PAUL LISTER�s dream is to re-wild his highland estate with wolves and other animals long since driven from Scotland, but not everyone shares his vision
By Julie Davidson

THERE is nothing grand about the Laird of Alladale; or, as BBC Scotland prefers to call him, The Real Monarch Of The Glen. He rarely claims the master bedroom in his big house - an opulent corner room which has all the glory of the River Alladale gorge, bright with new birch leaf, outside its windows. When the lodge is full he happily slums it in a small back room with no en suite and an inferior view. "I think I've slept in every bedroom in the house," he says. "There are only two which haven't been refurbished, and I can make plans for them when I'm lying awake at night."

Like many driven, single-minded people Paul Lister doesn't sleep too well. But he does know how to dream. Lister is the multi-millionaire MFI heir and former furniture salesman - "I use to eat, sleep and breathe chipboard dust" - who wants to turn a chunk of the northern Highlands into a wilderness reserve corralled within 50 miles of electrified fencing. He is the "wolf man", whose ambition to re-forest and re-populate Alladale with our one-time top predator and other vanished mammals has been savaged by our most vocal indigenous species: the militant rambler, for whom the right to march a Vibram sole through every peat bog in Scotland is now enshrined in law and non-negotiable.

"We have 23,000 acres at Alladale, which is half of 1% of the Highland mass," says Lister, whose allies include big names in ecology and conservation, and who shows no perceptible signs of mauling by the rival pack of walkers and climbers. "We need only 50,000 acres to make the reserve big enough to run wolves. Surely some compromise over access is a small price to pay for the re-wilding of such a small part of the Highlands."

So far, the only new fence raised at Alladale surrounds the 450-acre enclosure for the first re-introduced species: a herd of wild boar and two mighty European elk which are already fending for themselves, but for which he has had to acquire a dangerous animal licence. "Come and see them," he commands, leaping into his Land Rover. First we see the fence, which is a perfect symbol of the legislative paradox that is hobbling Lister's plans. On the gate is a red-for-danger notice with the information "Dangerous Wild Animals"; to its right is a 10-ft style over the fence "to give the public the right to roam", as required by the Land Reform Act (Scotland).

"We're not a zoo, we're not a safari park where animals are fed by keepers, we're not a national park: we don't tick any boxes. We're on a journey from A to Z and we have only reached K. The wolves won't join us until we get to Y, and only then if we succeed in getting Alladale exempted from the Land Reform Act. And then we'll have brought something unique to the Highlands, with access for day visitors and escorted walks and game drives."

Lister's enthusiasm is excitable. He rarely sits still; he is slightly built but wiry, with the restless physique of a long-distance runner (just as well, if he's to go the distance at Alladale) and a temperament he calls "hyperactive". When he talks and laughs, which he does all the time, he shows large white teeth. A silly joke almost escapes me: "What big teeth you've got, grandmamma?" But only the most fanciful observer would describe his appearance as lupine. Besides, Red Riding Hood is the true villain of the fairy tale, with her demonisation of a nervous and elusive animal which sensibly takes to its heels at the first whiff of human odour.

We roar back up the hill to Alladale Lodge, which is not just a second home for Lister but a key component in his master plan. The granite building, a typical legacy of the upmarket Victorian leisure industry, has been sumptuously restored to sleep 16 paying guests. Every game park must have its luxury lodge, and this one is let for exclusive use to families, friends or corporate team players. A rear extension harbours spa, gym and board room, and visitors are invited to help with tree planting, deer calf tagging, badger observation and other conservation programmes. A range of outdoor sports is also on offer, including fishing and stalking.

"The stalking will go when the wolves take over," Lister says confidently. Meanwhile, the reserve must wash its face with more income-generating accommodation - two new cottages and another lodge scheduled for conversion. "We hope to have 30 beds before long. I'm looking to buy at least another 37,000 acres of local land and I need to persuade the neighbouring estates the reserve can be economically viable even at this stage. I can't go to people and say look, I'm having such good fun losing money here, would you like to join me or would you rather put your spare cash in a hedge fund? Not much of a new economic model for the Highlands there."

