Interview: Alison Austin, Nevis Manager
On 21 June 2025, the Trust celebrated 25 years of caring for Nevis. Meet one of the key members of our Nevis team.
This iconic mountain has been the inspiration to many for millennia, but its appeal goes far beyond the peaks and valleys that hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to every year. It’s also a base for wildlife like eagles and snow bunting and a habitat for the native woodland that edge the river.
One individual that knows Nevis better than most is Alison Austin, our Nevis Manager. Having worked tirelessly to care for this special wild place for two decades, Alison and her team on the land ensure that we can continue to encourage and support access to Nevis, while retaining the mountain’s essential wildness and important biodiversity:
“Looking after a mountain as iconic as Ben Nevis, when so many people are connected and invested in its future, is a challenge and a privilege. My highlights have been finding the extremely northern emerald dragonfly on our peatland restorations site, exploring the steep north face cliffs for rare alpine plants, watching people enjoy the walk up the Ben and getting out in nature and the many days working and laughing with our fantastic volunteers to improve habitats and protect this amazing place.
"Our activities at Nevis over the past 25 years have included managing visitor impact by maintaining the upper stretch of the Ben Nevis summit path and the Steall Gorge trail, as well as regular litter picks."
Alison and her team also carry out regular wildlife and habitat surveys at Nevis and are working to encourage the natural expansion of native woodland including Scots pine. Alison says this includes deer control so that native trees can regenerate, as well as some planting with the local community as part of the Nevis Landscape Partnership Future Forest project.
"In autumn 2022, we carried out a peatland restoration project at Nevis. It was an expensive and challenging contract to write and manage as the site is so remote. All the material was helicoptered in and we had a great team on the ground who were happy to work with our volunteers to complete the restoration.
"It has been lovely seeing those exposed peat hags slowly rewet, while smaller pools remerge behind coir dams and start to recolonise with sphagnum. It’s specially exciting to record for the first time the presence of the rare Northern Emerald dragonfly this summer, which relies on those pools.”
Alison’s work often goes beyond the practical, with her role involving liaising with land managers from outside the conservation sector. Maintaining relationships with our neighbours and local communities are more important than ever at Nevis, and we hope to continue to strengthen these ties through partnerships and work on the land.
“My role is to build strong and trusting relationships, explore potential shared partnership projects and agree principles and delivery agreements among multiple partners.
"This takes time but I am convinced this is the key to making the large-scale changes we need to allow important mountain habits to thrive and for our communities to be part of that future. There some very exciting developments with our neighbouring landowners and partners in the community led Nevis Landscape Partnership, in the form of the Nevis Nature Network project. This project aims to deliver a future vison for our land and the land surrounding us to restore a thriving woodland network in the Nevis landscape, connecting an expanding stronghold of Scotland’s Rainforest to montane scrub on the high mountain slopes."
