Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. F. Darling Fraser
within it, and sometimes these same poor folk set light to strips of forest to act as a protection and screen from the Vikings. It would all depend on the airt of the wind, but the forest suffered anyway. The tradition of the burning by “Danes “ or “Norwegians” still exists in legends which may be heard in the North-West Highlands to-day. I know of several places said to be concerned with the burning in the forest of a Viking princess and the site of her grave has been pointed out to me in two places fifty miles apart. The West Highlands were also a source of boat-building timber for the Norsemen in Orkney and Iceland (Brögger, 1929).
The wanton burning of the western portions of the forest would doubtless be eased after Somerled’s Lordship of the Isles became established in the 11th century. This period was the most cultured and well ordered the West Highlands were to know for hundreds of years. Even as late as 1549, Dean Monro speaks of the wooded character of Isle Ewe and Gruinard Island in Ross-shire, affording good hiding for thieves and desperate men.
The woods of the Central Highlands were destroyed from the south-east. Gentlemen like the Wolf of Badenoch (floruit 1380) who was a brother of King Robert of Scotland, wandered through the country with large armed bands bent on plunder. Once more it was found that setting light to the forest was an easy way of smoking out or finishing off anyone who resisted. Local clan feuds must also have been a constant cause of forest fires of greater or lesser extent. The forests about Inveraray were destroyed by Bruce in an expedition against Cummin.
All these causes of destruction considered, we are still brought back to what I believe is a fundamental factor in the relation of man to the wild life around him, whether animal or vegetable. Man does not seem to extirpate a feature of his environment as long as that natural resource is concerned only with man’s everyday life: but as soon as he looks upon it as having some value for export—that he can live by selling it to some distant populations—there is real danger. The forests of the Highlands were discovered (this word was used at the period) by the Lowland Scots and the English at the beginning of the 16th century. Queen Elizabeth of England prohibited iron smelting in Sussex in 1556, and in the Furness district of Lancashire in 1563, because of the devastation caused to English woodlands. The smelters had to move farther north. The Scottish Parliament saw to what this would lead and passed an Act prohibiting anyone “to tak upoun hand to woork and mak ony issue with wod or tymmer under payne of confiscatioun of the haill yrne.” We can see exactly how this Act would work from the operations of black markets in Britain during the second German war. The game was so profitable that an occasional heavy fine was accepted as a normal tax on trade.
At this time also the woods were being destroyed actively for another reason—or perhaps two reasons. Thieves and rebels hid in the woods and wolves bred therein. It seems that infestation of the forests with these two forms of predatory fauna was so bad that it could be endured no longer. Menteith in The Forester’s Guide quotes an order by General Monk, dated 1654, to cut down woods round Aberfoyle as they were “great shelters to the rebels and mossers.” Ritchie, in giving an account of the extinction of the wolf in Scotland, mentions local tradition and definite record of woods being destroyed in the districts of Rannoch, Atholl, Lochaber and Loch Awe for this very purpose.
The suppression of the first Jacobite rebellion of 1715 gave an impetus to destruction. English business enterprises such as the York Buildings Company purchased forfeited estates and quite unashamedly set out to exploit them. Whatever was worth taking was taken, and the timber was one of the first things to go. But for the obstructive tactics of the Highlanders themselves it is probable that every vestige of pine forest would have gone at this time. The York Buildings Company went bankrupt, but not soon enough from the naturalist’s point of view. Even after this period between the rebellions, the higher standard of living which was more or less imposed on Highland proprietors by their taking up the English way of life, caused them to sell large areas of forest for smelting purposes. The prices paid for the trees were often ridiculously small. Ritchie says:
“The destruction wrought by these later and larger furnaces was irreplaceable. In 1728, 60,000 trees were purchased for £7,000 from the Strathspey forest of Sir James Grant…About 1786 the Duke of Gordon sold his Glenmore Forest to an English company for £10,000; and the Rothiemurchus Forest for many years yielded large returns to its proprietor, the profit being sometimes about £20,000 in one year.”
The last of the felling and smelting with charcoal seems to have been as late as 1813. The brothers Stuart, 1848, mention twelve miles of pine, oak and birch being burned in Strathfarrar to improve the sheep pasture.
The effects of the normal spread of arable cultivation with a rising population may be taken for granted, but this does not by any means round off the story of the changed face of the Highlands through the destruction of the pine and oak forests. The passing of the forests heralded another biological phenomenon of great significance for the natural history of the Highlands, and which was also brought about by man’s agency. This was the coming of the sheep. The old husbandry of the Highlands and Islands was a cattle husbandry, a well-ordered sequence of rearing in the islands and of feeding in the mainland glens and on the hillsides before the strong store beasts were driven away south to the great fairs such as Falkirk Tryst. The Highlands were a country unto themselves into which Lowlanders ventured with some wariness. The collapse of the second Jacobite rising in 1746 allowed flockmasters from the Southern Uplands to think about the exploitation of the new expanses of grazing in the North. “The Coming of the Sheep,” as this colonization of the Highlands was called, is one of the epic events of Scottish history, though it is one not commonly referred to in history books.
The end of the rising of 1745 meant an end of internecine warfare among the clans, which in turn favoured the survival of more men. The human population of the Highlands rose considerably during the second half of the 18th century, a fact we know as a result of Dr. Alexander Webster’s industrious work in effecting a census in 1755. Yet the extension of sheep-farming on the ranching system of the Southern Uplands meant a way of life in which fewer men were needed; also, the new sheep farms needed the crofting ground of the glens for winter pasture. The Highland gentry at this time varied greatly in achievement of the aristocratic ideal. Some had little thought at all for the clansfolk in the glens now that they had no further military significance, and others, finding themselves drawn into English metropolitan life, needed ready money—and a lot of it. Whether they were sorry or not to see their forests go in the space of a few years, it is unlikely that they considered with anything but satisfaction the new and profitable use to which it was now possible to put their land. The flockmasters offered high rents which the new clean ground amply repaid.
The old sheep of the West Highlands and Islands were akin to the present Shetland breed, but apparently they were never very numerous. The sheep now coming north with the Border men were Blackfaces which had been bred there since the 16th-17th centuries. The Scottish Blackface (Plate 8), now so common on Highland hills and through the Islands, should not be thought of as indigenous. Its origin is in the Southern Uplands; before that the north of England; before that the Pyrenees (where a prototype may be seen to-day) and possibly before that somewhere in Central Asia. The sheep were crossing the Highland Line into Dumbartonshire before 1760; by 1790 the occupation was complete in most of Argyll and in Perthshire and the sheep were plentiful in Mull and Inverness-shire. The first sheep farm in Ross-shire was settled in 1782 where it is said the occupant was a lonely man for some years. He was joined by many others at the turn of the century. Cheviot sheep-farming in Sutherland (Plate 3a) and Caithness was begun largely through the energy of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster in the early years of the 19th century. Extensions continued until 1850. Profits were large for both landlord and farmer, but the poor folk found themselves in a bad way. Their husbandry was relatively intensive, the ground being made into lazy-beds (feannagan) wherever slope and exposure made cultivation possible. These well-drained ridges, all turned by hand, grew good crops of barley and oats, and later of potatoes, which crop in itself allowed a greater density of population by its great increase of food supply. Fencing was relatively unimportant for there were so few sheep and the cattle were tended and kept out of the arable ground by the old men and children. The arrival of a heavy stocking of sheep on the hill made the position of these people untenable. They were cleared by the landlords and many thousands chose to emigrate. The folk who remained were pushed to the coasts