Demonised, tortured, extirpated - is it time to bring the wolf back?

“When it comes to wolves,” says rewilding pioneer, Derek Gow, “what's required is courage; political courage. Even though the animals can be radio-satellite collared so we know the location of every wolf, I doubt that the powers that be in Scotland and Nature Scot will have any interest in this at all.

“They will do nothing until they are explicitly politically told to do something. Politically nothing will happen until there is a groundswell of public opinion for this animal.”

Gow lives on a 300-acre farm on the Devon-Cornwall border, which he has been rewilding with wild boar, white stork and beavers, as well as, within a large enclosure, lynx - having previously reared sheep and cattle. But the story of his passion for nature, and the wolf, begins in his Scottish childhood, near Biggar, at the edge of the Southern Uplands.

What sparked both Gow’s new book about the predator's history, Hunt for the Shadow Wolf: The Lost History of Wolves in Britain, and his young imagination was a story that his grandmother told him of a place near his childhood home, called Wolf Clyde, said to be the site where the last wolf was killed on the Clyde. In her tale, the wolf was killed by a woman with a griddle pan.