Lister is more philanthropist than venture capitalist. He bought Alladale for £3.5 million and over five years has spent a further £1.5 million on its development. Through his charity, the European Wildlife Fund, he is funding research by Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (an ecologist called Chris Sandom spends most of his waking hours with the boar, studying their needs and usefulness as living rotavators). He has set up and hosts the annual six-week Challenger Trust (camping, conservation and outdoor adventures for parties of secondary school pupils) and admits this is also part of his charm offensive on local opinion, which he claims is shifting his way. But he doesn't expect a personal return on any of these investments. Or, as his reserve manager puts it: "Paul's not looking to take money down the glen."

Hugh Fullerton-Smith is another key component in the master plan. "I'm a retailer," says Lister. "I know how to manage shops but not land, and Hugh has 30 years of international experience behind him. He helped the Sioux in South Dakota re-wild their reserves and recover their buffalo. He helped Mongolian peasant farmers re-populate degraded land with sheep and goats, and he was the first person to bring wild boar into Britain and show how good they are at preparing land for tree-planting." Despite the hyphenated name there is nothing of the posh factor about Fullerton-Smith. He is a big, powerfully built, hands-on New Zealander who calls himself a "jackeroo". He himself approached Lister when he heard of his project, and believes its potential for success is "a no-brainer".

The term "re-wilding" has a thrilling ring to it, although it's a buzz word for bureaucrats as well as ecologists. There is even an EU directive encouraging member nations to support efforts (like the Knapdale beaver project in Argyll, which has just been given the green light by the Scottish Government) to recover the biodiversity of degraded land and restore, as much as possible, its original vegetation and wildlife. And land doesn't come much more degraded than the wasted hills and treeless waterways of Alladale, which was yet another unprofitable sporting estate when Lister bought it in 2003.

"The previous owner spent three weeks a year here and employed three people," he says. "Our current workforce is 18, mainly local, and in another two years it will be at least 30. I have no sentimental feelings about wolves or other wildlife. I don't want to hand-rear them or keep them as pets. The whole project is science-driven and the reserve will be managed until it can run itself, probably in about 60 years time, after I'm dead." (He is 49.) "But that's okay. As I'm sure you know there is no such thing as pristine wilderness in Scotland."

We are watching a posse of young stags ford the river Carron. With their high, handsome heads and muscular necks they look impressive; but not as impressive as the red deer of mainland Europe, which are forest deer and much taller and heavier; as ours once were, before they lost their woodland with its rich browsing and were forced into the hills, where meagre grazing diminished their stock. A memory of their early history lingers in the language of sporting estates, whose "deer forests" are treeless moors and uplands. "Ninety per cent of these places lose money," says Lister, pursuing his argument for a new Highland economy. "I could take you to one estate which employs only one person."

First the forests were cleared by settlers, driving our elk, lynx, bear, boar and wolf - the most enduring large predator - into smaller and smaller redoubts. Then came livestock, and the last Scottish wolves were hunted to extinction in the middle of the 18th century, leaving the deer to proliferate. Then, infamously, came sheep; and the combined forces of sheep and deer, fatal to the natural re-generation of woodland, gave us the celebrated Highland landscape of heather, bog and bracken we know today.

"We'll never get the Great Wood of Caledon back," says Lister. "The industrial revolution finished it off, when there was a huge demand for timber. But to re-wild Alladale we must start with trees. We will go on culling until we get the deer numbers down, and we've already planted 80,000 saplings near the rivers. Birch, alder and rowan on the banks, Caledonian pine on the slopes behind."

The reserve is an hour's drive northwest of Inverness. It straddles the border of Ross-shire and Sutherland (the nearest villages are Ardgay and Bonar Bridge, now bypassed by the A9) and sits midway between Loch Broom in the west and the Dornoch Firth in the east. "We're on the narrowest point of mainland Britain. From our highest tops you can see coast to coast on a clear day."

To those who love walking the Scottish hills - and I'm one of them - the landscape has familiar features: long glacial glens, peat-brown rivers, remnants of mature birchwood and Caledonian pine, a sprinkling of hill lochs and, beyond the headwalls of Glen Alladale and Glen Beag, austere uplands rolling from one false summit to the next.

