission can’t afford to hide behind a panel of faceless people. I’d urge them to get behind Emma and Tracey, support them, recognize what they have already achieved, and make Glentress even better than it already is.

I’m delighted that our new book, The Skye Trail, has finally arrived. It’s been held up by a variety of problems including the weather but it’s here now and I’m just about to start packing them into envelopes to send out to folk. For more info on the book check out our sister website at www.mountain-media.co.uk

We’ve been busy creating a brand new website for our company Mountain Media Productions Ltd. I’m aware some of you were having difficulty buying books and DVD’s from the old site so have a look at the new website at www.mountain-media.co.uk and let me know what you think.

I’ll shortly have all the new DVD’s on the site, including the highly successful climbing titles, The Great Climb and The Triple 5 featuring David MacLeod and Tim Emmett, plus our brand new book The Skye Trail which we are just awaiting delivery of. Should be available from later this week.

With Christmas just around the corner there’s plenty of books and DVD’s to tempt your loved ones. I reckon we can still get books and DVD’s to you in time for the Big Day!

BBC Scotland has indicated that my long hike and bike trip through the Outer Hebrides - The Hebridean Trail - will be broadcast on BBC2 Scotland and Sky Channel 990 at 7pm on December 27th. It was a great journey starting on Vatersay, the most southerly inhabited island of the Outer Isles, and running up the length of the Outer Hebrides to finish at the Butt of Lewis. The idea was to climb some hills on the islands and link up the best hillwalking areas with a bit of cycling, check out the wildlife and local characters and get an idea of what modern Hebridean living was like. We had some terrific interviewees and climbed some great wee hills. Having said that some of the best walking was on the machairs of the west coast and I have never seen beaches like the Hebridean ones, anywhere.

The programme will appear in DVD form sometime in the New Year.