Seeing Through the Myth
The return of the Scottish rainforest
This project began with a frustration at the way Scotland’s Highlands are so often romanticised and portrayed. Tourists and even locals are sold a false perception that the Highlands are wild and untouched. I believed this too. But the more I learned, the more I realised that this ‘wilderness’ is a curated illusion. The Highlands have been grazed bare, stripped of native forests, and replanted with monoculture in the interest of industry and profit. What appears natural is actually a legacy of extraction, and I felt it was time to reveal that.
I chose to locate my project in Callop Woods, Glenfinnan, part of a biodiversity initiative working to re-establish one of Scotland’s rarest ecosystems: the temperate rainforest. This isn’t a pristine forest. It’s a place in recovery. Fragile and Growing.
The form draws from the lichens that inhabit these forests, intricate, floating organisms like oak moss and lace lichen that drape between branches, barely touching the earth. Inspired by these forms, I designed a suspended walkway: a lightweight web of rope tension stretched between trees, lifting the structure gently into the air like a piece of lichen.
The walkway hovers and sways with the trees, anchored delicately but never imposing. It avoids foundations, leaving the forest floor undisturbed so new growth can thrive beneath. At moments, it lowers to meet the ground; at others, it rises just above the canopy. Its highest point offers a rare layered view of the Scottish landscape: the rainforest slowly returning in the foreground, the overgrazed hills stretching beyond, and the dense Sitka plantations lining the distance.
This is not an architectural spectacle. There are no signs, no destinations. The structure blends into the landscape, hosting moss, lichen, and ferns, allowing trees to pierce through it. It’s a place to move slowly, to sit quietly, and to observe without expectation. Over time, the forest will change. And with it, each drawing, photograph, and memory made here becomes not an archive of the architecture but a record of the land it supports.
