War against the wild forces of nature is, from the point of view of humanity, a constructive and in every way a useful operation, worthy of the attention of all statesmen who have the real welfare of the country at heart.
H. M. Cadell, The Story of the Forth (Glasgow, 1913), p. 225.
SIXTEENTH- and seventeenth-century topographers, like Bishop Leslie and Gordon of Straloch, spoke of the Scottish environment as though it were a given, a gift from a good but often incomprehensible God. Eighteenth-century lairds and philosophers spoke of improvement, nineteenth-century industrialists of the march of progress, Edwardian engineers (like Cadell) of warfare against nature, while modern politicians and environmentalists talk of sustainable development. All are speaking of ways to live comfortably, or more comfortably, in the world around us.
As E. A. Wrigley has emphasized, all life depends on capturing a proportion of the streaming energy of the sun, which even in cloudy northern Britain is equivalent to 22,000 million tons of coal a year.1 The food of all life on earth rests ultimately on photosynthesis, the process by which vegetable growth is able to capture solar energy, albeit only between one and four parts per thousand. When we eat grain, or meat, or fish we transfer some of this to ourselves, and for an active life a working human population needs an intake of 3,500 calories per adult per day, though 1,500 calories will suffice to keep a person alive. When we use thermal energy to keep warm, we use fuel: if it is wood, we use the energy of decades of photosynthesis stored in the trees we fell; if it is peat, we use the stored energy of centuries, even of millennia; if it is coal, gas, or oil, that of possibly tens of millions of years. With good silviculture, trees are a renewable crop. Peat, coal, gas, and oil are not renewable on any human timescale, though until the 1970s they were assumed to be inexhaustible resources—perhaps not locally but certainly globally.
When motive power was needed for ploughing to move goods or to turn machinery, there was once only the choice of simple forms of kinetic energy: muscle power deriving from photosynthesis, either human or animal (a horse is on average ten times stronger than a man), or sources of renewable mechanical energy such as watermills, windmills, and sails. Both the wind and the rain also derive their energy from the sun, the first through differential warming of the earth, the second from solar evaporation in the hydrological cycle. The thermal energy of fuel could not be translated into the kinetic energy of motion until after the invention and development of the rotary steam engine by James Watt and others. With the Industrial Revolution, inorganic fuels swept the board as the prime means by which humanity endeavoured to live more comfortably.
In the last resort the success of economies, of states themselves, has always rested on their access to the sun’s energy, current or stored, and on their efficiency in using it. The biggest shift of all is this shift from an organic to an inorganic economy: in the first, humanity used within a year mainly the photosynthesis of that year; in the second, the world now uses annually the accumulated photosynthesis of half a million years, and as we near the peak in oil drilling we realize that a fossil-fuel economy is not sustainable. To speak of the conquest of nature is an oxymoron, since the sun is always inescapably in control of us.
In the centuries before 1750, the ability of the Scots and everyone else to capture and use the energy of the sun was not basically different from what it had been in the Iron Age, though changes and improvements had been made at the edges. It depended mostly on photosynthesis through land-extensive methods of husbandry assisted by animals and metal-tipped tools, inefficient by modern standards but good enough to provide a dispersed population with enough calories to survive in most years, and since the Middle Ages also able to support modest urban populations of craftsmen and merchants. To a small degree it also depended on forms of hunter-gathering probably little changed since prehistory, of which fishing with nets and lines on rivers, shores, and from inshore boats, was the most useful. Thermal energy came from peat bogs and turf, seldom from firewood: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it also increasingly came in the Central Belt from coal deposits, which facilitated the growth of Edinburgh, already called Auld Reekie, from a few thousand individuals in 1500 to over forty thousand by 1750. Kinetic energy derived from the muscles of people and horses (still occasionally oxen before 1600), and to a smaller but vital degree from watermills (primarily to process grain) and sailing ships (to trade coastally and overseas). It infrequently came, in blustery Scotland, from windmills.
Compared to other parts of the British Isles, Scotland suffered from two interlinked disadvantages in garnering photosynthetic energy. The first was altitude and slope. Though there were extensive tracts of fertile low arable lands, particularly in the east, only 40 per cent of Scotland is below 500 feet/152 metres (but 79 per cent of England and 78 per cent of Ireland): 31 per cent is above 1,000 feet/305 metres (but 6 per cent of England and 4 per cent of Ireland).2 This meant that much of the photosynthetic energy had to be gained indirectly from grazing animals rather than directly from crops, at a very low calorie yield per acre. The second disadvantage was climate. Scotland certainly benefited very much from the amelioration of temperature from the warm waters of the Gulf Stream compared to lands at similar latitudes (like Labrador in Canada). But it nevertheless endured more wind and rain, more cold and shorter growing seasons than most other parts of the British Isles.
The configuration of the ground combined with underlying clay soils and schists in the glaciated valleys to turn much low ground into acid bog and marsh, or cover it with standing water. This was so even in Lothian, Fife, and Strathmore, areas of great potential fertility, as well as in the north and west. ‘ ’Tis almost incredible how much of the mountains they plough’, said the visitor Thomas Morer in 1689, because the valleys were so often ‘almost useless, on account of frequent bogs and waters in such places.’3 Yet ground subject to flooding was also cultivated if it was not actually waterlogged, sometimes with catastrophic results: thus at Glen Shira in Argyll around 1700, farmers found themselves washed out of their homes and land, ‘catching salmon where they had previously cultivated oats’.4
The second disadvantage was climatic. Throughout early modern Europe, the rural economy of marginal and upland areas was severely affected by the prolonged episode of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age.5 This is best understood as a period between the thirteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries when the weather became cooler, wetter, and windier than at any time in the last ten thousand years, but it was not itself of uniform and unvarying severity. The fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries had very notable years and decades of catastrophic weather characterized by famine and flood, but the period 1500–50 was about as mild as the first half of the twentieth century. Then the nadir of the Little Ice Age is reached between the late sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth centuries with particularly bad episodes in the 1560s, the 1590s, and the 1620s. Worst of all was the so-called Maunder Minimum between 1645 and 1715 (temperatures were lowest between 1670 and 1700 in Scotland, with spells of hot dry weather in the 1650s and 1660s). The first half of the eighteenth century saw a relative improvement, but with very bad conditions returning in 1739–;41, and on several occasions in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.
