New Light on the Highlands

SCOTLAND’S HIGHLANDS ARE ADMIRED THE WORLD OVER, BUT THESE ICONIC LANDSCAPES ARE EQUALLY WIDELY MISUNDERSTOOD.

THERE ARE NEW PERSPECTIVES……..

CHANGING PERSPECTIVES

IN THE

SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS

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Countless visitors normally explore the Scottish Highlands and Islands, but while they may learn something of the ancient and complex geology which underlies these landscapes, more subtle aspects of the scenery often escape them. Much of what they currently see in fact derives from the comparatively recent, Victorian, wholesale reorganisation of the land in the ‘ Balmorality ‘ epoch. Huge sums of money were spent in creating the big, rectangular fields now seen in all farming areas, in draining lochs and bogs, in establishing the plantations, often of exotic conifers, which cloak so many of our hillsides. The development of the sporting estate, concentrating on the red grouse, salmon, and red deer, led to a fenced, compartmentalised  landscape which was largely new; deer had to be kept out of the fields and plantations, and increased burning of the moors led ultimately to a monoculture of heather.

Something of the story of the Clearances will be known to many visitors; they began before the Victorian period but continued during it. They involved the relocation of whole populations, often from good, sheltered ground in the glens to poor, exposed locations, frequently on the wild coasts, where the evicted population ( those who did not emigrate all over the world ) eventually got some security of tenure and hung on, practising subsistence agriculture. These crofting townships, each small house in its piece of worked land,  contrast strongly with the big estates, with elaborate houses, amenity grounds known as ‘policies’, home farms and planned estate villages…..as well as spreading rhododendron.

The activities of the sporting estates involved a wholesale transformation, not simply of the visible landscape, but of the wildlife which inhabited it. Gamekeepers waged endless war against the creatures which they called vermin; foxes, pine martens, ospreys and eagles, and a host more. These at least were recorded; small birds like dippers were not, simply being automatically slaughtered. The present, high numbers of deer, especially the red, derive from the sporting aspirations of the Victorians, while populations of otters, (classed as vermin, of course), for instance, have only recovered in my lifetime. Birds like red kites and golden eagles still seem to disappear, often in areas of grouse moor………

The Victorians almost created the fashion for admiring the wild scenery of the Scottish Highlands and Islands; in fact, apart from the basic geography of the land, the shapes of mountains, headlands and islands, they effectively altered much of what visitors now see.

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Much of the land surface of the Highlands is covered by peat, sometimes shallow, sometimes, as in Caithness, of great depth. Sometimes it is merely damp underfoot, sometimes incredibly soggy, in places a complex landscape of patterned pools, as in the Flow Country. If such bogs are healthy, they will be covered by mosses, but these may often be eroded by the sharp hooves of too many deer. This is unfortunate, as eroding peat leaks large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, both critical greenhouse gases. Bogs, once regarded as wasteland, are now recognised as crucial to our Planet.

Bogs are natural in origin, often of considerable antiquity, caused by fluctuations in climate. These produced periods with low summer temperatures and high rainfall, resulting in waterlogging, changes to soils and the vegetation they carried. As our geology and climate vary from place to place, dates for these periods of poorer climate also vary, but much of the Highlands and Islands seems to have experienced a prolonged downturn in what is often called the Bronze Age; from, roughly, 2000 BC. Some peat profiles show more ancient peat, the surface of which dried out in a period of climatic optimum, perhaps around 3000 BC, permitting the growth of pine.

However, in the subsequent downturn, which gave much of the Highlands and Islands its covering of peat, the ground rapidly waterlogged again, and the pine succumbed, leaving only its stumps. Subsequent centuries have laid more peat down over this once drier surface.

What that sequence through time reveals is that it is very hard, if not impossible, to make fundamental changes in the nature of peat-covered land. The waterlogging of the soil is caused by the leaching down to its base of much of the minerals which it contained. This results in the formation of an impermeable layer, (which looks like a layer of rust); this would have to be significantly fractured for anything like a normal soil to develop, even under drier conditions.

