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Firefighters battled wildfires in the Scottish Highlands for a third day on Monday in a situation the first minister has called “extremely serious”.
The Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA), which has helped tackle the blazes, warned the fires are “becoming a danger to human life” that are leaving “stretched” firefighters unable to attend other incidents.
On Saturday morning, the Scottish fire and rescue service was alerted to a fire near the Highland village of Carrbridge. By Monday evening, the fire service said it was still tackling several wildfire incidents in the area.
At 8.40pm on Monday, the fire service urged residents in the vicinity of the fire to “ensure their windows and doors are closed to prevent smoke from entering”.
It said: “Our firefighters continue to work tirelessly to tackle several wildfire incidents from Carrbridge in Highland to Dallas, outside Forres in Moray.
“A significant number of resources and special resources have been mobilised throughout the area.”
A flood alert was issued for some of the affected areas by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, which said: “Minor flooding impacts and disruption to travel is possible if the heaviest rain falls in vulnerable areas.”
The SGA said that a “round-the-clock effort” from gamekeepers and land managers, working with the fire service, helped prevent two fires from merging into one larger blaze – a move that would have been a “nightmare scenario”.
Scottish first minister John Swinney said on X: “The wildfires that are taking place are extremely serious. Please follow all of the advice available. Grateful to Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and local people for their efforts to get the fires under control.
Fergus Ewing, the MSP for Inverness and Nairn constituency, said the wildfires “raging” across the area were “said by many locals to be the worst in our history”.
He added that he had already urged the Scottish government to convene its emergency response committee – the Scottish government resilience room, known as SGORR.
The SGA called on the Scottish government’s nature advisers at NatureScot to visit the sites of these blazes to see first-hand their impact and the efforts required to tackle them.
Speaking about the blazes, an SGA spokesperson said: “This is becoming a danger to human life because firefighters are becoming so stretched dealing with wildfires that they don’t have the resources to attend other fires.”
They insisted: “We need to have the Scottish government and their advisers out now to see what is happening, while these fires are ongoing.”
One witness, who tried to put the initial fire out, told BBC Scotland News that the seat of the wildfire was a ring of stones where a camp fire had been lit and camping chairs had been abandoned.
Dræyk van der Hørn, a Scottish Greens councillor for Moray, photographed the wildfires from a summit in the Cairngorms earlier on Monday.
He said: “Wildfires in Scotland were once a rarity. Not any more.
“Hotter, drier springs and summers – driven by the accelerating climate crisis – are turning our landscapes into tinderboxes.
“Fires are now more frequent, more intense and more destructive. This is not a distant warning.
“Climate change is here, and Moray, and Scotland are on the frontline.”
