Was this the last wild wolf of Britain? (2024)

Not far from the village of Killiecrankie in the Scottish Highlands, there is a densely wooded gorge through which the River Garry rushes. According to folklore, it is here (or somewhere very like it) that Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel shot the last wild-living wolf in Great Britain in 1680.

In May I walked across the Highlands to find out how local people feel about the idea of bringing the wolf back, a prospect that is gaining momentum and one that the UK government is obliged to consider under an EU Directive of 1992. For some this is a necessary reevaluation of a once-persecuted animal; for others it’s yet another scheme concocted by city folk who don’t understand the countryside.

I had read about Cameron’s wolf in James Edmund Harting’s 1880 classic British Animals Extinct Within Historic Times (With Some Account of British Wild White Cattle). There, in a footnote to the text, he notes that “a noble animal in a large glass case” had come up for sale in 1818, a specimen that claimed to be “the last Wolf killed in Scotland by Sir E. Cameron.” Could this really be true, I wondered?

I decided to start in 1818 and work backwards to 1680. According to Harting, the wolf had been listed as “Lot 832” in the sale catalogue of the “London Museum” or the London Museum and Institute of Natural History as it was properly known. This had been the brainchild of Edward Donovan, an amateur zoologist, author, artist and budding entrepreneur who had opened its doors on Catherine Street just off the Strand in 1807. But the project had cost him the colossal sum of £15,000 and within a decade he was broke. Unable to find a benefactor, Donovan had little option but to auction off his entire collection, including the wolf.

Donovan was a prolific author, writing dozens of books on the natural history of the British Isles. One of them – the Natural History of British Quadrupeds – contains a chapter on the wolf and a description that waxes, at times, almost Shakespearian. Wolves, he tells us, “frequently commit prodigious ravages”. The book also includes the illustration of a lone wolf with an unhinged look and a hint of slaver round its chops, most likely based on the sole wolf specimen that he held in his collection. Where did Donovan get his wolf? With a bit of searching, I discover that the year before he opened his museum, he’d picked up the wolf and some other interesting specimens from the dispersal of another natural history collection.

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Several decades earlier, in 1775, Sir Ashton Lever had opened the Leverian Museum, recognised as the finest natural history collection of its day. But Lever, like Donovan after him, was more interested in collecting than accounting and by 1786 he was bankrupt, disposing of all 28,000 objects with a lottery. The winning ticket was bought by James Parkinson, a stationer. But Parkinson, also beset by financial difficulties, struggled to make it a going concern and put it up for auction in 1806, which is when Donovan came into the picture. At the sale he bought more items than anyone else. On 30 June, along with “sea otter, young,” “crab, with a number of oyster shells adhering” and “a curious water rat”, he paid five pounds for “the wolf in fine preservation.”

Botanist and zoologist George Shaw made a study of Lever's collection and his Musei Leveriani published in 1792 contains an illustration of Lever’s wolf. This bears a happy resemblance to Donovan’s illustration – see how that front left forepaw is co*cked – supporting the idea that Lever’s wolf and Donovan’s wolf are one and the same.

Yet the wolf depicted in Musei Leveriani looks closer to a collie, docile and pastoral. And Shaw goes on to note that the ferocity of the wolf “is greatly mitigated by an early education; of which the individual specimen from which the present figure was taken, is a remarkable instance;” it had, he wrote, “been rendered in a great degree tame and gentle by the assiduity of the late Sir Ashton Lever.”

Shaw’s assertion that Lever tamed his wolf before stuffing it and putting it on show strongly suggests that it was not “the last Wolf killed in Scotland by Sir E. Cameron” as Donovan later claimed. Donovan’s ravaging wolf, it seems, was Ashton Lever’s pet.

One can only assume that, on the verge of bankruptcy and with no qualms about misleading a public who had failed to stump up the cash to save his life’s collection, Donovan turned his specimen into “the last Wolf” in the hope of a few extra quid. Maybe he coaxed those jaws into a snarl. There have always been those that benefited in making the wolf a little more ravening than in reality.

Who bought the wolf from Donovan remains a mystery. But although the specimen was not all that Donovan made it out to be, it is one that still fascinates me, mixed up as it is with the wolf's myth and its demise. And it is a specimen I fancy still survives. I picture it now, in the bowels of some Scottish estate perhaps, moth-eaten and with its glass eyes staring madly.

If you think you have seen this wolf, stuffed and quite possibly still in its original glass case, please get in touch.

Tale ends

It is unlikely we will ever know when the wolf finally went extinct in Britain. The story of Ewen Cameron killing a wolf in Killiecrankie seems to derive from a footnote in travel book for 1769, but it is by no means the only “last wolf” story. By the time that Lever sourced a wolf cub to tame, we can be certain that there were no longer any wolves in Britain so he probably looked further afield. He was renowned in his youth for training his beagles so well that they would close and open doors for him. A wolf must have seemed the next logical challenge.