Here I am, wanting to get away from the big city and its, sometimes polluted air, into the clean, fresh, invigorating winds of the big hills in Scotland. It sounds like a great idea, especially for someone like me in the early stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who cycles to work and for work, almost every day, in Birmingham and the Black Country.
The only snag is the grey and sometimes brown smoke wafting over the hills and down the valleys in the otherwise pristine environment of the Highlands. What causes this nuisance - and, for me, something that is harming my health, when there is no way for avoiding the smoke? It is the annual muirburn; the heather burning at the end of March and in April. The very weeks that are my favourite for burning rubber off my Vibram soles between the short days of winter and the long midge months of summer.
Is there anyone else out there who dislikes the heather burning and thinks that it puts walkers at a disadvantage for the benefit of the sportsman with his rifle? Or, do you not mind the occasional breathing in of smoke and smelling the fire of the recently blackened hillside?
On Easter Sunday in 2007, I was one of many tourists toiling up and down the path to the summit of Mount Keen, the most easterly Munro, when we were enveloped in smoke. The wind had re-ignited the fires of the previous week's heather burning. This last holiday, on both 1 and 3 April I was enveloped in smoke. Once in the hills north of Blair Atholl and, again, walking north from Loch Glascarnoch, in the Far North to visit the remote Corbett, Carn Ban.
Burning of anything spews out yet more carbon dioxide when one scientific research paper after another urges us to limit our greenhouse gas emissions for the benefit of all humanity.
Am I on my own in wanting heather burning restricted or even stopped?
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