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 where their crofting townships are to-day.
Sometimes these coastal townships were places of such extreme exposure and poverty of soil that after a hundred years of hand-to-mouth existence the crofts have gone empty. The sight of such a derelict and decrepit township (Plate VIIIb) is a most saddening and disturbing thing. It does not present the ruin of a civilization by sack or natural catastrophe, but the quiet failure of simple folk to obtain subsistence from their environment. In other places, the shift to the coast has proved almost a salvation, for the people have found a mild, sheltered and early climate, and natural resources in fish and seaweed which have enabled them to live much better than they could have in the inland glens. These coastal crofting communities vary greatly in habits and thus in their influence on local natural history. Some have a shore from which they can fish, others have a rocky shore or no aptitude for fishing and they turn their energies inland to breeding sheep. It is an unfortunate characteristic of many of the crofting townships, whether fishing or pastoral, that the small quantity of arable land is being neglected, and the vegetational complex of rushes and sedge is creeping in to both unoccupied and occupied crofts.
The coming of the sheep finished the process of changing the face of the old Highlands of the time of the forests. Large areas of birch scrub were burned. Where the birch trees were larger they were cut that their bark might be exported for tanning material for sails and rope. I know of one sheep farm in the North-West Highlands (now back to a famous deer forest) where the shepherds were paid in part with the value of birch bark which they themselves had to cut and peel while they were in the hill. The flockmaster’s firestick was a destroyer of ground cover over hundreds of thousands of acres, for even where the pine trees had been cut a new growth of birch was taking place which might yet have made a less bare Highlands than we know to-day. Every spring some patch of heather or purple moor grass (sometimes known as flying bent grass or Molinia coerulea) would be burnt and seedling trees would suffer. Much birch was cleared in the 19th century by the bobbin-makers working for the cotton mills of the Lowlands and Lancashire. The pirn mill at Salen, Loch Sunart, was the principal reason for the establishment of that settlement.
The sheep themselves, as we shall see in the next chapter, are the destroyers of a habitat in which scrub trees such as birch, willow and rowan are a part (Plate 23a). Regeneration in places where they reach beyond a very low density is impossible, and even the many flowers of the countryside disappear beneath their ever-questing and selective muzzles.
Even the sheep have not been quite the last straw in man’s despoliation of the Highland forests, because his railways have happened to run through some of the last expanses. The old Highland Line (now L.M.S.) running through the Grampians and Strath Spey has been the cause of burning a good many acres of the ancient pine woods. This incidental destruction is hard to bear in a time when we have come to treasure the few remnants of primitive sylvan beauty. But I would say this: we still do not take enough care. Every year or two there are fires in Strath Spey which take away more and more of these beautiful trees. The present Laird of Rothiemurchus, discussing the question of national parks with me, said that 3,000 acres of wood had been burnt in his lifetime. If some of the last remnants of the forests are to become the property of the nation, each one of us must be conscious of his personal responsibility in preserving them.
The destruction of the forests meant the end of a habitat for much other wild life which thereupon became extinct, was compelled to change its habits or was reduced to a very low population which would be in danger of extinction from other and often obscure causes. It has come to be generally understood nowadays, that the animal population of a region is not static. There is constant fluctuation in progress. But the purpose of this chapter is not to dwell on this natural rising and falling of numbers, so much as to mention the more startling events such as actual extinctions, retrogressions, resurgences, and introductions of new species within the area of the Highlands. The list of such events and movements
