Philip Marsden

Creature comforts

The company of fawns, owlets and badger cubs helped ease the misery of John Lister-Kaye’s brutal prep school

issue 09 September 2017

As naturalist, educator and writer, John Lister-Kaye was for many years a voice in the wilderness. In 1976, when nature conservation was still considered a benign eccentricity, he moved into a crumbling estate in the Scottish highlands. Taking as its credo a text from Gavin Maxwell —‘I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world’ — he set up the Aigas Field Centre.

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