A Land Won from Waste E-Book

Richard D. Oram

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife. This volume takes the reader from the climatic highs of the Late Iron Age to the depths of the war-torn and plague-ravaged fourteenth century. Departing from traditional frameworks that divide Scotland's history into periods based on kings' reigns or major political events, discussion instead follows the major shifts in climate that divide these fourteen centuries into epochs, each with its own distinct characteristics. Starting amidst the fields and forests shaped across the eight millennia of Scotland's prehistory, where we encounter the imprint of past generations of hunters and gatherers, farmers and fishermen, as well as the legacies of climate impacts and pathogens, the book explores the depths of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the long climb back to the 'Golden Age' of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Medieval Climate Anomaly, to end with the slide through crop-failure, famine, war and disease of what is reputed to be the 'worst century in human history'.

Leseprobe

A Land Won from Waste

Traprain Law and North Berwick Law, East Lothian. The probable centre of the Celtic tribe known as the Votadini or the Gododdin, Traprain housed a major concentration of population supported by the rich agricultural land of the Lothian Plain and the seasonal pastures of the Lammermuir Hills to the south.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL HI STORY OF SCOTLAND

A Land Won from Waste

Scotland AD 400–1400

_______

Richard D. Oram

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by

John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh, EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 0 85976 719 4

Copyright © Richard D. Oram 2025

The right of Richard D. Oram to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Scotland Inheritance Fund

towards the publication of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Mark Blackadder

Printed and bound in Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

Dunsinnan Hill, Collace, Perth and Kinross. Traditionally the site of Macbeth’s castle, the fort was already nearly two millennia old by the time of his reign. Located on an isolated summit in the Sidlaw Hills, the settlement at Dunsinnan was set amidst an upland landscape of extensive pasture with blocks of plough-cultivated arable land.

To Chris Smout, who started everything that has led me to this place. and To Emma, who has been with me every step of the journey from planning to completing this odyssey through Scotland’s past, present and future.

Ben Nevis from the east ridge of Carn Eige, Highland. The mountains of the western Highlands took their current form under the icesheet of the Loch Lomond re-advance, some 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.

Contents

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Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Framing Scotland’s Environmental History

1 Out of the Mists

2 After the ‘Great Wood’: Trees and Woodland Management to AD 1000

3 Riding the Rollercoaster from the Late Antique Little Ice Age to the Medieval Climate Anomaly c.500–c.1000

4 Raiders, Ranchers, Farmers and Fishers through the Great Winters of the Viking Age

5 Beasts of the Wild Wood, Mountain and Sea Shore

6 An Era of Increase and Abundance? Scotland c.1000–1256

7 Forests and Hunting Reserves

8 Feeding and Fuelling Growth

9 Facing into the Coming Storm

10 The Worst Disaster? War, Famine, Disease and Death in the Long Fourteenth Century

Conclusion – Stepping Back from the Brink?

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

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There is a vast array of people that I must thank for helping me through the long process of writing and researching this book and its companion volumes, Where Men No More May Reap or Sow and Standing on the Edge of Being. The opportunity to sit down and start the process of writing was provided by a long research leave at the end of my term as Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling, when I finally had the headroom and time to plan out the structure of a single- volume Environmental History of Scotland from the Romans to COP26 that, by the end of that year, had morphed into the three volumes of which this is the first. In the two years since the first draft was submitted to Hugh Andrew at Birlinn, much has changed in terms of structure, weighting in the content and span of each volume, and I am eternally grateful for his patience in waiting for a book that he was eager to publish nearly five years ago. As ever, I owe a massive debt of gratitude to Mairi Sutherland and her colleagues, for guiding me through the final stages from re-drafting to publication. To Laura Davey, who has helped to turn some of the clunkier prose into something far more readable, go my undying thanks.

Getting to this point has been aided and speeded by many friends and colleagues. Alison Cathcart, Catherine Mills, Michael Penman and Philip Slavin, all of History, Heritage and Politics at Stirling, read drafts and supported funding applications for research and for publication costs. Annie Tindley at the University of Newcastle, Alex Woolf at the University of St Andrews and Sam Alberti at the National Museum of Scotland also read texts in draft and gave their generous support for grant applications. The ideas that run through these texts have been sparked and nurtured through extended conversations over many years with colleagues past and present at Stirling, especially Paul Adderley, Sarah Bromage, Jane Cameron, Donald Davidson, Alastair Jump, Aedin ni Loinsigh, Greg Mannion, Ben Marsh, Ian Simpson, Phia Steyn, Richard Tipping and Eileen Tisdall, and of course, the much-missed Alasdair Ross. There are huge debts too to my former Master’s and PhD students in Environmental History – Gregor Adamson, Kate Buchanan, Sharla Chittick, Anne Dance, Val Dufeu, Ben Fanstone, Laura Hamlet, Sven Leman, Kevin Malloy, Richard Millar, Stuart Morrison, Edward Nelson, Simon Parkin, Verona Helen Shaw, Gilbert Stevenson and David Weinczok – for the conversations that underlie some of the discussion in these volumes.

Much of what is discussed here was supported by many of the staff in the University Library at Stirling, to whom goes my deepest gratitude. Likewise, the guidance and assistance of staff of Historic Environment Scotland (and the former Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland), Piers Dixon, Strat Halliday, Ewan Hyslop, and staff at the National Records of Scotland, National Library of Scotland and National Museums of Scotland, without whom this book would have been infinitely duller.

To Booboo and Lóki, who have kept me company (and stepped on the keyboard) during the long hours of writing, your distractions have always been welcome reminders that there are other important things in life. To you, Emma, the most important of them all, goes my undying love. To all our children and our first grandchild, Nora Violetta, the message in these books is for you, for it is you who will live with the decisions for the future of our environment that are being made today.

