Almost four million acres has been designated as wild land, to inform planning policy.

It is not a designation founded in law but it serves to underline the importance the Scottish Government attaches to ensuring certain areas are protected from development, not least wind farms.

However SNP MSP Rob Gibson is right to remind us that this land had another life. As Professor Jim Hunter, the historian, has argued, it supported people over 50 centuries, and it is only in the last two that the voice of man has not been heard.

During Scottish Natural Heritage's consultation, those closest to the land in question had serious misgivings that this wild land is now held to be natural; the people whose place it had been "rendered invisible ".

Proposed development in these areas is inappropriate and ministers are right to protect against it. Yet thought must must be given to reclaiming some of this land from its sad human history. It would be a suitable memorial to those who were cleared.

The late Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan, whose forebears had to leave Kintail, knew the difference wilderness and emptiness: "Above the 60th parallel in Canada you feel that nobody but God has ever been there before you but in a deserted Highland glen you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone."