CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

Recently reading a new and important, environmental book, I saw an illustration of a ‘typical, British upland’, described as ‘ a cultural landscape’. It was complete with bare hills, blocks of conifers and in the valley, close-grazed fields with some sheep.

Feeling, rightly or wrongly, that there is something rather negative, or limited, about this, I think that it is time to amplify somewhat the concept of the ‘cultural landscape’. I offer here a photograph of another ‘cultural landscape’ which, at first glance, may not seem significantly more interesting. It was taken in 1959, and is of ‘my glen’ in Assynt, Sutherland.

What it shows is a wooded Highland glen. The house was new-built by the Estate for the shepherd/keeper and his family. The cottage was its predecessor, built soon after the Clearances of 1812. Around the cottage are meadows, the last remnants of the ‘arable’ ground of the pre-Clearance (subsistence) farm. The woods would probably have been described as ‘birch scrub’ in 1959.

Most of the place-names are, of course, in Gaelic, but one is almost definitely of Norse origin, hinting at long occupation of the glen. Not in the picture, and now swamped in bracken, are the ruins of the houses, barns and byres of the 90 folk who lived here before 1812. Up the burn, in the wood, are the ruins of the mill where they ground their ‘corn’. Cultivation ridges, a huge clearance cairn, a lynchet and field banks hint at the agricultural management of the land. But an Iron-Age souterrain, (an underground storage chamber), and, further up the glen, a circular structure which might date from the Bronze Age, located in an attractive, fertile sheiling (part of their transhumance) show how long this glen may have been inhabited.

All those people lived simply, off the land, using the resources around them. This included the woods; the ‘birch scrub’ hides managed veteran trees of a number of species, and include the remarkable single-stem, pollarded hazels which I have featured elsewhere, and are characteristic of old wood-pasture systems.

And in 1959, there were still traces of the haymeadows, filled with wildlfowers and insects, which provided winter feed for the stock which grazed the summer hills.

Study of this glen has revealed a great deal about the lives of earlier inhabitants of Assynt; nowhere could better illustrate the idea of the ‘cultural landscape’, a title which indicates an extraordinary wealth and diversity of interest.