The Highlands and Islands of Scotland E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 879

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Alistair Moffat tells the extraordinary story of the Highlands in the most detailed book ever written about this remarkable part of Scotland. This is the story of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as it has never been told before. From the formation of the landscape millions of years ago to the twenty-first century, it brings to life the events and the people who have shaped Highland history, from saints, sinners and outlaws to monarchs, clan chiefs and warriors. Highly readable and informative, it mines a wide range of sources including medieval manuscripts and sagas, poetry and popular culture. Picts, Romans, Irish missionaries, Vikings, Jacobites and the flood of emigrants who left to forge new lives abroad are just some of the important players in the drama. As he paints the bigger picture, Alistair Moffat also introduces many key aspects of Highland culture and explores the experience of ordinary Highlanders and Islanders over thousands of years.

Leseprobe

The Highlandsand Islands of Scotland

A New History

Also by Alistair Moffat

The Borders: A History from Earliest Times

The Great Tapestry of Scotland

The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads

Islands of the Evening: Journeys to the Edge of the World

The Reivers: The Sory of the Border Reivers

Scotland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid, Misplaced and Misunderstood

Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

The Secret History of Here: A Year in the Valley

To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne

The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier

War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans

The Highlandsand Islands of Scotland

A New History

ALISTAIR MOFFAT

For Jan Rutherford and Andrew Simmons,the best of friends and the best of professionals

First published in 2024 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2024

The right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as 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 without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 857 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Acknowledgements

Over many years now, I have published books with Birlinn, and one of the major reasons that has been so enjoyable has been the pleasure of working with Jan Rutherford and Andrew Simmons. We have become good friends and happy collaborators.

I started writing after a twenty-year career in television because I wanted to work on my own, to be responsible directly for all I did instead of managing hundreds of people, and while I was putting words on a page, that was how it was. But I very quickly realised that publishing, if not writing, is highly collaborative, and I could not have had better, more sympathetic, more creative collaborators than Jan and Andrew.

When I submitted the manuscript for this book, it was even longer than the doorstop you now hold in your hands and it needed the excellent comments it had from Andrew. From others, I should be ashamed to say (but I’m not), I rarely accept suggestions, but I trust Andrew’s judgement and this book is very much the better for his quiet insistence. Also, James Rose did an excellent job with the copy edit, and I’m very grateful for his hard work.

But you might not have the book in your hands were it not for the skills of Jan Rutherford in marketing, publicising and guiding authors on how best to present their work to the public. I am grateful to her for her tact, kindness and acute observation.

Finally, I’m very grateful to Carcanet Press for permission to quote from the poetry of Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith; to Calum Macdonald for permission to reproduce lyrics from various Runrig songs (copyright © C&R Macdonald and published by Chrysalis/BMG); to Polygon for permission to reproduce extracts from the poems of Norman MacCaig.

Alistair Moffat

Selkirk

March 2024

Introduction

Introductions are sometimes best written last. Like maps of recently discovered lands rather than manifestos of intent, they can guide readers better as they embark on long exploratory journeys. What you have in your hands is not only a new history of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, but a long story of much that is unlikely and unexpected. Events and processes follow a broadly chronological sequence, one thing after another, but the narrative occasionally takes surprising turns.

History can be like memory. What stays in our collection of recollections is often made vivid by colour, atmosphere or the unexpected, and just as splashes of sunshine on a grey mountainside make the whole landscape seem to come alive, memory can illuminate the past powerfully. Often, we have to work out when whatever we remembered took place after we have remembered it. Was it before or after important turning points in our lives?

Consequently, this substantial book is arranged much like a mosaic, a long frieze illustrating a journey from the primeval and the prehistoric to the present day. What links it all is of course people, from the pioneers who came north after the retreat of the ice, the first Highlanders and Islanders, to those who now live in the same beautiful places. The bright, red, wind-burned faces of the fishermen who fire the engines of their boats and sail out of Hebridean harbours in search of lobster, crayfish and crab are the heirs of the oarsmen of the birlinns of the Lords of the Isles, the Shetland fishermen out on the haaf and the monks who rowed their curraghs along the ragged Atlantic shore. Linn gu linn, bho ainm gu ainm, ‘from one generation to the next, from one name to another’, people make this story what it is.

In the Highlands and Islands, geography made history. The mountains, glens, straths, lochs, the islands and the seas that linked them all are unique and the nature of the land and sea, muir is tir, made the people utterly distinctive. And the people named the land and sea. Beinn Nibheis and Loch Laomainn are not part of a wide scatter of wild and rainswept words few people now understand or can pronounce. The names of Ben Nevis and Loch Lomond not only tell us what Gaelic speakers called them, they mean something, names that placed people in the landscape. Maps are the language of the earth and place names are the litany of history, and the great scholars who made and catalogued them in the Highlands and Islands – William Roy, Edward Dwelly and W. J. Watson – are all deservedly venerated in this history. Their work helped greatly in its telling.

From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, there was much more history, more material, more information about ordinary people for the first time. In 1841, the modern census began, a thorough and generally accurate account of the population of Britain. More than arithmetic, it not only located people, but it also offered a much more concrete sense of the nature of their lives. Successive censuses listed marital status, family relationships, occupations and whether or not children attended school. They also supplied addresses and showed how dense occupation could be as large families crammed into farm cottages and croft houses. It was possible for the first time to do more than imagine what living conditions were. Newspapers began to proliferate and include much of the detail of what changed in the north, and what stayed the same. And many more written records of all sorts survived.

This welter of data, a cornucopia compared to the long silences of the past, forces choices and a more selective, more kaleidoscopic approach to the story of the Highlands and Islands. So, whilst it still follows the broad chronological sweep, the later chapters of the book focus more on social, political and cultural fundamentals: how and why life changed for Highlanders and Islanders, what affected the day-in, day-out rhythm of work, belief, and also what made people smile and what roused them to action.

Histories of the Highlands and Islands have often, and with very good reason, seemed to be elegiac, a mourning for loss and departure, and the passing of a distinctive set of cultures. And there is no denying that the recent past in particular saw terrible wrongs done. But in what follows, you will read of much that is to be celebrated. The glories of the north are to be found here, the warmth and humour of Highlanders and Islanders, stories of their resourcefulness, their dignity and their ancestral courage. These qualities remain undimmed, and the story of these remarkable communities burns brightly.

1

The Weather Man

At 4.40 a.m. precisely, on the morning of 1 June 1881, a tall, redhaired man closed the front door of his lodgings at Banavie, a hamlet between Corpach and Fort William. Carrying a pack containing instruments, notebooks, some food and waterproofs, he crossed the Caledonian Canal near the series of locks known as Neptune’s Staircase. Once across the bridge over the River Lochy, he found a path on the south bank of a fast-flowing stream, the Allt a’ Mhuilinn, and began to climb Ben Nevis. It was the first of 153 consecutive ascents of Britain’s highest mountain. Every day between 1 June and 31 October, whatever the conditions, Clement Wragge climbed 4,411 feet from sea level to the top of the great mountain.

The variable weather conditions were the point. Clement Wragge was a meteorologist, uncharitably known to some of his associates as ‘Inclement Rag’, who was absolutely dedicated to the gathering of accurate, sequential data that would inform the developing science of weather forecasting. It was the invention of the telegraph in 1835 that made forecasting viable and the safety of British shipping that made it highly desirable. The volume and value of sea traffic around the Empire was vast and if meteorologists could warn mariners about impending storms, then fewer lives and fewer cargoes would be lost. A network of weather stations was set up by the coastguard service and coordinated by the Board of Trade. When the Scottish Meteorological Society mooted the idea of an observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis, there was great enthusiasm for the project. The mountain stood directly in the path of storms blowing in off the Atlantic and consistent readings of air pressure, temperature, rainfall, cloud and fog cover, and much else, would create an unrivalled bank of data that would allow meteorologists to discern patterns and issue good forecasts that could immediately be telegraphed great distances to shipping and elsewhere.

When Clement Wragge heard of the Scottish Meteorological Society’s proposal, he immediately volunteered to climb Ben Nevis every day for five months. The readings he took would prove the value of a permanent observatory and also help raise the funding needed to build it. Independently wealthy, Clement did not seek payment for this remarkable, punishing and sometimes dangerous programme of work, and nor did his wife, Leonora. While Wragge climbed the mountain, she took hourly readings, despite having two children to look after, at what they called their sea-level station at Banavie. These allowed simultaneous comparisons of data gathered on the same day. It could be sunny and calm at sea-level and windy and raining on the summit of Ben Nevis at the same time.

As he climbed the mountain, Clement stopped at regular intervals to take readings. At Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, what he called the Halfway Lake, he would later set up a Stevenson Screen. Designed by Thomas Stevenson, the father of the great novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the builder of spectacular lighthouses around Scotland’s coast, these were essentially instrument shelters. Square boxes with double-louvred sides, they were always painted white in order to reflect sunlight and set up on supports that stood between four and six feet off the ground. The screens sheltered thermometers, barometers and other instruments.

In good weather, Clement could reach the summit in less than four hours, not counting his stops at six points on the way up to take readings. But conditions could change quickly and suddenly become very dangerous, especially in thick fog. The summit is a stone- and boulder-strewn plateau with sheer cliffs on three sides and in his diary Clement recorded that he sometimes took a guide, a local man called Colin Cameron. Here is part of an account of the end of the first season of ascents (Wragge wrote reports of his work for the scientific periodical, Nature):

The conditions of weather on Ben Nevis are now such as to render it impracticable and hazardous to continue the daily observations satisfactorily. I have therefore judged it best to discontinue them, after a very successful season, under the auspices of the Scottish Meteorological Society, of five months from June 1, without the break of a single day. The work at the six intermediate fixed stations has, I am very pleased to say, been well and generally punctually kept up throughout, and I trust that much goodwill will result. Simultaneous observations were of course made at the observatory at Achintore [near Banavie], Fort William. The Stevenson’s screens at these stations have now been made firm by wire stays to withstand the storms of winter. Yesterday Colin Cameron, the guide, accompanied me. The track was snowed up, and it was necessary to force a way through great banks and drifts of snow. The average depth was two feet; once we got off our course in the blankness of thick cloud-fog and trackless snow. To-day the weather was very bad on the summit, the hut was partly filled by drift, and the south-east gale was so violent at times that I could hardly make way. Possibly I shall attempt weekly or periodical ascents during the winter to keep up the registrations of the rain-gauges and self-recording thermometers.

In the course of the first summer, gangs of workers had climbed Ben Nevis to install instruments in a shelter built from sturdy angleiron and covered it with a tarpaulin. Its skeleton can still be seen, stayed and securely anchored, having survived the gales of more than 140 winters. The hut mentioned by Clement was a rudimentary shelter built as a last, safe resort in bad weather and a place to shelter from the icy winds and make notes. There exists a photograph of him coming out of the door, preceded by his dog, a Border collie. He wears a double-breasted jacket, a cloth cap, what might be jodhpurs and knee-length leather boots. Clamped in the corner of his mouth may be a pipe. The slightly blurry photograph looks as though it was not posed and Clement seems a wiry, leathery, thin, even cadaverous man; the physique of a marathon runner, perfect for an amazingly arduous programme of work.

The sun shines in the shot, but the design of the shelter speaks of extreme weather. Built with massive boulders and stones picked up on the summit plateau, it is little more than six feet high, with no windows and not much bigger than a garden shed. The roof is a tightly tethered tarpaulin. It has been roped to what might be wooden beams wedged about halfway down the walls and kept securely in place by the weight of five or six courses of the large stones laid over them.

Nature published details of the beginning of the second summer of data gathering in 1882:

. . . the heavy work of reopening chiefly consisted in digging out from the vast accumulations of snow the barometer cairn, hut, and thermometer cage which here, as a safeguard, incloses Stevenson’s screen. The snow, in fact, was nearly four feet deep, and it was necessary to cut out wide areas around the instruments . . . I had also to fix a new roof of ship’s canvas to the rude shanty that affords some little shelter from the piercing cold and storms.

Through articles like these and other reports, Clement Wragge’s work caught the public imagination and funds were quickly raised for the building of the observatory. Both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales contributed. The job of superintendent was advertised but despite his pioneering and voluntary efforts, Clement was not appointed. It seems that he was an eccentric, irascible man who perhaps spoke his mind too readily. Nevertheless, the data he so doggedly gathered and was carried on for thirty years by the observatory was a unique model, still the most complete record of high-altitude mountain weather that exists in Britain. No doubt stung by such a blatant rejection, Clement and Leonora sailed with their children to live in Australia. He continued his work in meteorology and we have him to thank for the irritating habit of giving people’s names to hurricanes.

What Wragge saw from the summit of Ben Nevis on clear, graphic, sunlit summer days must often have been spectacular. He saw the Highlands. In every direction, he looked out over spectacular and unique geography. And in the Highlands and Islands geography made history. To the north the Torridon mountains of Beinn Eighe and Liathach are visible, to the north-east the peak of Morvern in Sutherland, to the south Ben Lomond can be clearly made out and beyond it, the Irish coast. Over to the west, Clement saw Loch Eil snake into the Moidart mountains and Loch Linnhe lead the eye south-west to the ocean and the Hebrides. But perhaps most important to an understanding of Highland geography was what lay immediately at the foot of the great mountain, what Clement crossed every morning to climb it.

The Great Glen, An Gleann Mòr, the fault-line that runs northeast from Fort William to Inverness is a memory of an immense, slow-motion collision that took place hundreds of millions of years ago, one of three that formed the geology, the geography and the history of the Highlands.

Hugh Miller was fascinated by the age of the earth. Born in 1802, a Cromarty stonemason to trade, he was a geologist by vocation. His work in the quarries and his walks along the rocky shorelines on the Moray and Cromarty Firths had long stirred his curiosity. The strata he saw, making ‘a right use of his eyes’, and the fossils he picked up convinced him that the earth was very old, despite his deeply held religious beliefs. Miller’s famous book, The Old Red Sandstone, described sedimentary rocks laid down hundreds of millions of years ago when the crust of the planet was forming. Vast palaeocontinents with names that might have been invented by science-fiction authors were moving very slowly across the face of the earth. Avalonia, Baltica and Laurentia were once part of a giant land mass called Gondwana. When it broke apart, as volcanoes roared, the earth quaked and convulsed and oceans opened up, these vast pieces of the craton, the earth’s mantle and crust, shifted and started to collide. Bits sometimes broke off and three of these shards of ancient rock, known as terranes, came together very slowly, grinding and pushing against each other, to create the mountains, lochs and glens, to make the singular geography of the Highlands and Islands.

The Great Glen shows the angle at which two of these terranes collided. It was north-east to south-west, a virtually straight line now mostly filled with a string of lochs; Ness, Oich, Lochy and Linnhe. On the eastern side of the glen is the Grampian terrane and to the west is the North Highland terrane. Beyond it is a third terrane. It is based on a very hard and very old rock called Lewissian gneiss and it includes the Western Isles, much of Skye, Coll, Tiree and most of the north-west Atlantic coastline. To the south-east of all of these lies the geological definition of the Highlands and Islands. What is known as the Highland Boundary Fault runs north-east from the island of Arran at the same diagonal angle as the Great Glen until it reaches Stonehaven on the North Sea coast. South of the Boundary Fault is the Lowlands and another Scotland.