Scotland, a high, wet country on the north-western periphery of Europe, bore the full brunt of this climatic variability, not least because the surface of the North Atlantic between the Faeroes and Iceland became some 5°C colder than it is today. There has been as yet relatively little detailed examination of the Scottish weather itself in the Little Ice Age, but H. H. Lamb, doyen of English climate historians, and more recently, Alastair Dawson, have drawn together most of what is known about Scotland.6 Though there were warm spells in mid-century, there is much evidence of seventeenth-century cold, with permanent snow fields forming in the Cairngorms, permanent ice on high lochans in Strathglass, and in the 1690s a handful of lost Eskimo hunters who found themselves driven in their kayaks, by encroaching Arctic ice, to Orkney and Aberdeen. Lamb suggests that the temperature over the year would have averaged, in the late seventeenth century, 1.5°–2° colder than in the mid-twentieth century, compared to 0.9° colder in England. Cod, which cannot withstand near-freezing temperatures, left the waters around Shetland. There was also much evidence of storms; as the North Atlantic oscillation was turned on, the cold seas created a steep thermal gradient that bred cyclonic winds greater than most storms of modern times. This led to serious episodes of sand-blow in the Hebrides (e.g. Tiree and North Uist), at Culbin in Morayshire, and at Rattray and Forvie in Aberdeenshire—at Culbin a mansion house and nine farms covering perhaps 23 square miles were lost. Contrary to popular belief, this would not all have vanished in a single storm but rather have been the consequence of storms over a long period—the formation of the sandbar that closed off Rattray from the sea and formed the Loch of Strathbeg, for example, was first noted in 1413 but became impassable only in 1720. Nor should the effects of storms on shipping be underestimated—the great December hurricane of 1703 sank so many boats that it contributed significantly to the Scottish economic crisis of 1704, ‘one of the least years of trade that has been in this age’, when the Bank of Scotland ceased payment.7
The most serious impact of the Little Ice Age, however, was on the length of the growing season and thus on the photosynthetic abilities of plants. Lamb suggested that the growing season in northern Europe shortened by three weeks or more in the late Middle Ages, and that in the seventeenth century in England by about five weeks in comparison to the warmer decades of the twentieth century. In the coldest years like 1695 and 1740, when the summer temperatures were about 2°C lower than the twentieth-century norm, and springs and autumns cold as well, ‘the growing season was probably shortened by two months or even more’.8
Richard Tipping, investigating the area of the Bowmont Valley on the Scottish side of the Cheviot hills, found an increasing tendency to serious flooding in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, an increase in wetness on the bog surface, associated with the growth of sphagnum moss especially in 1550–1600 and 1675–1700, and a lowering of snow-bed plant communities to about 1,200 feet (366 metres), ‘well within the daily agricultural “round”’.9 More local studies of this calibre are badly needed.
All this resulted in a series of Scottish crop failures, dearths, and famines, mainly before the start of the eighteenth century. Scholarly examination of sixteenth-century famines has been quite cursory,10 but those of the seventeenth century, and especially of the 1690s, have been subject to much more detailed examination. Recent work has emphasized the severity, length, and national depth of ‘King William’s Ill Years’, and suggested that the demographic and economic consequences have been underestimated. Locally in Aberdeenshire and very possibly elsewhere in the Highlands and southern uplands the losses could have amounted to a fifth or more of the population.11 Similarly, the years 1673–6 and 1681–3, which were associated with heavy snow and disastrous loss of sheep and cattle especially in the south-west, also occasioned a surge in burials and emigration on a scale hitherto unappreciated.
The economic devastation in the Highlands in the seventeenth century has been well delineated by R. A. Dodgshon—here holdings were laid waste and payments of rents of necessity remitted or delayed for years, even decades, following bad years, in an area where parish registers do not survive to measure the loss of human life. I. Whyte shows similarly that in the Borders the problem was not just the bad crop years of the 1690s but a period of ‘long-term difficulty extending over at least 15 years during which conditions were consistently unfavourable to cattle-rearing’. Extended wet seasons were even worse at a high altitude than at a low one, and they hit livestock in these areas much more than cereals at low altitudes.12
How far holdings were actually abandoned in marginal areas in the Little Ice Age is a disputed question. M. L. Parry’s thesis, based on a study of the Lammermuirs, was that the altitudinal range of cultivation retracted appreciably. It is challenged by Tipping, who found no such evidence on the Cheviot edge, while Dodgshon found mixed results in the Highlands and Whyte points out that reduction of cereal acreage and amalgamation of farms is more likely to be the consequence of a run of bad years than actual desertion.13
Long-term abandonment of arable land may have depended on more than the weather; the relative movement of prices for animals and oats in the Edinburgh market, for example, may have tempted landlords and farmers to shift towards the former in the Lammermuirs, but might have had little effect in the Cheviots or on Rannoch Moor. On the highland west coast, however, it may have been the sheer force of the storms even more than the cold that forced the abandonment of arable land.