"Mamba country," I remark, as we survey the distant tops from the track's lonely terminus - a small hydro-electric dam on the River Carron where the builders, many years back, neglected to install a fish ladder. Lister looks puzzled until I explain the army acronym for Miles And Miles of Bugger All. He gives his explosive laugh. "Mamba signifies Africa to me."

Much has been made of Lister's African connections. He is a regular visitor to the great game parks of east and south Africa, and uses the model of Shamwari Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape as an example of successful re-wilding. Here private land once trashed by farming has been returned to a population of its best "managers" - predators and prey species and all the other wildlife which keep the African wilderness balanced and healthy. His opponents have accused him of attempting to impose this exotic prototype on the weary Highlands, which have had more than their share of "improvers". But the inspiration for Alladale lies much closer to home.

In the forests of mainland Europe, not many miles from the mountain resorts of the Pyrenees or the tourist coasts of Italy and Spain, there are remnant populations of European wolf, brown bear and even lynx. Lister got his first experience of wolves in the Carpathian Mountains, where he has maintained links with the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project in Romania. There, a population of some 3000 wolves runs free, and wildlife tourism is a valuable niche market in the local economy.

"I went there first in 1992, and that's when the idea began to take shape. But I've been coming to Scotland since I was 20, when my father bought forestry land in Argyll and I did a bit of deer-culling. It occurred to me even then that there was something badly wrong with the balance of things when we had to shoot so many deer to maintain a robust population and let trees grow. You ask Innes MacNeill, our head ranger and stalker, what it's like to find red deer, often pregnant hinds, starving to death."

Lister's father is Noel Lister, founder of the MFI furniture empire, which he sold to Asda in 1985 for a reputed £60 million. His son's background is both typical and atypical of the sons of successful fathers. The family home is in the affluent north London suburb of Totteridge, he went to expensive but quirky Millfield School in Somerset - "the only thing I shone at was cross-country running" - but he was no spoilt rich kid. "I was 40 years old before I flew business class. Both my parents were adventurous sailors, who took off round the world and kept a yacht in the Caribbean. But when I joined them for holidays I had to earn my treats. I couldn't get a Mars Bar without swimming under the yacht's keel."

His father also made him work his passage in the retail industry, and his first job was with Littlewoods. He confesses he's spent much of his life competing with the Lister patriarch. When he started his own furniture chain it borrowed something of the MFI stack-em-up-sell-em-cheap philosophy. "It was called Furniture To Go, and it was a cross between Ikea and Costco. Can you imagine anything more ghastly?"

Seven years ago he was almost overwhelmed by two calamities, one after the other. Furniture To Go failed and went into administration, and his father suffered a serious stroke. "I spent three months in Florida by his bedside, haranguing doctors, changing hospitals and, I believe, saving his life. Then it was time to re-think my own life."

Enter the wilderness reserve - not a whim, but a calculation which required him to twist the arms of the family trustees to release capital and find the right Highland property. "I spent a lot of time looking, as I had 10 criteria in mind." Alladale included five of the most essential: no more than an hour from Inverness Airport, no Munros, no livestock, tenant farmers or crofters. "I'd have liked more forest cover, but we'll get that right. I find synergy in the fact that I spent half my adult life chopping down trees and now I'm putting them back."

There have been other events since he bought Alladale: a short-lived marriage, his first, and a manor house in Oxfordshire which is now on the market. "We wanted different things." Lone wolf? Again I'm tempted to push the metaphor too far. Instead, I ask what happens if he doesn't manage to untangle Alladale from its bureaucratic and legislative anomalies, buy more land and get the necessary permissions for the reserve's fence and future. "It will happen because enough people want it to happen. If it doesn't I'll know within the next two or three years. And then I'll have to think again."

The Real Monarch Of The Glen, a six-part fly-on-the-wall series on Paul Lister and the Alladale Wildlife Reserve, starts tomorrow at 8pm, BBC2 Scotland