The weather patterns so painstakingly recorded by Clement Wragge had been changing for millennia, sometimes dramatically. Recorded history offers many examples. In 1303 and again in the winter of 1306/07 the Baltic Sea froze over and almost ten years later the very bad spring weather of 1315 caused widespread crop failure and Northern Europe found itself in the grip of a devastating famine. It was the beginning of a very long series of periods of cooling across the North Atlantic. Temperatures dropped sharply, winters were more severe and lasted longer until the middle of the nineteenth century. Sir Henry Raeburn’s famous painting of the Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch near Edinburgh is emblematic. That winter of 1795/96 saw episodes of very cold weather but the minister and his friends made the best of it, setting up the Edinburgh Skating Club, the first to be formed anywhere in the world.

Others were not so fortunate. Famine stalked the Highlands frequently and the ‘Ill Years’ of the last decade of the seventeenth century persuaded many that political union with England was desirable. The Scottish economy was badly in need of revival as farming contracted, land became unmanageable as growing seasons shrank and the rain seemed incessant. Clement Wragge will have been aware of these patterns. The winter of 1849–50 was very severe with heavy snow across the Highlands piling up drifts as high as fifteen feet, and tremendous storms raced in off the Atlantic, smashing into coastlines. High winds and tides blew away large sand dunes on the coast of Orkney Mainland to reveal the prehistoric settlement at Skara Brae. In August of 1850, the Cairngorm Plateau was still covered in deep snow that reached down to lower altitudes in the glens and as far as Braemar. The following two winters saw more dreadful and damaging weather as well as widespread disruption. But by the end of the decade, the cycle appeared to have shifted and it may have seemed to meteorologists that what became known as the Little Ice Age was at last ending.

As predominantly rural communities concerned with food production, Highlanders and Islanders have long been at the mercy of the weather and, like geography, it has shaped their history, where they lived and how they lived their lives.

In 1159 BC the Icelandic volcano known as Hekla suddenly blew itself apart. A huge tonnage of ejecta, of debris, rocketed into the atmosphere. Much of this was dust and it immediately screened the sun. The tremendous force of the eruption sent the ejecta so high that it became trapped in the stratosphere, too high for rain to wash it out but so dense that the sun could not fully penetrate. The immediate impact of the eruption of Hekla was almost certainly a tsunami that crashed onto the shores of the Hebrides and the north-west Highlands. When prehistoric communities looked up and heard the roar of the great wave before they saw it hurtling towards them, they could not have known what had caused it. The eruption of the Icelandic volcano though would have much longer lasting and even more devastating effects.

A deadly darkness descended over the mountains, glens and islands, a perpetual twilight that must have seemed to many like the evening of the world, as though it was ending. Tree ring analysis of ancient Irish oaks confirm that the volcanic dust screened the sun for several summers. In those years, the rings were very, very narrow, showing little or no growth. Temperatures dropped and the cultivation of crops, especially at higher altitudes, became impossible. Before this catastrophe, archaeology suggests that the north-west and especially the islands were relatively heavily populated, were good places to live. Fish and game were abundant and prehistoric farmers grew enough corn to feed themselves and the cattle, sheep and goats they had domesticated. But after Hekla exploded, it is likely that a series of great migrations began, the first in a recurring pattern of departure. In the dim, half-dark of the sunless summers, families and communities trekked over the mountains to settle in eastern Scotland where the effects of the eruption were much less severe. The cold and the rain accelerated the formation of peat as good grazing and crop-raising land became bleak, damp and soggy moors. At the magnificent Calanais Stones on the Atlantic coast of Lewis, archaeologists removed a four-foot layer of peat in 1857 that had formed around the megaliths in the centuries since Hekla, restoring the monument to its former splendour.

Profound changes in the weather shaped the Highlands and Islands even more dramatically in the deeper past. About 26,000 years before Clement Wragge climbed Ben Nevis and gazed out over the mountains of the north, they were buried under a thick sheet of ice. Sometime around 24,000 BC, the climate began to grow colder. Mean annual temperatures plummeted, winter snow lay on higher ground all year round and the growth of vegetation shrank. The animals who browsed the grasslands and the woodlands of the north began to retreat southwards and they were followed by the first Highlanders and Islanders, hunter-gatherers who depended for their food, clothing and much else on the herds of wild horses and deer. The last ice age was beginning.

Huge ice-domes formed. Hemispherical and symmetrical and often accumulating around land mountains like Ben Nevis, they could be several miles thick. Hurricanes howled around the smooth slopes of these vast ice-mountains as their great weight pressed down hard on the land, crushing the crust of the earth. When the skies darkened over a dazzling, white landscape, these high points attracted precipitation. Ice formed on the summits and as it began to solidify, gravity pulled it radially downwards to become the slow-moving frozen rivers known as glaciers. Over millennia they gradually began to shape the Highland and Island landscape we see now.

Invisible under the frozen rivers was a slick of meltwater, and as the mass of ice moved, it acted as a lubricant. Locked inside the glaciers was all sorts of debris: boulders, silt, gravel and even plant matter. This geological rubbish acted like primeval sandpaper. As the glaciers inched forward, they scarted and planed the land underneath them, gouging out the glens, and the lochs and shaping the mountains and their ridges. On the islands of Lewis, Harris and the Uists, there are wide inland areas known as cnocan agus lochain – hillocks and small lochs. Thousands of large rock pools filled with brown, peaty water pattern the landscape and they are mirrored by small hills that look as though they have been scooped out of the lochans. These were formed by relatively fast-moving glaciers towards the end of the last ice age. Sometimes, these changes were much more immediate as the ice domes began to melt about 11,000 years ago.