From all this, it might be supposed that the Scots lived on the edge of subsistence in a country only marginally able to support its people. Such was indeed the case over large parts of the Highlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Harvest shortfalls occurred (according to some commentators) every fourth or seventh year, though it helped that landowners might then remit or delay grain rents. Even in relatively good seasons there was often a ‘hungry gap’ in late summer, between the consumption of the last of the stored grain and the onset of a new harvest. At such times the population turned to ‘famine foods’—fish if they could get it, shellfish and edible seaweeds gathered from the shore, the blood of cattle tapped from a vein, or the leaves and roots of land plants like nettles and silverweed. The fields of growing oats or bere (a hardy form of barley) abounded in colourful flowers that outsiders considered weeds. Dodgshon has suggested that these were deliberately tolerated by the farmers, because many of them also provided nutrition in the difficult months. The highlanders had a considered strategy for coping with the chronic risk of hunger that beset such marginal areas in these difficult climatic times.14
But Scotland, though small, has a highly varied topography, with tracts of relatively fertile land as well as open hill and bog. Outside the Highlands things were less desperate. The country was usually a net exporter of food (fish, meat, and grain), notably so after about 1600. Furthermore, travellers from the outside, however unsympathetic they might be otherwise to the Scots—as so many English were—did not describe the common people of the Lowlands as starving or under-nourished. And when institutions, whether universities or orphanages, left dietary records that can be analyzed, their inmates always turn out to be more than adequately provided with calories.15 Scottish population increased after the plague-ridden lows of the late Middle Ages, at least to the early seventeenth century, and urban population increased faster still until by 1700 about one Scot in ten lived in a town. None of this would have been possible unless the lowland countryside generally provided more than enough food for the people.
The problem for Scotland as a whole was not chronic Malthusian pressure of population on resources, but inelastic supply when conditions for photosynthesis suddenly deteriorated, as in the 1590s and 1690s. There were no reserves, and the land could not suddenly produce more food. Though in the lowland countryside people might then also turn to famine foods and in the towns they might try to import grain from the Baltic or elsewhere in the British Isles, such shifts could not prevent national malnutrition or famine in these bad years. Yet such years were comparatively unusual except at the close of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
So the Scottish population maintained itself (and increased) through a land-extensive system of husbandry that utilized and ecologically modified every possible inch of land below the highest mountain tops. Timothy Pont in the 1590s could still write on his draft maps of the Highlands, ‘extreem wilderness’ and ‘many wolfs’ in north-west Sutherland, and ‘all fyr and other wood with great wilderness’ at Rynettin in the Abernethy Forest.16 But the history of animals suggests a steady erosion of truly wild land where large mammals could survive. Elks probably disappeared in the Iron Age, the auroch probably in the Bronze Age, the bear probably in post-Roman times, the wild boar by the thirteenth century. It has been argued that the lynx hung on into the Middle Ages, and beavers lingered into the sixteenth century near Loch Ness. Wolves were still common in the Highlands in the late Middle Ages, and were hunted by Mary, Queen of Scots in the Forest of Atholl in 1563. Robert Gordon of Straloch later in the 1630s said of Aberdeenshire and Banff that ‘dangerous animals, hostile to the herds, are lacking, for wolves are now believed to have almost died out, or if there are still any, they are far away from gentler areas and human cultivation’.17 By 1684 Robert Sibbald, Geographer Royal, believed them extinct in Scotland, and though there are stories of individuals killed by wolves in Perthshire in 1680, and in Sutherland between 1695 and 1700, there are no later plausible records.18 The largest land bird in Scotland, the capercaillie, the ‘cock of the woods’ of the pine forests, survived until around 1780 after being in decline for at least a century (it was later successfully reintroduced).19 Perhaps in this case climate change played a part, but all these species apart from the auroch survived in Scandinavia and in the wilder mountains of Europe, but not in Scotland.
The most critical developments in the environmental history of Scotland after 1750 related to energy supply. Two forces were at work: a change in the availability of food energy, which enabled more people to be supported from the same area of land, and a revolution in the application of thermal energy, which enabled the concentration of people in cities.
The increasing supply of food energy begins after about 1760; in the central Lowlands, conventional grain yields of oats and barley had by 1800, improved by 200–300 per cent,20 and in the Highlands the introduction of the potato might enable up to three or four times as many people to live off the same acreage of land as compared to putting it under grain.21 This had the effect of allowing more people to work at trades and industries divorced from food production, but still, before 1800, using muscle power at hand looms or spinning wheels, or water power at the new cotton- and linen-spinning factories in the countryside.
After 1800, however, it became possible to use Watt’s improvements to the steam engine to power rotary motion, so thermal energy was turned into kinetic energy for manufacture and transport. The transition from an organic to an inorganic economy began to gather pace, with enormous consequences. The timing and scale can be judged from the output of Scottish coal mines (Table 1.1), which before the twentieth century were the sole source of inorganic energy available on an industrial scale. The increase, tenfold in the eighteenth century, twentyfold in the nineteenth, was extraordinary.
These developments impacted directly on the growth and redistribution of population, with profound consequences for the natural world, and for the way in which humanity experienced its environment. The reasons for the growth and the details of the distribution are the subject of Chapter 2 below, but population grew fourfold over the period 1750–1950, and the proportion of the Scottish population living in settlements of over five thousand grew from about a fifth to two-thirds of the whole. Partly because of the dual nature of the developments in energy supply (both organic, and inorganic) there was not just a simple shift from country to town. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century both urban and rural populations grew, but thereafter there is only growth in town, and decline in country.