Abbreviations

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AHRB

Arts and Humanities Research Board

AMOC

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Current

ENSO

El Niño Southern Oscillation

GISP2

Greenland Ice Sheet Project, Phase 2

GRIP

Greenland Ice-core Project

HES

Historic Environment Scotland

LALIA

Late Antique Little Ice Age

LIA

‘little ice age’

MCA

Medieval Climate Anomaly

NAO

North Atlantic Oscillation

NLS

National Library of Scotland

NRS

National Records of Scotland

RCAHMS

Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland

RPS

The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. K.M. Brown et al. (St Andrews, 2007–24), http://www.rps.ac.uk/

RWP

Roman Warm Period

TEK

traditional environmental knowledge

UNESCO

United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation

VEI

Volcanic explosivity index

Inauguration site, Dunadd, Argyll and Bute. Rising now from the grazing-land of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Improvement era fields, the fort was once surrounded by the raised bog of the Moine Mhòr, exploited for fuel, pasture, scrubby woodland and hunting opportunities by Dunadd’s inhabitants.

Introduction: Framing Scotland’s Environmental History

_______

We listened into the Iceage

And we built up man round the Picts

And the daybreak hammered out warning

To the weak

We dreamed on moor with passion

And on the long lochs bluer than eyes

’Till the mists of bygone ages

Heard our cries1

According to the website of VisitScotland, the agency that promotes the wonders of this land to domestic and international tourists alike, our environment – or ‘Landscapes and Nature’ as it is labelled on the site – is one of the country’s greatest assets and attractions.2 It is a land replete with natural wonders laid out for visitors, of ‘Towering mountains, glittering lochs, dense woodlands and miles upon miles of golden beaches’ that form ‘landscapes and natural scenery [that] really will take your breath away.’ You are invited to ‘Tour the rolling hills and lush farmland of the Lowlands, or drive through deep glens surrounded by mountains in the Highlands. Uncover magnificent coastal features in the west, and explore the atmospheric, royal settings of the east.’ For the adventurous, you can ‘Head to one of our Dark Sky Parks or spots where you can marvel at the sparkling night sky, dip your toes into our crisp sea water, wander around one of the many glistening freshwater lochs, or venture out into the wilderness to see if you can catch the Northern Lights dancing in the sky.’ Here, in a few sentences, is the delight, wonderful variety, astonishing diversity and seeming timelessness of the land and environment of one small country captured in a handful of breathless lines.

It is an attractive vision, almost idealised in its conjuring of juxtaposed docility and wildness, like the imagined landscapes of some medieval Italian fresco.3 Look a little deeper, however, and questions begin to form. Where are the people in this landscape? Apart from the Lowlands’ ‘lush farmland’ or, perhaps, those enigmatic ‘atmospheric, royal settings of the east’, it is a ‘wilderness’ with which we are presented, of glens, mountains, lochs and woodlands, empty of other life – human and non-human – and awaiting your discovery as intrepid explorers. There is almost nothing in the pitch to suggest that what you will find is far from being in any sense wild nature or a wilderness, and only the barest of hints that it is the product of around nine millennia of human interaction with, and transformation of, almost every part of the land and waters of what we now know as Scotland. Far from being anything close to pristine nature or in any sense wilderness, all of what we see today is part of a complex cultural construction, layer upon layer of cultural landscapes. Every one of these superimposed levels has been manufactured by millennia of interaction between humans and the wider environment through which they moved and which they altered and adapted to deliver the means to sustain themselves. The complexity of this landscape is staggering in the multiplicity of strata of alteration and input, created by shifting economic and social conditions, population levels, management fashions and, of course, climate change.4 When there is little recognition of this reality of layering amongst the many stakeholders who are trying to shape public perceptions of the nature of Scotland’s landscape – in some cases, the human presence has been almost literally airbrushed out of the scene to emphasise the apparent emptiness of this ‘wild land’ – it is perhaps unfair to single out what is, after all, a successful promotional pitch designed for an agency charged with boosting national income from tourist revenues. It nevertheless serves as a useful illustration of the myth-making that for decades if not centuries has moulded perceptions of Scotland’s history, of its people and most powerfully of the land itself both at home and abroad. Importantly, these are the myths which as factoids are being repackaged and redeployed by participants in current debate concerning the future shape and content of Scotland’s landscapes and environment. Too often, the repetition of some of these pieces of false or misleading data and their loud declaration as ‘truth’ create a distorted vision of the past, present and future of Scotland’s environment. But simple, indeed glib, explanations are seductive.

The white sands and aquamarine waters of Scousburgh, South Mainland, Shetland, a scene that captures the spirit of the VisitScotland promotion of the country’s natural beauty.

The airbrushing of humanity’s presence and impacts from the picture presented in this marketing material – unconsciously reflecting one consequence of generations of enforced population displacement as a result of the Clearances and the lure of a better life abroad through emigration, and more recently the actual physical removal of such evidence – is a contributor to what has been labelled a ‘syndrome of “shifting baselines”’.5 This ‘syndrome’ has been explained as our individual internalising of the ‘ecological impoverishment in our science, culture and institutions’ whereby ‘each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the decline and damage of the generations before’, thereby perpetuating a continually moving picture. We are, however, in a dangerous place where steps to reverse that ecological impoverishment result in a cultural impoverishment. It is made worse by that impoverishment occurring through wilful, self-conscious acts of social amnesia that obliterate and then deny past human contributions to the creation of landscape features that evidence our ancestors’ struggles to subsist and succeed in places that are often hostile and inhospitable for settlement. A long educational tradition of teaching the history of ‘Improvement’ and ‘Enlightenment’ in schools and the ingrained popular knowledge of the Highland Clearances have, however, preconditioned some awareness of moments of significant change and their enduring physical legacies, packaged as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ in their effects. Many people know of the transformation of rural landscapes that started in the eighteenth century and reached its zenith on the eve of the First World War, and whose physical remains still define the patterns into which the land is divided and the uses to which it is put. Similarly, many recognise and understand the consequences of industrialisation/de-industrialisation and urbanisation since 1800. These are all processes that altered the face of the land, creating agricultural landscapes or engulfing them beneath expanding towns and cities, and leaving profound scars that are the unmistakable evidence of massive human interventions of the relatively recent past.

Lubvan ruins, Laggan, Highland. The manufactured emptiness of a landscape cleared first for sheep and then to create a deer forest is for many the epitome of Highland ‘wilderness’.

