The Unremembered Places is a poignant and enthralling take on some of Scotland’s most fascinating, yet overlooked, places of interest. Combining a rich fusion of travelogue and historical narrative, Patrick baker threads themes of geology, natural and social history, literature, and industry from the places he visits, discovering connections between people and place more powerful than can be imagined.

The thought stayed with me. In the weeks following my return from St Finnan’s Isle, I rolled it around in my subconscious, turning it over again and again as if rubbing pebbles in my palm. The idea that wild histories were somehow synchronous with the present, influencing and occupying the here and now as much as they were signifiers of the past, threw a different perspective on the places I had visited. They had felt wild certainly, but the stories I’d encountered had contemporary significance, were sustained as well as sustaining. The ancient pathway still used on Jock’s Road, the placement of flowers at Inishail’s graveyard, the legend of St Finnan’s Bell – these were not mere rites of remembrance but a vital continuation of what had been.

At the same time, a narrative was also building in my journeys. An observation of things left behind: memorials, shelters, gravestones. Things left behind – but not discarded. There was a subtle difference, an intentionality and motive that had endowed certain locations or landscapes with an enduring meaning. The opposite, however, was true as well. Markers exist within Scotland’s wild places that are discrete and fragmentary, unconnected and now forgotten. In many ways these unremembered histories hold more intrigue, oblige more interest, require more explanation. They are the evidence of specific moments, sudden events and abrupt endings. Wildness is part of their story, but also the reason for their lingering anonymity. To find such a relic is therefore to be confounded, puzzled by opposing characteristics of significance and obscurity. One such anomaly in the landscape astonishes me more than most, and I visited it a month after my trip to Loch Shiel.

On the high, empty moorland of Sheriffmuir west of the Ochil Hills is a long section of wall, two metres thick and broken by artillery fire. It’s not easy to see at first. The concrete takes the same dun colour of the surrounding landscape, a swell of hillside rising behind it, nudging it below the horizon. But it’s there on the map, a thin, rectangular box sitting snugly, but without explanation, between the contour lines.

I parked on the single-track road that runs across the moor’s western flank, opening the car door onto a wind that had all the force of an incoming wave. My sons were with me and bundled out of the car too, half falling, half jumping, one on top of the other. They raced on ahead, old enough to be let loose but still not tall enough to stride easily through the heather. I watched them leap and stumble across the moor in their bright rain jackets, heads bobbing above the tall grass. By the time I reached the wall, they were already there, chasing each other round the structure.

On one side, the wall ran straight for about 250 feet, a solid unbroken façade supported by several sturdy buttresses. On the other, the structure had been disembowelled. Sinuous metal peeled out from the broken concrete, thick cables splayed in the flower patterns of explosion. At one section, the wall had been completely breached by shell blast: a half-circle gap filled with a blue and white sky, concrete held in mid-air by wires, suspended at the moment of detonation. In between, grasses had grown, large tussocks with white seed-heads, covering the debris and joining the moor on either side.

It served no obvious purpose, this mammoth lump of industrial masonry. There was nothing in the acres of windswept moorland to protect or enclose, no architectural clues or logic to its placement. It simply began and ended. But it was here, in the secrecy rendered by a wild and remote place, that a crucial stage of Britain’s war effort against Nazi Germany had been finalised.

The wall had been built in 1943 as a full-scale replica of a section of Hitler’s Atlantic defences, the vast series of coastal fortifications that ran all the way from northern Norway to southern Spain. Plans stolen by the French Resistance, combined with aerial photography, enabled the British Army to build their own versions of the wall according to the exact specifications of the German construction. At least four other walls were also covertly made, one in Wales and another three in England.

The intention was to test the structural resolve of the concrete ramparts ahead of the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day. Ordnance was heaped on the replica wall in intensive set-piece rehearsals, while soldiers from artillery regiments carried out mock offensives of the beach landings. The wall fulfilled its purpose. On the one hand it confirmed to the military tacticians that the German defences could be sufficiently breached to allow tanks, troops and armaments to pass through and press the offensive inland. On the other, it enabled a vital pre-visualisation, a means for soldiers to somehow steel themselves for the eventual horror of the beach landings. Amid the hail of gunfire and shrapnel as they ran and fell, sodden, bloodied and terrified on Normandy sand, a surge of familiarity might have surfaced in their thoughts; the muscle memory of the training, the self-belief borne of repeated action, the recollection of the wall, its concrete shattered once before, a battle theoretically won high on that heather-clad moor.

The peculiar fate of the Atlantic Wall, an object both unaltered and forgotten because of its wild location, put me in mind of another place that held secrets on a far greater scale. It was an entire region of the left behind, a formaldehyde jar of land that had preserved life as it had once been lived: sheilings, crofts and whole townships abandoned to the elements.

Patrick Baker has worked in the publishing industry for many years and is currently writer for an investment management company. He is a keen outdoor enthusiast and has walked and climbed throughout Scotland and Europe. He is the author of The Cairngorms: A Secret History.