Rural communities lost population for many reasons, but historiographical concentration on the Highland clearances, and more recently on the ‘Lowland clearances’, has tended to emphasize force majeur over voluntary exodus.22 All over Europe (Scotland was no exception) very remote localities lost their attraction: once, many had seemed in environmental terms the ideal place for life, with a good supply of peat fuel, seaweed, and shell sand for fertilizer, seabirds, fish and rabbits for food, and perhaps free grazing outdoors all year for ponies to supplement human muscle power.23 There were thousands of such townships in the Highlands, the Hebrides, and the Northern Isles, and though many were forcibly cleared, and some were weakened by voluntary emigration before the laird completed the job, others were deserted entirely voluntarily.
Table 1.1 Annual output of coal from Scottish fields (million tons)
One of these was St Kilda, sixty miles out in the Atlantic but evacuated in 1930 after two thousand years of continuous occupation. In the seventeenth century, it had had a reputation for natural abundance, producing seabird oil, feathers, and flesh, wool, even grain, and supporting perhaps 180 people. By 1930 the population had shrunk to 37 and requested evacuation as an act of charity: what had once seemed a place of natural plenty now seemed to offer nothing but penury and hardship, but it was a society that had changed, not the environment. The seabird colonies benefited from the withdrawal of man. However, the St Kilda house mouse, genetically close to its Norwegian congeners and probably a Viking settler, but one which had in little over a thousand years become a distinctive subspecies (Mus domesticus muralis), was still so dependent on people that it became almost immediately extinct.24
One main consequence of the growing dominance of inorganic energy was that people flooded in large numbers to the towns and cities, a topic that will be explored in relation to their inhabitants and built environment in Chapter 24. Of the biggest cities, Glasgow with its port and surrounding towns containing nearly two million people by 1901, and Edinburgh with over four hundred thousand, both clearly also had a substantial impact on the environment, though these have not been widely studied.25 We have no equivalent yet of William Cronon’s work on Chicago to explain the environmental history of a city and its hinterland.26
The impact of urban detritus on the surrounding countryside is clearly one major theme in this, and the example of Edinburgh gives an indication of how it developed. Certainly from the late seventeenth century, and perhaps from much earlier, disposal of the town’s dung to the farmers nearby was seen as a profitable business, but by the early nineteenth century the latter were forming cartels to oblige the city to moderate its prices. The manure kept agriculture in a ring of Midlothian parishes so well supplied with nitrogen and other nutrients that they no longer needed cattle to supply it, and by this recycling, farms were kept under intensive cropping of wheat and vegetables. Something similar happened on the edge of late eighteenth-century Aberdeen, and nineteenth-century Dundee fertilized the raspberries of the Carse of Gowrie with its sewage. Even quite tiny burghs like Nairn and Pittenweem sold their ‘fulzie’ to spread on the fields. When the Union canal was built, stretching to Falkirk, Edinburgh waste could reach well into West Lothian.
By the 1840s, however, the growth of population, threefold in Edinburgh since 1750, meant that the problem began to spiral out of control, and the sanitary crisis of the early Victorian city, with its solution, flush toilets that carried the waste away diluted by water into drains, sewers, and ultimately into burns and rivers, brought this tradition of nutrient recycling to a halt. Sewage became waste, not resource. At first, councils were optimistic about continued sales, but as guano and other bagged, dry fertilizers became available to farmers, this was seen to be a false hope. Edinburgh poured her filth into the Water of Leith (it caused disgusting pollution in the harbour), into the River Almond and the Foul Burn, where it irrigated the meadows of a large sewage farm at Craigintinny, which was declared ‘a decided financial success’. It was eventually closed in 1922 in response to local complaints about the smell and questions about the wholesomeness of food produced. Thereafter until 1978 all Edinburgh’s sewage was poured largely untreated into the sea, through nine outfalls.27
The immediate effects of this water pollution, here and in similar cases throughout Scotland where tanneries, bleach and dye works, gas works, paper works, paraffin works, coal washings and similar industrial effluents took effect, was locally catastrophic to the fish life of rivers and streams, notably to salmon and trout. The oyster beds of the Firth of Forth, once perhaps the largest in Britain, had been wiped out through over-fishing, but recovery was made more difficult through pollution. A striking example not of industrial but of agricultural pollution was the effect of reclaiming the peat bogs west of Stirling by throwing the peat into the Forth river, where it floated down to smother sandy beaches and affect the sea bottom as far east as Queensferry.28
Burning fossil fuels caused substantial air pollution, the consequences of which embraced both the human and the natural world. The windy weather of central Scotland might be supposed to have diffused the coal smoke from the streets of Auld Reekie and Glasgow, but the blackened buildings of both cities are proof otherwise. The consequences on the health of the population were dire: in Edwardian Glasgow ‘experienced newspaper editors left extra space for obituaries during smog sieges’, and a fog there in 1909 was calculated to have caused 1,063 extra deaths. As late as 1950, Glaswegians ordinarily inhaled about two pounds of soot each year. The solution came ultimately in the Clean Air Act of 1956, made easier by the substitution of oil and gas for coal without any great economic sacrifice.29 Smoke pollution also had serious effects on nature, some species of butterflies becoming extinct in the Central Belt and only starting to return late in the twentieth century; the ancient oak wood in Dalkeith Park to the east of the city is still impoverished in its lichen flora because it lay in the path of the smoke plume from Victorian Edinburgh.