*

In the summer of 2022, I went to the scene of one of the most dramatic events in the making of the Highland landscape. I’d driven often on the A86, along the banks of Loch Laggan and below the glories of Creag Meagaidh to the Braes of Lochaber and through the dappled shade of its beautiful woodland. It was a good, alternative route to the west, to Fort William and the Atlantic shore beyond. I’d seen signs for Glen Roy and knew something of the history that had made its way down by the River Roy to Keppoch and the foot of Glen Spean, but I’d never been up the glen. Events of great moment in much more recent history had taken place there. In January 1645, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, and the MacDonald general, Alasdair mac Colla, had led their clan army through the deep snows of the winter mountains and down Glen Roy on a flanking march to surprise the Campbells and their allies at Inverlochy Castle. On a bright summer morning, I turned off the A86 and drove up the glen in search of a different, much more ancient kind of drama.

After a few difficult miles on a winding, fraying single-track road, I found where the map had plotted a car park and a viewpoint. It was stunning, an epic landscape, a direct and clearly visible legacy of the last ice age.

Running along the steep flanks of Glen Roy are what are known as the Parallel Roads. For centuries their origins were held to be mysterious, even mystical. Three ribbons of precisely parallel tracks run at different altitudes from the head of the glen to its mouth, a distance of about eight miles. Each is about thirty-five feet wide and so consistent in width that it was believed that they were made by hands of giants or ancient heroes, like the fearsome Finn McCuil. Or perhaps they were the work of gods. Highland geography was sometimes thought to be made by the divine, wrought by the Queen of Winter, the Storm Hag, An Cailleach nan Cruachan, as she flew through the night air. Having inadvertently created Loch Awe (by forgetting to cap a spring on the summit of Ben Cruachan), she might also have been the magical builder of these remarkable roads. More down-to-earth assessments insisted they were man-made, one for walkers, a second for carts and a third for livestock. But that made no sense to me either. Why not build one track that all could use, and in any case, wouldn’t it have been much easier to set that on the floor of the glen and not on its steep sides? In 1838 Charles Darwin was so fascinated by the Parallel Roads that he made the long and arduous journey by coach from London to examine them. But even a scientist with his gifts and insight could not unravel the web of mystery around these extraordinary features.

As I looked up Glen Roy, I understood why drawings and engravings had lured Darwin into the heart of the Highlands. The roads did look like divine decoration, as though a deity had leaned down from the clouds with a stylus and drawn these marks on the steep hillsides, following their folds and curves in perfectly parallel lines. Two years after Darwin’s bemusement, the Swiss-American geologist, Louis Agassiz, was driven up the winding road in a pony and trap. Perhaps from the viewpoint where I stood, he made, in Hugh Miller’s apt phrase, ‘a right use of his eyes’. Almost immediately, the geologist understood exactly what he was looking at.

In 1837 Agassiz postulated a new theory: that the earth had endured a relatively recent ice age that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere. His particular interest was the behaviour of glaciers, how they had shaped the land and carried rocks and gravel far from their places of origin. With the English geologist William Buckland he toured the Highlands and recorded clear evidence of glacial action and its effects. In Glen Roy he saw how the ice had done something different, and spectacular. When Agassiz looked at the Parallel Roads, he realised immediately that these were not tracks at all but a series of three prehistoric shorelines. Steep-sided Glen Roy had once been a vast and very deep loch.

Near the end of the last ice age, as the domes groaned and cracked, the ice began to melt and move more quickly. A glacier known as the Lochaber Ice Lobe had shifted and dammed the mouth of Glen Roy. The very cold and fast-flowing waters of the River Roy slowly built up to form the loch up to the level of the lowest of the three Parallel Roads. Almost certainly by a combination of wind-driven wave action in the summer and intense frost in winter, the thirty-five-foot wide, flattish beaches were created on the flanks of the ridges on either side of the glen.

As the ice age ended there were fluctuations when the intense cold advanced and then retreated. When a cold period began, the Lochaber Ice Lobe grew larger and pushed the waters of the loch further up the glen. And its level rose to form the second or middle of the three Parallel Roads. When temperatures dropped even lower, the level of the ice-cold loch rose once more and created the highest of the roads.

From the viewpoint car park, I could see that the lowest of these ancient shorelines was perhaps only two or three hundred feet above me. As a string of well-washed ewes lifted their heads from the lush summer grass, they watched me puff and struggle up the steep incline. The lowest road was, I discovered, not absolutely flat but in fact a very shallow slope, like most sandy, seaside beaches. Below me the ground fell away sharply to the bottom of the glen and I realised that Loch Roy must have been very deep at its fullest.

When the temperature fluctuations ceased to be so extreme and the earth began to warm at the close of the last ice age, the slow-moving changes that took centuries, even millennia, suddenly accelerated. In only a few catastrophic hours the great ice-dam at the mouth of Glen Roy broke down, and with a mighty roar, a huge volume, a tsunami, of extremely cold water burst out and raced towards the frozen wastes of the Great Glen. Carrying everything in its path, the raging torrent probably first drained to the north-east towards what became Loch Ness and into the Moray Firth. The Parallel Roads are the relic of a cataclysm, but also the moment when the last ice age ended and life in the Highlands and Islands began.

In the late summer of 1993, a group of archaeology students were fieldwalking near the village of Bridgend on Islay. It lies at the head of Loch Indaal, and the students were looking to see if recent ploughing had turned up anything of interest. A sharp-eyed individual spotted something glinting on the top of a furrow. It was a flint arrowhead, and most significantly, it could be dated to around 10,800 BC, at least a thousand years before the ice age finally ended.

The prehistoric archer who loosed an arrow near Bridgend almost thirteen millennia ago may have been one of the first pioneers to set eyes on the Highlands and Islands. It seems that as temperatures fluctuated, some of the mountain peaks poked through the ice. Known as nunataks, similar peaks can be seen standing out clearly from the frozen, white landscape of Antarctica. It may be that Islay was easier to find because the mountains of Beinn Bhàn, Beinn Bheigeir and Beinn Sholum could be seen easily from the sea. The flint found at Bridgend may have belonged to one of a summer hunting party who sailed from the south in search of seasonal game, or perhaps seals. There is evidence to suggest that the western part of Islay, the Rinns, may have escaped glaciation entirely and the party that made their way north, almost certainly in early versions of the skin boats known as curraghs, probably came back each summer. Another flint, dating to 10,000 BC, was picked up near Port Askaig after it had been unearthed by rootling pigs. When these hunters looked to the east, all they will have seen was ice and snow as the Highlands and Islands lay buried, waiting for their people, waiting for the bands of pioneers to come and to stay.

*

The deposit of all this geological drama, what was left after the ice melted, was the soil of the Highlands and Islands. A clear understanding of its nature and the distribution of different types was much advanced by sentiment and a generous donation.

In 1930, Thomas Bassett Macaulay remembered his heritage. Descended from the Macaulays of Uig, a crofting township on the Atlantic coast of Lewis, he was born in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of an emigrant. Thomas worked his way up to become the chairman of Sun Life Financial Inc., making a great deal of money in the process. He gave £10,000 to found the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research, mercifully known as the Macaulay, and it was based in Aberdeen.

The land, its quality and what it can produce is clearly central to understanding farming and food production in Scotland. In the mid 1960s the Institute developed a Land Use Capability System that divided the country into four main classifications: land capable of supporting arable farming, mixed arable, improved grassland and rough grazing. This in turn allowed a fascinating and revealing map of Scotland to be drawn, as much a historical document as something created by geology and geography. Different colours indicated degrees of fertility. Russet denoted the best land and areas of arable farming were heavily concentrated in the Borders, the Lothians, Fife, lowland Perthshire, Angus and the Mearns, Aberdeenshire and a small group of patches around the Beauly Firth and the Black Isle. Mixed arable was shown in green and included Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire, Orkney, parts of Caithness and around the fringes of the best land. There are no areas of russet or green anywhere in the Hebrides, the Atlantic coastlands or the Western and Central Highlands, not a spot. Improved grassland, a shade of red, was concentrated in the Southern Uplands, Easter Ross and the eastern glens of the Grampians. On the Macaulay map, purple identifies areas of rough grazing, and apart from significant swathes of the Galloway Hills, almost all of it is plotted in the Hebrides, the Highlands and Shetland.

This immensely detailed and thoroughly researched map is an important snapshot. It offers an underlying and undeniable fact of life. When the ice finally melted in the Highlands and Islands, it revealed poor and difficult land, as well as the drama and great beauty of the mountains, sea lochs, glens and islands. The Macaulay reveals this in its definition of rough grazing:

This land has very severe limitations in that it prevents sward [short grass] improvement by mechanical means. This land is either steep, very poorly drained, has very acid or shallow soils and occurs in wet, cool or cold climate zones. In many circumstances, these limitations operate together. The existing vegetation is assessed for its grazing quality . . . and is of very limited agricultural value. Nonetheless, this ground often has a high value, for example in terms of storing carbon in its organic soils and supporting rare species and habitats.

There is also ‘Rocky and boulder strewn ground of very limited agricultural value . . . [and] it covers 4,035,800 hectares [almost 10 million acres] or 51 per cent of Scotland’s land area.’

Even allowing for the amount of rough grazing in Galloway, these statistics are stark, and absolutely determinant. In the Highlands and Islands, geology made geography and geography would make history.

2

The Forest

Just to the north of Oban, below the ruined ramparts and the massive keep of Dunollie Castle, there is a sea-stack. A tall, massive finger of rock with an unlikely tree growing out of its top, it sits not in the waters of the bay but on a green, grassy ridge above it, on what is known as a raised beach. The sea-stack is a relic of a geological phenomenon known as isostatic rebound. When the ice domes at last cracked and disintegrated and the glaciers melted, a massive weight was lifted off the land and it began to rebound, to rise up, outstripping the level of the oceans as they filled with meltwater. Scotland is still rising, 11,000 years after the ice. Slight isostatic rebound can still be measured in East Lothian and elsewhere in the Central Belt.

In the centuries following the ice, the rebound was much more dramatic. A huge area of what is now the North Sea was dry land, a subcontinent known as Doggerland, named after the Dogger Bank, once a range of hills. It lay between what are now the coasts of Denmark and Germany and much of the eastern shoreline of Britain. The coastline was ragged, breached by wide estuaries and fringed with large areas of wetland, a rich habitat for the people who lived to the south of the Dogger Hills. Undersea maps plotted by the North Sea oil and gas companies and wind farm builders have discovered a varied landscape, one ribboned with rivers and ranges of hills, and with a large lake near the centre called the Silver Pit. It was one of the richest hunting grounds in prehistoric Europe and probably relatively heavily populated. Similarly, a land bridge linked Caithness with Orkney, plains extended for a hundred miles to the east of the Highland massif, and the Rivers Ness and Conon were once much longer. With its disappearance, the influence of Doggerland on early Highland and Island history can be easily underestimated, even ignored. And the effects of the ice and its legacy have sometimes been forgotten.

North of Ullapool, just off the A837, now part of the famous and notorious North 500 tourist route, polar bears once hunted on the ice sheets. Near the hamlet of Inchnadamph on the shores of Loch Assynt, a grassy glen leads into the mountains, and down it rushes the foaming white water of the Allt nan Uamh. The Gaelic place name means ‘the Mountain Stream of the Caves’. At the base of a 200-foot limestone cliff there are four dark, shaded entrances, each of them accessible by tracks up a gentle slope. Behind these openings, one of them very wide, is the longest cave in Scotland. Uamh na Claonaite stretches back into the mountainside for almost two dark, damp and dangerous miles and the Gaelic description makes clear that it is steeply sloping, and probably very slippery.

In 1889, Dr John Horne and Dr Ben Peach walked up the slope with spades and picks and undertook a careful, methodical exploration and excavation of the great caves and discovered remarkable survivals from a lost history. On the floor of the caves, they came across the remains of the fauna of the ice age and its last centuries. They were able to identify the bones of Arctic fox, brown bear, reindeer, a lynx – and a polar bear. In the late nineteenth century there was no way of dating the bones accurately, but it was clear to Horne and Peach that their finds remembered a landscape emerging from the ice, and indeed before then. All of these species had been long extinct in Scotland.

In 2009 the techniques of carbon dating revealed fascinating results. The polar bear had padded over the ice sheets and survived the extreme cold of the height of the ice age as it hunted for seals sometime around 16,000 BC. One of the brown bears had prowled in a Scotland that has disappeared. It lived in the centuries around 45,000 BC, long before the coming of the ice, before the ice domes and the glaciers that scoured, sheared and planed the landscape we see now. The bear hunted and scavenged in a lost world. The remains of another bear were 35,000 years younger. It lived at the end of the last ice age and may have died when it was hibernating in one of the caves. Its bones were found some distance from the entrances and its body may have been washed by meltwater down into the deep interior of the cave system where its skeleton was preserved.

Human remains were also found and dated and it is possible that Uamh na Claonaite was an ice-age refuge, a place where early settlers or seasonal hunters could shelter when blizzards whistled down the glen and temperatures plummeted. In the famous iceage refuges of the Pyrenees, our ancestors painted on the walls the animals they hunted and stalked beyond the caves. When the thaw came at last, about 10,000 or 11,000 years ago, those cold-adapted animals, like reindeer, could not evolve quickly enough to cope with higher temperatures and so they were forced to chase the retreating ice northwards. And the hunters from the southern refuges who depended on the herds followed them.

When the reindeer bones found at Uamh na Claonaite were carbon dated, they turned out to be about 12,000 years old, the last phase of the ice age in Scotland. There were also the remains of wild horses from about the same era. Both of these herd animals could easily outrun human predators and they could only be brought down at vulnerable moments in narrow or difficult places. These came when the herds moved to begin the annual journeys of transhumance, making their way upcountry from winter pasture to fresh summer grazing in the hills and on the mountainsides. Each year, they followed the same routes and in defiles or crossing places over rivers, or where there was cover, the hunters would be waiting. Old reindeer or horses might sometimes straggle, unable to keep up with the herd and be attacked by spearmen or bowmen. Flint arrowheads or sharpened wooden spears charred hard in the embers of a fire would not kill an animal but might wound it. There then followed a blood pursuit as the pumping heart of an injured and slowing horse or reindeer might make it bleed out and finally collapse. Archaeologists have speculated that the high country at the head of the glen of Uamh na Claonaite might have been a calving ground for reindeer and when the herds came down off the summer pasture in the late autumn, hunters will have tried to pick off young animals.

The finds in the caves beg an obvious question. These dates for human activity in prehistoric Scotland are very early. Was Assynt at least partly ice-free before the thaw began over the rest of the Highlands and Islands, like the Rinns of Islay? Or were the hunters who butchered their kills in the caves seasonal visitors from the south? Whatever the unknowable answer, these people were amongst the first, the earliest to see the Highlands and Islands after the ice.

*

A sense of what the prehistoric landscape looked like had to wait thousands of years until the Roman Empire crossed the English Channel and the legions marched north to the ends of the earth, to the land they called Caledonia.