People often seem to dislike bogs; perhaps they are bleak and apparently rather uniform, devoid of the regular ‘punctuation’ of other landscapes by bushes and trees. But they are very specialised environments, home to small but fascinating plants like the insectivorous sundew and butterwort, and often covered with drifts of heath-spotted orchids and the golden, lily-like bog asphodel. You have to get down, close to the ground, to see the beauty of these small flowers, but other senses are required to enjoy the birds of such places. The haunting calls of golden plover,  greenshank and red-throated diver make it evident that these are not wastelands…. as well as being critical to our future.

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The pine stumps sandwiched between peat layers remind us of past woodland. Deforestation has always been something of a controversial topic; I used to hear people saying “ the Highlands were covered in trees, and we cut them all down “. This never seemed convincing; for a start, it is precisely in places where we know that historical logging on a grand scale took place, that we have some of our finest remaining areas of native woodland. Places like Loch Maree, Loch Lomond, Glen Affric and Speyside remind us that woodland is preserved where it is valued and used.

There have been natural causes for deforestation; exposure to constant, salt-laden winds effectively limits the growth of woods, and will cause them to move where they have the space. The layers of peat remind us of significant changes in climate; periods of downturn have led to waterlogged soils where trees do not flourish. (Many of the stumps found in peat turn out to date from the climatic downturn of the Bronze Age). And regular eruptions of Hekla in Iceland throughout prehistory and history have dumped loads of sometimes toxic chemicals on our landscapes, which will have had significant effects on its vegetation.

In addition, new thinking suggests that as woodland moved north over the country after the last Ice Age, trees and bushes were accompanied by numbers of large herbivores which would help to create a dynamic and changing landscape, with many open -if transient- areas. Add in areas of bare rock, exposed mountain summits, lochs and extensive wetlands, and the idea of blanket woodland from coast to coast seems less and less convincing.

What is now certain, too, is that when all the above processes, (and no doubt, some clearance for agriculture and fuel) resulted in a relative scarcity of native woodland, it was subsequently managed in a way that many will know from traditional practices -coppicing and pollarding- in the South of Scotland or England. As far north as Assynt on the West Coast, we find, hidden in subsequent regeneration of birch, remnants of veteran trees of many species surviving for centuries precisely because they were valued and harvested in this way. An oak coppice on a croft in Assynt, (one of many), might well be over 300 years old, and I have identified many older.

Coppices and low pollards depend on control of grazing to permit new growth to get away. Our hugely increased deer numbers have led to fencing of many old woods, often eliminating any grazing at all. While coppices may remain obvious under such a regime, pollards, contrarily, need some grazing to retain their shape, as new shoots will  often spring from their base without it. Fencing will ultimately lead to a loss of critical evidence for this traditional woodland management.

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The population of the Highlands and Islands cannot have been static throughout the centuries; archaeology suggests, for instance, that remoter areas like the far North and West may have been almost abandoned during the Bronze Age climatic downturn. And periods of plague may well have led to local, intermittent depopulation for which we now have no documentation. The infamous Clearances, while most certainly changing where people lived, had strangely little effect on overall numbers inhabiting counties like Sutherland.

We have better records for subsequent episodes of depopulation; huge numbers of men died in the carnage of the First World War, while there was also quite a movement of people from the remoter glens, headlands and islands after the Second. (Such changes do in fact continue although their effect may be masked by the building of many new second homes).

From the Clearances onwards, such depopulation has had a marked effect on the vegetation and wildlife surrounding the settlements, which would have depended on small-scale agriculture. Two photographs I have show the sort of changes which follow the abandonment of active cultivation. Here, in Assynt, in the space of only 30 years, a colourful hay meadow, full of flowers, has been replaced by a sea of dense bracken, over six feet in height and almost impenetrable. Only the two main buildings reveal that this is, in fact, the same view. The loss of biodiversity has been immense, a loss which is repeated all over the Highlands. Bees, butterflies, and other insects, as well as related birds, have been replaced by very little. The blanket coverage of bracken, (and  wet pasture is now, similarly, thickly cloaked with rushes), is of little use to wildlife compared to what went before, where working with Nature (as was also done in managed woods) produced a rich biodiversity.

And undifferentiated, unmanaged pasture, with a few sheep, perhaps a few cows, nearly always dozens of deer at night, (see any Highland glen) effectively robs us of significant, potential biodiversity.