In the uplands, the ecological consequences of modernity have also been impoverishing, but by what mechanism is disputed. Fraser Darling famously described the Highlands as a ‘wet desert’, a zone of former Caledonian forest stripped of its nutrients by the axe and fire of iron-masters and graziers, and by the ‘extractive tooth’ of animals that consumed but did not recycle nutrients as the animals were driven off and used elsewhere.30
Deforestation is now seen to have been a very long drawn-out process, starting as early as the Neolithic and partly climatic in origin. It was substantially complete before 1500, and by 1750 less than a tenth of Scotland was woodland, much of that being open wood pasture and montane scrub.31 The most obvious parts of a ‘wet desert’, the mires and flows of the north and west, have been interpreted by James Fenton as the normal ecological climax under the wetter climate of the last four thousand years.32 Some of the most forested of the remaining areas, the oak woods of Argyll, actually seem to have benefited from the care that the iron-masters took of their fuel supply, and in a similar way those who exploited the belt of oak woods from Dumbartonshire to Perthshire for tanbark, and those who exploited the Scots pine forests of Strathspey and Deeside, contributed to their long-run conservation by taking good care of a profitable resource.33
The importance of grazing and burning in the open moors, however, can hardly be doubted. If stock is taken off and no fire is used, the drier heaths rapidly revert to birch, willow, and (in some cases) to Scots pine. Using fire to burn the moors, though, was not new, but had been an ancient tool used by farmers to favour grazing for their traditional mix of animals—small sheep, goats, horses, and in particular black cattle. After 1750, but especially after 1800, it was increasingly used to favour either the new flocks of large Cheviot and blackface sheep or in Victorian times to encourage grouse and deer on sporting moors.
The question therefore resolves into asking what were the ecological impacts on the open hill of the new land-management regimes of sheepmaster and sportsman? Fraser Darling’s notion that the sale of sheep actually removed significant quantities of critical nutrients from the land has been hard to verify, and the readiness with which birch and willow return once grazing stops also suggests otherwise. The picture is complicated in that aerial deposition of nitrogen and phosphorous in acid rain from factory smoke began to occur from mid-Victorian times, and had the reverse effect to driving off nitrogen and phosphorus in meat and wool: indeed, acid rain seems likely to have been implicated in the decline of heather moorland and the spread of Nardus strictus grassland, especially in the west. It also altered the chemical composition and the microscopic fauna of even the highest and most remote lochans in the Cairngorms, as well as other lochs the length and breadth of Scotland.34
A more important agent for ecological change on the moors was probably the way the new sheep grazed. Sheep graze close and tread lightly, their small hard dung sits on the surface and oxidizes in the wind, whereas the old black cattle had grazed high, punctured the ground with their hooves, and their runny dung had got into the sward. The new flocks of sheep could also be summered on the hill in far greater numbers than in the past, when stock had been limited by the acute shortage of winter fodder. Now they could be kept on low ground and fed on turnips or (later) artificial feeding stuffs, so that a much bigger breeding stock could occupy the hill in summer and graze all its resources to the utmost.35
People at the time noted an environmental transformation over a generation. The montane scrub, full of berries and insects, was eaten off or burned away to improve the grazing: the old summer shielings (mountain pastures), once patches of flowers and sweet herbs high on the hill, became part of the close uniform mat of heather or of Nardus and Molinia grassland: lower down people noticed a more general decline. Osgoode Mackenzie called Gairloch in his grandfather’s time:
The most perfect wild Highland glen … the braes and wooded hillocks were a perfect jungle of primroses and bluebells and honeysuckle and all sorts of orchids which then quite whitened the ground.36
He made his great artificial garden at Inverewe in Wester Ross to compensate for the great natural garden he had lost. Modern palynological investigation has confirmed contemporary testimony and oral history, and shown a clear decline in floral biodiversity following the arrival of the sheep flocks and the departure of peasant farming.37
Scottish landowners, of course, had always hunted game, but sporting estates as a primary land use only began in the early nineteenth century. With the invention of the cartridge and the shotgun they became popular from early Victorian times, and greatly multiplied after 1870 when sheep farming ran into a depression. Most deer forests and grouse moors had therefore already undergone ecological alteration as sheep runs beforehand, and they also used fire as vegetation control. By 1912, 3.6 million acres (and at least 40 per cent of Ross and Cromarty and of Inverness-shire) were deer forest, and what had been a comparatively scarce animal in the well-populated landscape of the eighteenth century became abundant: by 1940 there were reckoned to be 250,000 red deer in the Highlands (but 347,000 by 1990). From early in the nineteenth century they were abundant enough to hinder natural regeneration of pine in Deeside and elsewhere—Fraser Darling reckoned that sixty thousand was the highest population of red deer the land could bear without damage.38
Where an estate was used primarily for grouse or salmon, the main ecological impact was in the destruction of raptors. In the case of grouse, this might be rewarded by a short-term surge in the numbers available to shoot, invariably checked by outbreaks of disease and by a longer-term deterioration of habitat where the moors were also grazed by sheep.