Fewer people perceive the expanses of emptiness found in many upland districts (not only in the Highlands) as anthropogenic constructions of equally recent creation. Yet whether it is the grassy hillsides of the Borders or the heather-clad moors and mountains of the Highlands, the depopulated and often ecologically degraded places we see today are usually cultural products of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century social and economic systems which valued sheep and deer more than people. For many contemporary commentators, the point of transition that delivered these socio-economic systems is the critical baseline, such that Scotland’s current environment is understood in terms of division between a pre-Improvement era of nature’s abundance and a post-Improvement one of continuous and continuing loss.6 What few acknowledge, however, is that such a baseline is arbitrary, reflecting neither the millennia of subtle and not so subtle shifts that have been powered by climatic, pathogenic and human agencies, nor that the systems which brought about the changes they identify were transitory and gave way to a slow-moving landslide of consequences with variable and still unfolding modern outcomes.7 That slow-moving landslide is our unconscious experience of ‘shifting baselines’ and to an extent it excuses our relative blindness to the reality that environments are not static, have no ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’ state in which they should persist, but exist in constant flux. Rolling back the flow to some arbitrary, notionally pristine state, as sought for in even the most carefully planned programme of restoration ecology, at best resets the dial on the change process, but how it evolves from there will be determined by wholly different climatic, environmental and anthropogenic variables from those that obtained in the past. To suggest otherwise is to deny the realities of evolution.

Enter a new discipline

While Standing on the Edge of Being, the final companion volume to this one, ends with the question of where we go from here in our human relationship with the environment in Scotland, it is how we got to our present state that is the central theme of this book and of the second volume, Where Men No More May Reap or Sow. What is offered is an environmental history of Scotland, not a history of Scotland’s environment. It is a study of human relationships with the land and the biota in and on it rather than one that focuses on the development over time of the plant life and wildlife to be found here throughout history. Such environmental histories – that is, histories that explore the interrelationship between humans and the environment in which we live, where nature matters8 – started to emerge as a new strand in historical writing in the third quarter of the twentieth century, around the time we gradually awakened to the immensity of the negative impact we were having on the world. From the atom bomb to overpopulation, pollution and ‘forever’ chemicals, to resource exhaustion, societal disintegration and ecological collapse, academics in the 1960s saw a horrifying prospect of imminent apocalypse and responded with an outpouring of existential anxiety in a wave of publications that sought to understand how we had arrived at this place and how we might survive the inevitable crises to come.9 Ironically, given the contribution of the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War era to that existential anxiety, many of the major advances in that understanding were triggered by research programmes in the Arctic funded chiefly but not exclusively by the US military, which had the overarching aim of better understanding the survivability of profound global change – i.e. through nuclear war – but which began to deliver hard evidence for episodes of past global climate change. The most significant advances, however, came with the European Science Foundation-funded Greenland Ice-core Project (or GRIP, as it was known), which ran from 1988 to 1995, and subsequent projects which tested and expanded upon GRIP’s findings.10 Archaeologists and historians, especially those working in the North Atlantic, were quick to waken to the potential of this new form of data to explain in terms of climate change the early successes of ventures like the Norse colonisation of Iceland and Greenland and the near collapse or total failure of those colonies later in the Middle Ages.11 If we could understand how and why that happened, might we not better understand the kinds of challenges that humanity could face as climate change and, in particular, global warming accelerated? For a country located in an especially climatically sensitive position on the north-western edge of Europe, backed by the North Atlantic and dependent for its relatively benign climatic conditions on the circulation of oceanic waters and atmospheric pressure systems, the precarity of agricultural regimes in Scotland that depended on the continuity of those mechanisms was immediately evident in the new data from Greenland.

It is important to reflect on the fact that until the data from GRIP and the subsequent GISP2 projects started to percolate beyond the climatological community – indeed until around twenty-five years ago – almost all history, not just Scottish history, was written from an entirely human and overwhelmingly male perspective. Archaeology was already moving ahead of historians in its embracing by the 1970s of evidence for ancient environmental conditions – palaeoenvironmental data – that could enrich understanding of lifestyles and practices for which there was otherwise no written record, and was developing methodologies and philosophies that looked beyond the human male experience to better understand how societies in the past had functioned.12 Regardless of the emerging influence of gendered methodologies, however, archaeology’s focus long remained almost wholly anthropocentric. It was concerned with what such evidence might tell us about the arrival and spread of agriculture, prehistoric woodland decline or the diversity of foraged and farmed resources exploited by a community. The emphasis was on the human lived experience. Reflection on the non-human experience and the role of climate change and its potential contribution to some of the changes evident in the archaeological record developed only gradually through the 1980s. From there, however, application of that alternative ‘gaze’ evolved rapidly such that by the 1990s perspectives had already swung round, to the point where climate was being proposed by some researchers as one of the most significant influences on human cultural development.13

Glacier, Prince Christian Sound, Greenland. The now fast-melting Greenland ice sheet contains a record of millennia of northern hemisphere climate change. (Image: Anna Ritchie.)

While archaeologists were pursuing these exciting new approaches to their discipline, many academic historians remained oblivious to, or dismissive of, the potential for similar forms of data to expand understanding of processes that they could otherwise barely descry in their documents. That is not to say that there were no developments in historical methodologies, but by the late 1970s, while some scholars adopted a top-down or bottom-up social approach, or attempted to adopt a gendered perspective, historiography still largely followed the human – usually male – gaze. Most research remained driven by textual evidence or, occasionally, oral record, giving only the most cursory of nods to other forms of evidence. For the most part it also considered the world in which we live as a mere backdrop to political events, economic developments or individual human experiences. That world, furthermore, existed in a relatively constant physical state that changed only when we humans decided that it needed to be improved upon, or in some way modified to deliver more of what we wanted from it. In that entirely anthropocentric worldview, a capitalised ‘Nature’ was a relatively passive force that impinged little on human decision-making and, when it did, was there to be subdued to the will of humankind.

Aonach Mor and the mountains south of Glen Affric from the east ridge of Carn Eige, Highland. Scientific understanding of the effects of the last ice age of the Younger Dryas and the recovery from it in the early stages of the present Holocene era expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century. Research into the sub-arctic area of Scotland’s montane regions continues to add to that understanding.

This negative perspective needs some tempering, for from the middle of the twentieth century, before even GRIP had been conceived, growing scientific awareness in Europe and North America of a far more complex interplay between humans and the planetary system in which we live had begun to permeate some areas of historical thinking. In the early twentieth century, work by Scandinavian palaeobotanists provided the underpinning data for what was presented as a four-stage development of the northern hemisphere’s climate regime across the Holocene era from the end of the last ice age to the present, revised in the middle of the century into a new, tripartite scheme, then revised again more radically in the last quarter of the century. Until the GRIP and GISP2 data began to become available and be analysed and modelled, the view that prevailed for Scotland was of a rapid post-glacial warming and increasing rainfall to the early sixth millennium BC, after which shifts in climate regime were ‘relatively minor’.14 The impact of this climate awareness was strongest in areas like historical geography and climatology, where researchers were attracted by the emergent scientific data and began to advance their own interpretations of the way in which larger and more powerful forces – like climate change or pandemic and panzootic disease – might have impacted upon human decision-making and daily life in the past.

At the forefront of this new thinking in Britain was the historical climatologist Hubert Lamb, whose research by the mid 1960s pointed towards episodes of climatic warming and cooling that, although ‘relatively minor’, had had effects on the largely rural society of the Middle Ages that were likely to have been profound. He identified the most pronounced warming episode as having spanned the period from the later eleventh to the mid thirteenth century, and a major cooling that had started in the fifteenth century and ended in the nineteenth.15 His theories on the warming episode that he termed ‘the medieval warm epoch’ struck a chord with English medieval economic historians led by Michael Postan. It was Postan who developed a depressingly neo-Malthusian thesis of population growth outstripping the capacity of the land to feed the expanded numbers, triggering a subsistence crisis and then catastrophic famine- and disease-delivered collapse. He argued that the initial growth was enabled by the benign conditions of what we now style the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), which had stimulated population growth after a long period of stagnation from the middle of the first millennium. Growth of communities created pressures on resources and on individuals’ social advancement opportunities – to secure a marriage, young males needed first to acquire land on which to support a family – and so drove peasant land-hunger, expansion into new areas and intensification of exploitation in older settlement landscapes. Postan saw these processes as creating a spiral of ultimately unsustainable growth, which led to overpopulation and soil fertility depletion, leading in turn to yield decline, harvest failure, famine and mass mortalities.16 It was a compelling model, especially when viewed within the context of 1960s anxieties over global population levels and ‘the limits to growth’, and it set a trend of enquiry which for the first time looked at the science within the natural processes upon which human society depended. Unfortunately, Postan’s use of the extensive surviving southern and Midlands English manorial accounts, which documented expansion of the area under cultivation, population figures, yield levels and stock numbers, coupled with Lamb’s analysis of narrative sources for weather trends and his own meteorological models, could not be replicated for northern England, let alone Scotland. Such records simply do not exist for the northern parts of the British Isles. The result was that beyond a disappointingly meagre handful of generalised statements about population trends and agricultural expansion, the revolution in English historical thinking on the interplay of climate and human populations throughout the Middle Ages and beyond failed to take root north of the border.17

Largely as a consequence of that perceived lack of equivalent data, as late as the early 1990s the major overview histories of Scotland could still be written with a perspective in which almost every determinant – plague pandemics apart – in the socio-economic and political evolution of the Scottish state was founded in human action.18 But the steady increase in the availability of scientific data to provide proxies for both climate and weather records and of historical materials such as manorial accounts and yield figures meant that the delayed revolution was imminent. The new movement was spearheaded from the 1960s in social history and from the late 1990s in environmental history by the work of one scholar, Christopher Smout, the pre-eminent social and economic historian of early modern Scotland. In the decade following his retirement from an academic post at the University of St Andrews, a prodigious outpouring of new research and forensic re-examination of much of his older work saw Smout single-handedly introduce Scotland to the potential of environmental history as a tool by which to better understand human relationships and interdependencies with the places in which they lived, the resources available there and the trees, plants and wildlife with which they shared the land. The influence of his work will be most evident in Where Men No More May Reap or Sow and Standing on the Edge of Being, in the exploration of the period from 1500 to the present.

It was Smout who masterminded the setting up of a joint Centre for Environmental History and Policy at the universities of St Andrews and Stirling, its evolution into the then AHRB-funded Research Centre for Environmental History, and from 2002 the development at Stirling especially of programmes of teaching and research in this field. Over the last twenty-five years, the Stirling Centre became the principal focus of enquiry into the environmental history of medieval and early post-medieval Scotland and the output of several of the scholars associated with it has shaped the themes covered in this volume and the two following volumes that continue its narratives down to the present. Despite that output, however, and despite a sustained effort to communicate research findings in an accessible manner that could carry them far beyond a narrow academic community, popular awareness of the complex histories that underlie many of our current environmental issues remains shallow and fragmentary. Myth and misunderstanding have thrived as new audiences have become engaged and enraged by the ecological loss with which they are everywhere confronted, and the seeming indifference or incapacity of governments, agencies and the public at large to respond effectively to the continuing degradation and destruction. Much of their outrage is based on misconception and misinformation and is often misdirected. Most is fuelled and targeted by the factoids distributed by usually well-meaning but ill-informed commentators and activists, whose perception of the past has been framed by the often vivid but ultimately fantastical word imagery of nineteenth-century authors rather than by the cooler, carefully researched – but sometimes poorly communicated – findings of modern academics.

Modern myth-making, however, has directed its gaze much deeper into the human past in Scotland than the reach of the nation’s recorded history, and it is there that the means to dismantle some of the most persistent of these distortions lie. Although this book and its companion volumes cover only the last two millennia, it is vital to recognise that an environmental history of Scotland does not simply span that ‘historic’ era or commence with the earliest surviving written accounts relating to the geographical area occupied by the modern nation. Using different forms of non-textual record evidence, we can instead take an environmental history far deeper into what is conventionally labelled ‘prehistory’. Using climate proxy data (forms of evidence that provide a record of prevailing climatic conditions), such as the annual growth rings of some tree species (whose thicknesses vary according to the tree’s sensitivity to temperatures and precipitation), speleothems (the limestone structures that form in caves as a result of the slow percolation of water through the rock strata above, which varies according to annual rainfall or drought), palaeoenvironmental records (such as pollen records or ancient insect and other invertebrate remains) and the physical evidence from archaeological excavation and field survey, it is possible to synthesise an account of the main trends and processes that shaped the environment through which the first settlers in this land and some two hundred generations of their successors moved before the Roman general Agricola led his armies north or his son-in-law the historian Tacitus set pen to parchment.19

Weather’s drivers

So, what are these primarily non-anthropogenic forces that underlie such fundamental transformations of the environment upon which Scotland’s human population depended? In the second half of the twentieth century, but especially from the 1990s as the results of the GRIP project unfolded, there was growing scientific awareness that whilst the post-glacial climate regime might have seen only ‘relatively minor changes’ there were other factors that affected prevailing weather patterns as opposed to more general climatic conditions. In particular, there was better understanding of the degree to which major oceanic and atmospheric circulation systems drive prevailing weather patterns. The growing research into global circulatory systems, however, indicated that even relatively minor variations can have potentially beneficial or catastrophic consequences for human societies. Such variable outcomes were greatest for societies that had developed economic practices – agriculture, fisheries and other forms of resource management – founded on traditional environmental knowledge, or TEK, shaped during long phases of relatively stable conditions by close observation across generations of the rhythms of the seasons and patterns of weather. In the North Atlantic, the most important of the oceanic circulation systems is that known by the acronym AMOC, otherwise the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is the major system of oceanic currents that carry warm water from the tropics northwards. It works like a conveyor belt that is powered by differences in water density that arise from changes in temperature and salinity. When the water flows north it gradually cools but also sees some evaporation, which causes the salt content of the remaining water to increase. The low temperatures and higher salt content cause the water to become denser. As the density increases, the dense water sinks deep into the ocean – several thousand metres beneath the surface – and begins to spread southwards. There, it begins to be drawn towards the surface, warming as it rises, and so starts a new circulation.

But it is not solely the AMOC which has an effect on the British Isles, and we have become increasingly aware of the impact of the greatest global circulation system in the Pacific Ocean and its influence on weather patterns even in the north-eastern Atlantic. Most people are familiar with the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon by name but less so with what it is and how it affects us. ‘El Niño’ means ‘the little boy’ in Spanish and is derived from the name that fishermen on Peru’s Pacific coast used from the 1600s for periods of unusually warm water in the ocean that affected the migration of the shoals on which they depended. Its full name is ‘El Niño de Navidad’ (the little boy of the Nativity, i.e. the Christ Child), because the warm-water episode usually peaked in December. ‘El Niño’ is now used to describe this episodic warming of sea surface temperature, which is concentrated normally in the central-east equatorial Pacific. In Met Office terms, an El Niño is declared when ‘sea temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific rise 0.5°C above the long-term average. El Niño is felt strongly in the tropical eastern Pacific with warmer than average weather’.20 El Niño’s counterpart is La Niña or ‘the little girl’. It is the term adopted by climatologists from the traditional name applied to the opposite side of the Pacific’s temperature fluctuation. This is episodes of cooler than average sea surface temperature occurring in that same region of the equatorial Pacific. The conditions for declaring a La Niña event differ between various monitoring agencies, but it is generally accepted that during an event surface temperatures might fall to 3–5°C below average. This is generally experienced as cooler, drier than average weather in the tropical eastern Pacific.

Sunset over the North Atlantic, looking west from near Virda Field, Papa Stour, Shetland. Whilst we have long had a heightened awareness of the way our interrelationship with the surrounding seas has shaped us culturally, our understanding of the influence of oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns on our environment is still growing.

But it is not just the Pacific region that is affected by the El Niño/La Niña cycle. We now know that the cycle has global ramifications, with often severe weather impacts in regions distant from the Pacific. In the northern British Isles, El Niño years are recognised as an important factor with the potential to increase the threat of colder winter weather. El Niño has been seen as a limiter on the development of tropical storms in the North Atlantic. By way of contrast, La Niña can enhance development of storm systems and cause increased rainfall in some regions but droughts or cooler temperatures in others. As a note here, current monitoring at the time of writing suggests that summer and autumn 2024 will see a La Niña event.

Neither the AMOC nor El Niño/La Niña function in isolation; both are accompanied by major switches in atmospheric pressure systems and circulation. For AMOC there is the North Atlantic Oscillation and for El Niño/La Niña there is the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, which is an irregular interannual cycle involving the oscillation of atmospheric pressure changes between the east and west tropical Pacific regions and is now known to accompany both El Niño and La Niña episodes. The ENSO name is a reminder of the intimate interaction of atmosphere and ocean that is an essential dimension of the weather-shaping processes they represent. Of the multiple examples of such systems interactions globally, ENSO is the single most dominant phenomenon driving weather variability on year-to-year timescales across much of the planet. From a historical perspective it is essential to recognise that these systems are also not modern developments, although their increasing dynamism and unpredictability is linked to anthropogenic factors. In recent experience, these events have been associated with widespread disruption of global climate systems that can last several months, sometimes recurring annually, and have been seen to lead to significant impacts on human life, affecting everything from agriculture (good and bad harvests) and fish migration patterns, the physical infrastructure of buildings, roads and bridges, human and animal health and the provision of traditional sources of thermal energy.

In the northern part of the British Isles, most direct weather impacts arise from the North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO. This is the name applied to the changing relative relationships of the area of atmospheric high pressure centred on the Azores (the so-called Azores high) and low pressure over Iceland (the so-called Icelandic low). The interaction between these systems exerts a strong influence on winter weather and climate patterns in Europe and North America, as it causes changes in the intensity and location of the North Atlantic jet stream, the flow of very fast winds high in the atmosphere that affects the movement of regions of low pressure. The Met Office describes the alternating states of the NAO as follows:

The positive [or ‘high’] NAO phase represents a stronger than usual difference in pressure between the two regions. Winds from the west dominate, bringing with them warm air, while the position of the jet stream enables stronger and more frequent storms to travel across the Atlantic. These support mild, stormy and wet winter conditions in northern Europe and eastern US. Conversely, northern Canada, Greenland and southern Europe are prone to cold and dry winter conditions.

The negative [or ‘low’] NAO phase represents the reverse with a weaker than usual difference in pressure. Winds from the east and north-east are more frequent, bringing with them cold air, while the adjusted position of the jet stream leads to weaker and less frequent storms. As a result, Europe and eastern US are more likely to experience cold, calm and dry winters. In contrast, northern Canada and Greenland will tend to be mild and wet.21

How we see the effects of these phenomena on Scotland is founded on a combination of modelling based on different forms of climate proxy data, physical evidence from archaeological excavation, principally palaeoenvironmental records, and the often qualitative data of surviving written records.

Introducing climate proxy data

Our evidence for what would have been the lived experience of the physical effects of these various atmospheric and oceanic phenomena is derived mainly from what are referred to as climate proxy records. The most important long-sequence proxy record – that is, one which provides a run of data across a very long chronological span – is from GRIP and GISP2 and most of our temperature and precipitation models for Scotland draw heavily on that ice core data. Obviously, Greenland is geographically distant from the northern British Isles and there would have been considerable buffering of weather effects by the intervening ocean. The development of geographically more proximate proxy sequences has therefore been of huge importance over the last two decades in enabling the construction of more nuanced models. There are currently three main sets of widely available proxy data from Scotland – the Traligill speleothem record (mainly winter precipitation), the Loch Sunart bottom water temperature record and the Cairngorm tree-ring sequence – all of which are linked closest to weather patterns originating in the NAO. Of these proxies, only the Traligill and Loch Sunart records currently extend into the deeper past, with the speleothems offering a three millennia record and the sediments one millennium; the Cairngorm data so far available starts only in the early thirteenth century.

Weather front and rain squalls over the Ross of Mull, Argyll and Bute. The positive or ‘high’ NAO state delivers waves of rainy and possibly stormy weather to the western, Atlantic-facing parts of Scotland.

The first of these proxies comes from western Sutherland in the record of the Uamh an Tartair caves in the Traligill basin in Assynt, where the growth rate in the annually deposited laminae of the speleothems – stalagmites and stalactites – reflects the levels of moisture percolating through from the peat overlying the subterranean system. Speleothems offer a well-nuanced proxy record for winter precipitation with strong regional significance. For northwest mainland Scotland at least, the speleothems from Uamh an Tartair have begun to yield good evidence for North Atlantic climate variability over a 3,000-year period and allow the construction of broad models of the winter climate regime experienced in Atlantic-facing northern Scotland. Uamh an Tartair’s record has been analysed in most detail for the thirteenth century and later, but the same kind of trends of high/low winter precipitation revealing positive and negative NAO states are identifiable for earlier centuries. The MCA sequence commences with three decades of high winter precipitation to around 1030. This is associated with a high winter NAO characterised by strong westerly airflow and cyclonic rainfall, then plunges to the lowest precipitation – signalling a low winter NAO – recorded for the north-west Highlands until the early seventeenth century, with the dry conditions lasting into the 1080s. Low winter NAO is associated more with cold, dry winters and a northerly or easterly airflow but the depth of the change reflected in the laminar growth of the speleothems at this point perhaps signals the additional influence of an episode of low sunspot activity known as the Oort Solar Minimum.22

At Loch Sunart, the long, deep sea loch that penetrates the western Highland coast to the south of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, isotopic analysis of benthic invertebrates – clams, worms and crustaceans – from the bottom waters of the inlet yielded a record of summer coastal temperature anomalies spanning the last millennium. Their clearest evidence is for a change in climate regime that commenced around 1400, which the researchers saw as being driven by the large-scale reorganisation of northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation that marked the transition into the ‘little ice age’ (LIA). Although this climate shift has been classed as minor in comparison to that which heralded the onset of the last true ice age and its worst effects were localised to the North Atlantic and Europe primarily, it was sufficiently significant to deliver profound change in the weather patterns upon which Scotland’s agricultural economy was founded. This transition point and the changes that it heralded are the topic of discussion in the opening chapters of Where Men No More May Reap or Sow.

Loch Sunart, looking east over the island of Oronsay, Highland. The long, fjord-like sea loch that runs deep inland between Ardnamurchan and Morvern provides ideal conditions for the development of the seabed sediments that record temperature changes over long time spans.

In comparison with many other parts of Europe and especially Ireland, Scotland lacks a long run of climate data derived from the annual growth rings of certain tree species. In the 1980s, preliminary research started to indicate that there was potential for the reconstruction of a sequence of historic summer temperatures in the central Highlands, using pine timbers rather than the oak that is the basis for the deep chronologies constructed for Ireland. That work ran into the barrier of the relatively young age of the majority of still growing trees – around 225 years old – and a lack of knowledge of the provenance of surviving structural timbers of greater age. In the early 2000s, however, there was a breakthrough using modern, historical and subfossil pine material obtained from current native pinewoods, from historic structures and from loch-bed sediments. The material recovered spans the last 8,000 years and we are fortunate that the published results of a first stage of analysis, tree-ring sequences from the Cairngorms, commence around 1200. These sequences give us insight into summer conditions in the central and north-east Highland uplands over the last 800 years, taking us through the era from the decline of the MCA to the end of the LIA.

As an illustration of the value of these proxies, let us look at just one short episode in the thirteenth century. We will return to this material later in the volume. From the Cairngorm tree-ring evidence, we have a record of summers in this region having been generally cooler since the start of the century, declining slightly through the 1210s but becoming significantly cooler through the 1220s. The extreme for that decade was reached in 1227, which was the fifth coldest year across the entire 800-year sequence currently available, but worse was to come. The extreme European winter of 1233/4 has been described as ‘the most outstanding meteorological episode of the thirteenth century’,23 and Scottish proxy data suggests that this was indeed a time of great cold. At Traligill, the speleothem growth rings indicate that the 1230s were the driest decade of the thirteenth century, albeit with still relatively high levels of precipitation.24 What this points to is a marked weakening of winter NAO which brought a much colder anticyclonic airflow pulling Arctic air south and across Scotland. This cooling is also present as a sharp dip in the Loch Sunart deep water temperatures – followed by an equally sharp positive movement – perhaps pointing to a combination of cooler ocean surface temperatures and cold run-off from the surrounding land.25 In the Cairngorms, summer 1232 was the coldest of the last 800 years.26 Collectively, these fragments of evidence point to the late 1220s and early 1230s as a brief episode of sharply deteriorating summer and winter weather conditions, followed by a bounce back to the warmer conditions of previous decades. Taken together, this data provides some context for the political disturbance of this period, which saw King Alexander II facing challenges from the same northern and western regions that the proxies indicate experienced adverse weather conditions. It is a matter of record that the king’s campaigns in the Clyde estuary, Sutherland and Caithness and Galloway were all hindered by adverse summer weather. Alexander, however, was by no means the first and certainly not the last ruler to have his plans upset by circumstances beyond his control. Indeed, both our archaeological and palaeoenvironmental record and our albeit fragmentary historical documents indicate that the human experience in Scotland has been shaped by interactions with climate, weather and the environment since the first human arrival in this land.

