The glen has belonged to many people. The east side was Mackintosh land for centuries — the clan whose chief, Aeneas Mackintosh, leased timber rights at Ruigh Aiteachain to the Glen Feshie Wood Company in the late 18th century, when Scottish pinewoods were being felled at industrial pace to feed shipbuilding and construction. The west side was the Forest of Feshie, the hunting ground of the Dukes of Gordon. From 1752 onwards the Gordons leased it to the Macphersons of Invereshie as sheilings — high summer pastures where cattle were taken up to graze on the better grass. In 1804, an early environmental dispute broke out when Mackintosh and George Macpherson Grant of Ballindalloch quarrelled over damage to floodbanks caused by logs being floated downriver. In 1815, Alexander Gordon, the 4th Duke, sold his Glen Feshie holdings to Macpherson Grant. The cycle of ownership had begun its slow drift away from clan tenure toward the great sporting estates.

The Bedford family arrived in 1818. Georgiana Russell, the Duchess of Bedford, leased the Invereshie shootings from Macpherson Grant and began what would be a decades-long sporting association with the glen — a fashionable English aristocratic family adopting a Highland landscape as their summer hunting ground, a pattern that would soon define large parts of the Scottish Highlands. By 1829 Macpherson Grant was limiting sheep numbers on the upland grazings that his farming tenants depended on. By 1839 he had converted his sheep range in Glen Feshie outright into a deer forest, displacing the surviving small farmers. In the late 1840s the Duchess persuaded Alexander Mackintosh of Mackintosh to do the same on the east side: convert the Bedford shootings into a deer forest. Across two decades, the working agricultural use of Glen Feshie had been rolled up and replaced with sport. Sheep and people gave way to red deer and stalkers — a transformation repeated up and down the Highlands, and one whose ecological consequences are still being worked out today.

In 2006, Anders Holch Povlsen, the Danish founder of the Bestseller clothing empire and one of Europe's largest private landowners, bought the Glen Feshie estate. He soon added the neighbouring 4,000-acre Killiehuntly farm. Povlsen's intent in Glen Feshie has been deliberately the opposite of the Victorian conversion to deer forest: cull the deer population aggressively, take the grazing pressure off the native Scots pine, and let the Caledonian pinewood return on its own. The braided river — that geological signature of Glen Feshie — has been a key witness. As deer numbers fell and young pines began regenerating naturally along the river terraces, the visible character of the glen began to shift back toward what it must have looked like centuries ago. The work continues. The river is older than the politics around it. It will keep braiding through whatever the estate becomes next.