The elimination of predators, however, was long-lasting: most of the damage came before 1840, and after around 1870 gamekeepers were mainly engaged in mopping-up operations, as Richard Lovegrove has demonstrated. The records of the fur market held every year in February at Dumfries indicate the scale in the south-west: in 1831, 600 polecat and 226 otter skins were exposed for sale, but none of either by 1869. In the Highlands, the main records are estate vermin returns; there must always be a question where bounties were paid, but owners were not fools and usually demanded the evidence of heads or wings. So we should not dismiss it out of hand when we hear of 143 pine martens and 295 eagles killed at Langwell and Sandside in Sutherland, 1819–26, and similar statistics. Some species of predators became extinct in Scotland as a result (polecat, red kite, osprey, sea eagle) and others were greatly reduced (wild cat, pine marten, otter, hen harrier, golden eagle). It was well into the second half of the twentieth century before there was even limited recovery from this Victorian slaughter.39
The Victorians became extremely attached to the beauty and wildness of highland scenery, and thanks to the railway and the improved road network, came to enjoy it not only as sportsmen but also as ramblers, mountaineers, and landscape connoisseurs.40 But the movement for environmental defence came late and was not as strong as in England. The first bird-protection legislation of 1869 was directed to the defence of seabird colonies and inspired by a campaign in Yorkshire: it was opposed by fishery interests in Scotland. The National Trust was formed to defend the Lake District in 1895. Not until 1931 was there an equivalent body in Scotland. Knowledge of Scottish biodiversity did not lag—naturalists like William McGillivray and John Harvie-Brown were as industrious and sophisticated as any—and one of the leading proto-ecologists was Patrick Geddes, but somehow knowledge and enthusiasm failed to translate into effective defence of the environment.
Indeed, in one area, the scientists failed to blow the whistle soon enough because they did not believe any harm was being done. The Victorians greatly intensified the exploitation of the sea. Of course, since Mesolithic times fishermen had harvested the marine environment in innumerable ingenious ways, ranging from fish traps and shore-based nets and lines to inshore boats all around the coasts and islands. In the eighteenth century more ambitious herring busses copied the Dutch in making lengthier voyages into the North Sea and Atlantic, but mostly the fisheries were neither well capitalized nor ambitious. Though their prosperity ebbed and flowed, it was not due to any depredation on the stock but rather to the natural vagaries of the fish themselves, and to variations in ocean currents and temperatures that drew them nearer to or further away from human grasp.
The first expansion of the herring industry had nothing to do with steam power, but involved a new design of large, decked, wooden sailing boats capable of venturing further out, and usually equally novel cotton nets, thereby vastly increasing the catch: herring landings went up about eightfold between 1810 and 1880. Steam trawlers were introduced from the 1880s and revolutionized the pursuit of white fish. Steam-driven and steel-hulled drifters followed twenty years later, and dominated the herring fishing on the eve of the First World War. By then the herring catch, at over 2 million barrels, was twentyfold what it had been a century earlier.41
Though much more research needs to be done in this area, it seems likely that already by the 1880s more herring were being caught than could be replaced by the breeding stock, as some suspected at the time. But Professor W. E. McIntosh of the new Gatty Marine Laboratory at St Andrews, and the leading Scottish fish scientist of his age, declared there was no need to worry, and he received support from no less a figure than Thomas Huxley, who declared the seas inexhaustible.42 Despite dissent from some, the dominant voice of science was reassuring, and this combined with the boundless enterprise of fishermen to prepare the way for emptying the seas of palatable fish. The productivity of the North Sea today is, in these terms, about one-tenth of what it was in 1883.43
Scotland at the opening of the twenty-first century was apparently set on the road to environmental disaster. It could hardly be otherwise. It was a small but whole-hearted and generally successful part of a global economy growing out of control at an unprecedented rate. Something New Under the Sun was the apt title of John McNeill’s book on twentieth-century global environmental history, where he lays out the basic figures: between the 1890s and the 1990s world population grew fourfold, urban population thirteenfold, industrial output fortyfold, energy use sixteenfold, carbon dioxide emissions seventeenfold, cattle population fourfold, pig population ninefold, and marine fish catch thirty-fivefold.44 Scotland did not experience increases in any of these indicators of anything like such magnitudes, mainly because she started from the higher base of early industrialization: but as part of the developed world we have enjoyed rising levels of consumption, which are the primary forces impelling these indices up and up. Scottish GDP rose by an average of 1.9 per cent per year between 1978 and 2008. New registrations of motor vehicles rose from 100,000 a year in 1963 to 250,000 in 2007, when there were 51 vehicles for every 100 people (the figure for Great Britain was 57). Despite gains in the efficiency of energy use, UK consumption of primary energy rose by about 1 per cent per year between 1980 and 2000: it would have been much the same in Scotland.45
The Scottish global footprint (the measure of our resource use in relation to the total of the earth’s resources) showed in 2009 that if everyone else lived as we do, we would need more than two earths to survive. Our efforts to reduce the impact, however, are not inconsiderable: by 2007 about a fifth of electricity in Scotland was generated by renewables, half from hydro; this was twice the proportion at the start of the century. But our efforts within Scotland are more than outweighed by the consequences of our growing consumption of goods. Thus greenhouse gas emissions for which we are responsible fell by 13 per cent between 1995 and 2004 if we take into account only those generated within Scotland, but if we take into account those emissions generated by Scots buying manufactured imports like cars and TV sets, they actually rose by 11 per cent over the same period.46
There is a lack of easily available environmental statistics specific to Scotland going back any distance of time, and it would be a good academic project to compile them. Climate statistics are the exception, with a good series going back to 1857. Scotland, like the rest of the globe, has become warmer over that period, markedly so in the last halfcentury: it has also become wetter. Rising consumption of inorganic energy across the world appears to be the root cause, but as Alasdair Dawson reminds us, there are other players in climate change (notably sunspot activity). The outcome of rising temperatures acting on the oceans could either lead to Scotland becoming as cold as Labrador or to an accentuation of present warming trends: we simply do not know.47
There is, however, an environmental history of Scotland since 1950 to be written apart from this catastrophe movie, and it concerns changes in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, advances in pollution control, and the rise of an environmental movement. Not everything in our modern period is gloom and doom.
It is, however, all remarkably little studied. Scottish farming in the twentieth century lacks even an economic history, apart from a useful chapter-length study by Ewen Cameron, which stresses that livestock farming accounted for 76–77 per cent of output (by value) in the 1950s and 1960s, falling to about 64 per cent since 1990, and that about two-thirds of the agricultural area in Scotland is composed of rough grazing—‘arable farming, though valuable, is a minority pursuit in Scotland’.48 This sets parameters for rural environmental history, and explains why the consequences of mechanization, chemicalization, and arable-directed subsidy, which in the post-war period wrought such havoc with farmland biodiversity in England generally, had only a more muted impact on Scotland beyond the main grain-growing areas of Angus, Fife, and Lothian, and even there less severely than in East Anglia and other arable counties in England.
Nonetheless, Scottish farming was severely affected by all the crises and trends that moulded British agriculture as a whole in the late twentieth century. One event that has been studied in appropriate detail is the introduction and spread of myxomatosis in Scotland in 1954–5, which was unreservedly welcomed in Scotland (unlike in England) in the hope that a major pest to agriculture, the rabbit, could be eliminated.49 Similar detailed treatment awaits historians of the epizootic diseases, of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) in 2000, and foot-and-mouth disease in 1967 and 2001, which affected not pests but the most valuable products of Scottish agriculture. Also worth consideration is the environmental history of agricultural pollution in Scotland, from the devastation caused by organochlorine insecticides (DDT and its allies) in the 1950s and 1960s (particularly to peregrine falcons and other raptors at the head of the food chain), to the pollution caused by excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer, notably to the Ythan river in Aberdeenshire and to parts of Fife.
The effects of overgrazing by sheep have already been referred to, but the manner in which it was exacerbated by subsidy before and after Britain joined the European Community in 1973 remains under-researched; yet this is reflected in dramatic declines of the characteristic birds of rough grassland, lapwings and curlews. The environmental history of the sporting estate is also largely a blank sheet: two related topics that are frequently in the news are the illegal persecution of raptors and the decline of grouse numbers, both of which have a history spanning much of the twentieth century. Often the latter appears to have been connected, as on the Buccleuch estates in the south of Scotland, with habitat deterioration associated with overgrazing when owners tried to make the most of two sources of income that were perhaps incompatible. Peter Hudson’s work on the red grouse has a significant historical dimension utilizing runs of game books back to the nineteenth century, which indicates a way to proceed.50
The biggest land-use change in Scotland since 1950 has been afforestation by Sitka spruce and other American conifers: only 6 per cent of the land surface was under wood in 1960, but 17 per cent is afforested today, mostly by conifers. This was a programme initially driven by the forestry commission, but in the later 1970s and early 1980s it was largely executed by private forestry companies, the government agency granting permissions, distributing grants, and setting targets. Some Secretaries of State for Scotland (Willie Ross for one) thought these too low, such were the high and entirely unfulfilled expectations of the economic benefit of forestry to remote areas. The political, administrative, and technological background has been told both in relation to the UK and specifically to Scotland, and the social implications are being explored at the moment in a series of oral history pamphlets.51 A longer, in-depth, oral history that does justice to the environmental impact of the process is Ruth Tittensor’s study of Whitelee Forest in Ayrshire, which stresses the total ecological transformation involved in converting peat bog and open moor into a dense conifer forest. She also demonstrates the disenchantment of the local population when they found that afforestation was not the key to jobs and prosperity, and the loss of access when open country was replaced by an impenetrable and tall barrier of Sitka.52
The end of the planting bonanza came in 1986 with the withdrawal of Mrs Thatcher’s government from supportive tax breaks for forestry, which had been designed to encourage investment irrespective of where the trees went. The occasion was a dispute over the proposed drainage for planting of the Flow Country in Caithness and Sutherland, which would have obliterated for small returns in timber production one of the last large wilderness areas in Scotland. That this conflict took place at all, and that it had a political outcome favourable to the wilderness, would have been unthinkable earlier. It demonstrates the political power of an alliance between ecological science and popular interest in nature conservation, which had Victorian roots but had grown in strength particularly since the 1970s.53 In a British context such conflicts have been well studied by John Sheail,54 and in a highland context discussed by several historians and anthropologists.55 Conflicts between ‘use and delight’, rural developers or land managers on the one hand, and conservationists and their supporters on the other, were commonplace from 1950 onwards. Early in the twenty-first century they have lessened but not gone away. They do not always have consequences favourable to conservation, as the victory of the American developer Donald Trump demonstrated in 2008 when he gained permission from the Scottish government to destroy the largest mobile dune system left in Scotland in order to build a golf resort. Such battles have been wide-ranging, focusing in the earlier decades particularly on hydroelectric schemes, then on the conservation of habitat, more recently on the placing of wind farms and the reintroduction of lost species like sea eagles and beavers.56
These conflicts are often conceptualized as town versus country, or expert versus local knowledge, but the reality is complex. Rural communities have indeed often been hostile to attempts to restrict their development opportunities, but have sometimes rounded on the developers (as with the Lewis windfarm and Harris superquarry in the Western Isles) or have at least failed to support them (as with the Flow Country). And urban populations have been indifferent to some problems, like the siting of waste tips and incinerators beyond their boundaries, or the course of motorways. As Kevin Dunion has shown, local communities have then been left to fight their own corner in a search for environmental justice, with no support from the big conservation charities like the National Trust for Scotland, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, or the RSPB, who fight for nature conservation, and only the relatively impoverished Friends of the Earth as backers. In such cases direct action was often the only realistic course for the objectors (as defenders of their families and communities), and the history of the protests at Greengairs in North Lanarkshire and at Kirknewton in West Lothian, both in the 1990s, read like episodes in radical labour history.57 Far more work can be done on the structure and social meaning of conflicts over the environment since the end of the Second World War. It is worth noting that the history of biodiversity decline and nature conservation in Scotland has received far more attention than the history of emissions and pollution control, with the history of amenity preservation falling somewhere in between.
What happens on land is always better studied than what happens invisibly below the surface of the sea. Marine fisheries provide the example of the most profligate of all resource exploitations, not only in Scotland but throughout the globe. The Scottish fisheries entered the second half of the twentieth century with replenished stocks (thanks to the interruption of fishing during the war) but with an industry at low ebb following the interwar collapse of the once-enormous herring sales to the Baltic and Russia. The fleet was rebuilt with the help of government subsidy and a remarkable level of technological application. The period of 1945–75 was critical for the introduction of scientific methods of fishing, both mechanical and electronic. Two modern purse seiners (fishing vessels) with a crew of thirty could in 1986 catch more fish than could a thousand boats with five thousand men in the 1840s, even if they only fished for a quarter of the time of their predecessors.58 Much of the harvest of the purse seiners was used for fertilizer or animal foodstuffs, whereas earlier the catch had been entirely for human consumption except in times of glut.
The 1970s began with closure of the herring fisheries for several years due to depletion of stock: forty years later it was the cod stocks that were in deep trouble. After entry to the Common Market in 1973, the industry was directed through the European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Live-weight landings of demersal fish (cod, haddock, flatfish) dropped from around 300,000 tons in 1982 to about 80,000 tons in 2008, and of pelagic fish (mainly mackerel once the herring had declined), from 260,000 tons in 1988 to 140,000 tons in 2008. The number of regularly employed fishermen halved between 1992 and 2002 as stocks fell, and larger boats were used to catch what was left as cheaply as possible.59 The CFP presided over a marine disaster where each nation’s politicians were swayed more by the mutual suspicion of their fishermen than by the warnings of scientists. Scotland reckoned it got a raw deal in the allocation of catch quotas compared to other fishing nations like Spain, but in the widespread evasion of quotas and landings of ‘black fish’ the Scots were excelled by none. There is an urgent need for an environmental history of modern European sea-fishing, and no less for an environmental history of the salmon farm, which, since the 1970s, has come to supplement and replace wild-caught fish.
Paradoxically, as the open sea was emptied of commercial fish, and the sea-lochs were filled with floating cages of salmon and their heavily polluting waste, other animals that feed on fish flourished in the second half of the twentieth century as never before. Certainly the end of persecution at their breeding stations was a very important factor: fishermen, who had objected to the first protection of the gannet in the 1870s, a hundred years later objected far more vociferously to the protection of the grey seal, which they saw as a serious competitor.60 Seals and most of the seabirds, however, feed mainly on sand-eels: the destruction of most of the cod, herring, and mackerel that also fed on the sand-eels may have led to an increase in food for seals and birds.
To the scholar approaching from the outside, environmental history can appear daunting in the range of knowledge that is expected of its practitioners. To take the last example, surely the skills of a fishery expert and an ornithologist are more appropriate than those of an historian in solving the paradox of declining fish numbers contrasted with increasing seal and bird numbers? The scientists are certainly indispensable here, yet it is the historian who can give the right time perspective and who is best equipped to research how human attitudes towards birds and seals have changed. Very frequently, and probably in this case, a partnership between scientists and historians will produce the best environmental history. Institutional obstructions to such partnerships exist, but they are there to be overcome. There are other cases, though, where an historian could be comfortable working entirely alone with no more than the usual background knowledge of the technicalities of his subject: thus an urgently needed history of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and its predecessors back to the inspectorate of the alkali industry in the nineteenth century would not need a pollution scientist as partner. The field of environmental history is so wide, and its questions so far-ranging and intriguing, that there is ample room both for the associational spirit and for the lone practitioner.
Coull, J. R., The Sea Fisheries of Scotland: A Historical Geography (Edinburgh, 1996).
Dawson, A., So Foul and Fair a Day: A History of Scotland’s Weather and Climate (Edinburgh, 2009).
Dickson, J. H., et al., The Changing Flora of Glasgow: Urban and Rural Plants through the Centuries (Edinburgh, 2000).
Dodgshon, R. A., ‘The Little Ice Age in the Scottish Highlands and Islands: Documenting its Human Impact’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 121 (2005), 321–37.
Dunion, K., Troublemakers: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2003).
Lambert, R., Contested Mountains: Nature, Development and Environment in the Cairngorm Region of Scotland, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, 2001).
Sheail, J., Nature in Trust: The History of Nature Conservation in Britain (Glasgow, 1976).
Smout, T. C., Nature Contested: An Environmental History of Scotland and Northern England, 1600–2000 (Edinburgh, 2000).
—— Exploring Environmental History: Selected Essays (Edinburgh, 2009).
—— ed., People and Woods in Scotland: A History (Edinburgh, 2003).
—— MacDonald, A. R., and Watson, F., A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland 1500–1920 (Edinburgh, 2005).
Syse, K. V. L., From Land Use to Landscape: A Cultural History of Conflict and Consensus in Argyll, 1945–1980 (Oslo, 2009).
Tittensor, R., From Peat Bog to Conifer Forest: An Oral History of Whitelee, its Community and Landscape (Chichester, 2009).
Yalden, D., The History of British Mammals (London, 1999).