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In winter, subtle variations in the landscape are most clearly seen; these may reflect differences in geology, structure and drainage, the influence of changes in climate or in land use. Very common are remnant patches of better ground with good grass.. These are often the sites of sheilings, places of summer grazing. Before the Victorian transformation of the Highlands, livestock was taken from the permanent settlements into the hills, in order to take advantage of the summer flush of grass and heather.

Such transhumance may still be seen in the Alps and Pyrenees, and it is a very efficient use of resources; one key benefit is that it significantly reduces grazing pressure around the fields and houses. It is very likely that the sheilings were in regular use in our area from at least the Iron Age, if not before.

It is known that some sheilings were actually more like detached portions of the infield, in that crops, such as oats, hay or barley were grown. In an era without wire fences, where dykes of rough, unmortared stone were hard to build up to any significant height, depredations by deer would have been most unwelcome. They were, accordingly, restricted in number by regular hunts, being otherwise confined to home ranges -the traditional deer forests, (where “ forest” refers not to trees, but to regulations which protected them).

Such sheilings may be found in glens which reach far into the hills, emphasising how limited the deer numbers must have been through many centuries of sheiling life. They were still significantly controlled when Frank Fraser Darling published in 1937 “A Herd of Red Deer”, his genuinely ground-breaking study; numbers now are immensely greater, although at least they are beginning to be properly regulated again in areas where the necessary infrastructure exists.

But it remains a sad fact that there are many places in the Highlands, including villages, where nothing may now be safely grown without the provision of a six foot fence.

A map of the permanent settlements, many of them of course now labelled ‘Clearance Villages’ , and their associated sheilings, (where such a map can be found) is most revealing; it shows how much of the now ‘empty’ Highlands and Islands was formerly inhabited and worked.  This is, in fact, what we now refer to, properly, as a ‘Cultural Landscape’; small wonder many of us react against the ‘Wilderness’ description which appears so often in the tourist literature. Some estate surveys, like that of Assynt  in 1775, provide invaluable documentation for a way of life which was shortly to disappear, leaving only faint traces on the land.

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Our landscapes may look wild, but they need management, and belong to a whole range of owners: private, corporate, government, charitable and community entities. That implies a whole range of motives and strategies. Sometimes financial expediency may make a community body, for instance, act, in some ways, just like a traditional sporting estate. Deer numbers must be controlled and money may be made by letting out the stalking. People are employed, too, in the process.

For some of the newer owners, the motive is ‘rewilding’, a recently coined phrase which simply means ‘ecological restoration’, an idea which has been around for a long time. Deer control is nearly always part of it, but restoring a number of missing species is often up there, too -in other words the idea is to repair the damage done by the Victorians. Frequently this means bringing back predators, like the red kite or  sea eagle, both of which are now commonly seen.

Often you will hear the controversial suggestion that as part of this ‘rewilding’ we should bring back the lynx and the wolf, because they were once present in the Highlands (a long time ago!) and to assist in the reduction of deer numbers. It is, however, very difficult to get from those who so argue, an idea of the numbers of both that would be needed to make a difference. I did once get a proponent of the lynx to admit that he thought that some 3000 lynx would be required across Scotland, a number which carries with it serious implications.

And, for the wolf, the control by wolves of elk in Yellowstone is often cited; again without numbers! In Greater Yellowstone, very roughly, 500 wolves control a population of 40,000 elk. But in the Highlands we have at the very least 400,000 red deer, maybe half a million; are these people really suggesting that we should end up with 5000 wolves or anything approaching that number? Norway is a much bigger country than Scotland, and harbours only 100, of which perhaps a quarter are culled every year.

More to the point are the less ‘glamorous’ efforts which are returning red squirrels to woods where they are absent, and beavers to wetlands and river systems. Ecological restoration is an excellent idea, but we should not be seduced into thinking only of glamour species, but rather concentrate on the habitats, their plants and insects, small birds and mammals…………………….. and now especially, their ability to retain carbon in vegetation and soil.

There are, however, species which cannot make it on their own. The capercaillie has a fragile presence here, (which surely would be further threatened by lynx and wolf). I cannot understand why its prospects are not enhanced with birds from Europe, as was done with the red kite and sea eagle. Biodiversity, genetic diversity, these attributes keep the whole system going, across the Highlands as across the Planet.