Ivor Guest’s father was instrumental in setting up the East Loch Ericht Deer Management group in the 1970s, and was a stalker in his own right when at the estate. Ivor’s father, grandfather, grandmother aunt and uncle chose Craiganour as their final resting place. Ivor Guest took on the estate in 1993- having grown up between Paris and Ireland visiting Craiganour as a child.

‘After attending a meeting of the deer management group early on, I was surprised that the decision making process around deer numbers didn’t take into account the ecological condition of the ground itself. I realised nobody had this information and that the land was being managed for deer, grouse and sheep exclusively. At that point I commissioned, with the help of Jonathan Henson of Savills, large ecological surveys- as it turned out pretty much the first of their kind on a Scottish estate. We surveyed everything from soil type to archeology and everything in between’.

‘Furnished with this information in 1997 we planted two large woods at Aulich and Leargan, totalling around 4.5 million trees (Caledonian afforestation with a small commercial element based around thinning). We also put the birch wood and other habitats under regeneration, and began to take a different view of deer numbers and movement. We were involved in a potential wind farm at this time - perhaps I was naive (I was well aware even then that clean energy would become a major issue in the future) but I was not able to support it given the impact on the landscape. That was a complex decision that I might make differently today. In the early 2000s we built the James Turrell Skyspace, and in 2007 refurbished and modernised the Lodge’.