Hindsight – Jenna Watt

Hindsight is the story of writer and theatre-maker Jenna’s experience of stalking a deer hind on a vast Highland estate as part of an attempt to understand the shifting baselines of ‘rewilding’, and what it means emotionally and physically to participate in Scotland’s deer cull.  

 In what is an insightful, non-scientific exploration of wilderness and Highland identity, she unravels the story of that day’s hunt, interlaced with a discovery that her ancestors were deer stalkers, gamekeepers and ghillies who participated in what are now considered by many as ecologically damaging land practices.  

 Along the way she meets the ‘Wolf Man’ of the Highlands, who wants to reintroduce wolves to Scotland; a mountain ecologist, who ranges alone across the landscape to track the environmental impact of deer; landowners who are reintroducing species such as beaver onto their estates; and a female deer stalker pushing for more women to enter the male-dominated world of stalking and game-keeping. 

 “Hindsight is about much more than deer… Watt has an unsparing eye for whims and ecological blind spots” The Times Literary Supplement