Glen Derry and Glen Luibeg pinewoods, southern Cairngorms, Aberdeenshire. The living pines, ‘sub-fossil’ remains found in peat or in loch-bed sediments and pine timbers from historic buildings are providing new data for climate change and related weather impacts on tree growth in this region over many centuries.

History versus mythology

Exactly when those first human settlers arrived in Scotland will probably never be known, as coastal erosion and changes in sea level, millennia of intensive land-use and modern urban sprawl have erased many places that would have been attractive to these first people. It was long believed that no humans could have subsisted in the northern parts of the region that is now the British Isles until several millennia after the last phase of the ice age, the so-called Younger Dryas era. That episode had seen the re-establishment around 12,900 years ago of an ice sheet over north-western Scotland, extending from the Torridon mountains to the south-eastern end of the Loch Lomond basin, in what we know as the Loch Lomond Stadial or Loch Lomond Readvance. The ice developed and spread for over a millennium, until around 11,700 years ago the climate began to warm and the ice contracted rapidly, signalling the start of a new climate era, the Holocene. Archaeologists have found increasing evidence, however, that human populations were present in what is now Scotland from around 12,900 BC and remained within the region on the southern fringes of the ice-covered zone throughout the stadial. They were members of a culture that used the stone tool technology known as ‘Hamburgian’ (after the north German site locations near the city of Hamburg where encampments were identified), which developed during the period to which the broad label of Late Upper Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) is applied. This culture, identified from artefacts, art and midden remains as hunters of the reindeer herds that thrived on the tundra at the edge of the ice sheet, persisted through the Loch Lomond Stadial and until around 10,000 BC, when ice probably still lingered on the high summits and in corries.27 Research into these early people is just commencing and a new ‘history’ of the earliest human settlement of Scotland starting to be written.

We can be sure that it was the rapidly warming climate at the start of the Holocene that created the conditions which drew many more groups of hunters and gatherers north, users of a new form of stone technology that characterised the period we know as the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), starting a 10,000-year interaction between humans, land and environment that shaped the cultural artefact that is our modern landscape and the distinctive ecologies that now exist upon it. Some studies, influenced by the growing perception of human impacts on the environment as wholly negative, sought for evidence to support suggestions that such transformations were as old as the earliest human presence in Scotland. Thus, it was argued that by around 8000 BC significant anthropogenic interventions were already having an impact on the physical character of the land and the vegetation it supported, starting that slow landslide of ecological change that has given rise to some of Scotland’s regionally distinctive landscapes. With hindsight, we can recognise that there is an inherent danger in applying a deterministic interpretation to such evidence, where the ‘butterfly effect’ of an event that is perhaps only indirectly attributable to human action can be overblown into a proposition that from that one action flowed an inevitable trend that resulted in a negative outcome whose legacies remain with us today. In the Flow Country of north-east Sutherland and Caithness, for example, it was proposed in the 1990s that widespread burning of vegetation was already being practised by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer peoples who moved through the region around 9,000 years ago. That burning, it was suggested, started to impede the development of woodland cover by tree species already at the limit of their geographical range, over four millennia before the arrival of Neolithic pastoralists and cultivators.28 While some archaeologists and palaeoenvironmental specialists further suggested that this periodic burning might have contributed to the start of the waterlogging that led to the development of the iconic peat wetlands of the Flow Country, others have argued strongly that the two are more likely unrelated and have pointed to the very limited nature of the charcoal spreads that have been claimed as evidence of extensive woodland or heathland burning. Most recent studies have rejected anthropogenic causality in peat formation, other than where cultivated methods have reduced natural drainage and triggered waterlogging when rainfall levels began to increase.29 Rather than being the unwanted end product of a human action, blanket peat spread has been proposed alternatively as ‘an inevitable but rapid end-stage to soil development’ in what was generally a cold, wet climate conducive to its growth, or as a consequence of past climatic change.30

Looking south-west over the Bog na Gaoithe to the Sutherland hills and the Caithness Flow Country, Highland.

That shifting understanding in respect of one of the most iconic landscapes of northern Scotland, a landscape that at the time of writing has been submitted by the UK Government for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,31 is representative of a wider series of largely myth-driven controversies concerning the interplay of human and non-human factors in the shaping of Scotland’s current environment and cultural landscapes. The most contentious of these controversies, whose influence will be seen recurrently throughout this volume and in both Where Men No More May Reap or Sow and Standing on the Edge of Being, is that regarding the degree to which the decline of Scotland’s woodland cover – where its changing form and the processes affecting its fate have become the principal proxy for exploration of wider environmental loss – has been a consequence of human actions as opposed to successive climatic switches and associated weather trends.32 From medieval to nineteenth-century efforts to rationalise the disappearance of extensive post-glacial ‘climax forest’, based on observation of layers of preserved timbers in peat bogs,33 to later nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century scientific understanding of the legacies of past land-use practices that were hostile to woodland regeneration, and even as far as the 1990s, the narrative was almost entirely one of continuous decline caused by human agency. Central to this tradition was the construction of the myth of the ‘Great Wood of Caledon’, which is discussed in depth in Chapter 1. This myth, in its fullest nineteenth-century development, led to a vision of Scotland as still swathed shore to shore in dense woodland – mainly of Scots pine or pine and oak – that blocked the advance of Roman legions, from whom safe refuge was provided within this ‘primeval northern forest’34 for the Celtic tribesmen who refused to bow to the might of empire.

Scots pine trees, Allt Mheuran, Glen Etive, Highland. For around two hundred years, fragments of ‘Caledonian Forest’ of this kind have been misrepresented as remnants of a once vast ‘Great Wood of Caledon’.

Although already challenged by the 1860s and comprehensively demolished in a series of major studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, the myth has proven resilient and persists in much popular and populist environmental literature. It is especially prevalent in calls for an acceleration of woodland restoration with the express purpose of the recreation of this ‘lost’ forest in large-scale rewilding projects. Further fuelled by the frequent misused interchangeability of the ‘Great Wood of Caledon’ of myth and the scientific category ‘Caledonian Forest’, which lends an air of hard scientific respectability and veracity to the ahistorical fantasy woodland, the written record has been weaponised as the unimpeachable authority for the vision of a blanket of trees that swathed the land until Roman legionaries and later waves of invaders destroyed them. It is understandable that this particular myth has secured such prominence, for it offers a modern parable for the environmental impact of human actions and the possibility of remediation, and consequently a form of conscience-salving atonement and potential redemption for our ancestors’ crimes. While this ‘putting right the wrongs of the past’ approach undoubtedly yields benefits in the heightened public engagement with afforestation and rewilding debates, the distorted picture which it presents of the processes that contributed to woodland decline is unhelpful for a wider understanding of cultural landscapes, historic environments and the interleaving of human and non-human agency in effecting environmental change. Most damagingly, where the myth of the Great Wood is deployed commonly and uncritically, the contribution of climate change to past, current and possible future episodes of woodland loss is omitted or packaged as another aspect of the Holocene’s catalogue of anthropogenic destruction.35

Since the development of carbon-14 dating in the 1950s, which made it possible to determine the relative antiquity of the ancient timbers present in peat bogs, coupled with the increasing sophistication of pollen analysis, it has been clear that major episodes of large-scale woodland loss occurred at a series of points through Scotland’s prehistoric era. A detailed picture of the evolution and decline of woodland over the last ten and a half millennia, based on scientific evidence, was formulated and refined in the early 1990s.36 The picture is one of gradual evolution over several thousand years after the end of the last glacial episode in Scotland, around 8300 BC, at which time Scotland’s only woodlands were probably groves of juniper. Scattered remnants of juniper scrubland that remain in the valleys fringing the Cairngorms are descendants of a genuine ‘primeval forest’. This ice age survivor was joined over the next millennium by new arrivals. The first colonists were willow and rowan, then birch and some centuries later hazel. The tree long believed to have constituted the bulk of the mythical ‘Great Wood’ – Scots pine – had established a substantial presence in Wester Ross by around 7000 BC, possibly spreading from a refugium that had escaped the Loch Lomond ice sheet but has now been inundated by the Atlantic, or from Ireland, which had not been subject to the full extent of ice cover. Pine colonised the north and west Highland area rapidly in the following centuries, some from this initial Wester Ross zone. Other pine populations came from unknown sources to the east or south, perhaps out of the now submerged ‘Doggerland’ of the North Sea basin.37 Although dominant through much of the central, western and northern Highlands, Scots pine was not the only species present in number, nor did it spread significantly anywhere south of the Highland Boundary Fault. From around 6500–6000 BC, much of southern and eastern Scotland supported oak-dominated woodland with a significant presence of elm, with mixed hazel- and oak-dominated woodland in the central Southern Uplands, Argyll and southern Hebrides, along the Highland/Lowland interface from Breadalbane and through the Angus Glens to the north-east, Moray lowlands and Easter Ross. In the far north mainland, Northern and Western Isles, birch remained dominant around 5,000 years ago, when the forests of Scotland reached probably their maximum extent.38 That maximum, however, never constituted blanket coverage, with at most 50–54 per cent of the land surface being under some form of woodland; neither did those woods present any semblance of uniformity or stability, being instead in a state of constant flux as wildfire, anthropogenic burning, grazing pressures from wild and domesticated animals, disease and, critically, climatic variation affected the trees and their regeneration. Their constituents, with the probable exception of juniper, were all post-glacial colonists that advanced from their late Pleistocene refugia as the ice retreated and soil formation encouraged tree growth, but they form the group that modern science has misleadingly labelled ‘native’ species. Any species absent from that list before the large-scale introduction of new types in the sixteenth to later seventeenth centuries AD, including species like sycamore (or plane), beech and hornbeam that were introduced directly from Europe or that had been spreading more slowly northwards through England since the tenth millennium BC, have been stigmatised as ‘alien’.

Looking south over the Cnoc Coig shell midden, Oronsay, towards the north-west coasts of Islay and Jura, Argyll and Bute. Oronsay and its neighbouring islands have yielded rich evidence for the seasonal exploitation of marine resources by nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers.

Human colonisation

As we have seen, humans were already moving through the land area of what is now Scotland in nomadic bands of Late Upper Palaeolithic, reindeer-hunting Hamburgian people many millennia before the pine forests started to grow. Technically more advanced flint, chert and bloodstone tools dating from around 10,000 years ago point to the arrival of new tool-making methods and possibly to a new wave of Mesolithic hunters and gatherers who came in the wake of these Upper Palaeolithic peoples. The discoveries of Mesolithic encampment sites in places like Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides, Lussa on Jura, Kinloch on Rùm or the Morton Lochs in north-east Fife down to the 1980s helped to create a sense of seasonal movement between locations that offered a diverse range of hunting and gathering opportunities at the interface of distinct environmental ranges, mainly in lowland or coastal locations.39 As long ago as the early 1930s, however, Mesolithic material had been identified from sites in the coastal districts of Ayrshire and penetration inland from there had been postulated by the French-born archaeologist Armand Lacaille.40 Understanding of where these people travelled across the face of early post-glacial Scotland was limited only by our perceptions of what the land had looked like as new soils developed and vegetation regenerated over the ice-scoured ground.

Morton Lochs, Tentsmuir, Fife. Now located over 1km from the nearest seashore, the lochs were once an area of coastal lagoon and saltmarsh, where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers exploited overwintering wildfowl and other game and the shellfish resources of the tidal waters.

By the late 1960s, scatter sites of small flint flakes, characteristic of the manufacture of stone cutting edges and points in the Mesolithic period, had been identified at sites like Rink Farm deep in the Southern Uplands at the confluence of the rivers Ettrick and Tweed. The distribution of such sites indicated – as Lacaille had believed – that the river valleys at least had already been penetrated by these nomadic people some 7,000–10,000 years ago.41