Pliny the Elder was interested in everything, and in AD 79 his curiosity killed him. He was an extraordinary individual; not only a naval and cavalry commander, and a friend and advisor to the Roman Emperor Vespasian, he also compiled the first encyclopaedia. Natural History, as it is now known, was an attempt to gather together all knowledge in one place, in a single volume. A large Roman fleet was based at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, and as Praefectus Classis, its commander, Pliny lived in a grand villa near the shore with a vast library of scrolls. It was there that he wrote much of his great work. When Vesuvius erupted and engulfed Pompeii on 24 August 79, the great scholar had a grandstand view, watching from the safety of his terrace at Misenum as the mountain exploded, raining down ash and pumice, sending clouds of toxic gases rocketing into the atmosphere. Having received a desperate plea for help from a friend, and also wanting to get close to the volcano to observe the course of the eruption, Pliny ordered a ship to put to sea and sail as close to the harbour at Herculaneum as possible. But the crew and the Prefect were themselves overwhelmed as a fiery emission of poisonous gas enveloped them. It appears that Pliny was asphyxiated rather than burned, for when his body was recovered the following morning, it was unmarked.

Many posthumous copies of Pliny’s Natural History were made and survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, sometimes preserved in monastic libraries. The great encyclopaedia turns out to be important in the history of the Highlands and Islands because it contains the earliest documentary mention of the north of Britannia, and gives it a name that has endured.

Pliny’s friend, Vespasian, had campaigned as a legionary commander during the Claudian invasion of Britannia in AD 43, and when he became emperor he ordered ‘the whole island’ to be conquered and brought into the Roman Empire as a new province – all incoming emperors needed the glow and prestige of military success to help consolidate their authority. It was sometime after AD 75 that Pliny wrote of the advance of imperial armies in Britannia, noting that ‘as yet they have not penetrated beyond the vicinity of the Caledonian Forest’.

This is a fascinating footnote. Clearly the Silva Caledonia was a place so well known in the Roman world as not to require any further explanation. And in the Natural History, Pliny does a lot of explaining. What was the Caledonian Forest, and why did its existence appear to denote a limit, a boundary, even a problem?

Roman generals were very wary of forests. Terrible things had happened to Roman legions in the dark, dangerous depths of impenetrable woods. In 391 BC, Celtic warbands had cut a Roman army to pieces in the Ciminian Forest in what is now southern Tuscany. After that disaster, the Senate was so spooked that it passed a law forbidding commanders from leading their men into the woods. In AD 9, another great slaughter took place. A huge army, whose core comprised the XVII, the XVIII and the XIX Legions, commanded by Gaius Varus, was ambushed in the Teutoburg Forest by hordes of barbarians led by the German tribal leader Arminius. On hearing the news, Emperor Augustus was appalled, humiliated. He tore his clothes and went about unshaven and in rags for months. The three lost legions were never reformed. And the Romans never lost their fear of forests.

That is why they did not make the mistake of marching into the Caledonian Forest. The army that invaded the north of Britannia in AD 79 appears to have very deliberately gone around it. Pliny says nothing more about the great wood, but someone who knew him and was friendly with his son, Pliny the Younger, adds more than a little to the story.

Publius Cornelius Tacitus did not live up to his name, or rather, his cognomen. Tacitus means ‘Quiet Man’, and mercifully for the first glimmers of the documentary history of the Highlands, he was no such thing. Writing concise prose full of well-turned, memorable phrases, certainly as talented a stylist as Cicero, if not even better, he published a great deal towards the end of the first century AD. Perhaps Tacitus’ most famous work is the Agricola, a brief biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the governor of the province of Britannia between AD 77 and AD 84 and the man who led an army into Caledonia. It reads fluently, the narrative fresh, exciting, clear and succinct, and many scholars believe that much of it is eyewitness reportage. Provincial governors often appointed family members, men who could be trusted, to their staff, and it is likely that his son-in-law accompanied Agricola on his campaigns in Britannia as a military tribune.

By AD 80 Roman legions had marched north of the Cheviots and were building forts and roads to consolidate their conquests and strengthen their alliances with Lowland native kindreds and their kings. A Roman fleet shadowed the advances north and kept the army supplied by sea. In AD 82 Agricola led his troops further north, ‘beyond Bodotria’, the Latin name for the Firth of Forth. It was not terra incognita. Two thousand years ago military intelligence was just as vital as it is now, and Tacitus wrote that Roman ships had made voyages and reconnoitred the northern coasts and potential harbours. The report in the Agricola of what their sailors and captains saw was one of the earliest recorded and earliest surviving eyewitness accounts of the Northern Isles and of the western sea lochs of the Atlantic shore – it is a brief snapshot of the Highlands and Islands seen from the sea:

It was then that a Roman fleet for the first time circumnavigated this coast of the remotest sea and established that Britain is in fact an island. Then it too discovered the islands, hitherto unknown, which are called the Orcades [Orkney], and subjugated them. Thule [Shetland] was thoroughly viewed, as well, but no more, for the fleet’s orders were to go no further, and winter was approaching. It is reported, however, that the sea there is sluggish and difficult for the rowers, and is not even stirred up by the winds as happens elsewhere. The reason is, I believe, that land and mountains, which create and feed storms, are further apart there, and the deep mass of broken seawater is set in motion more slowly. It is not the purpose of the present work to investigate the physical properties of the Ocean and tides, which have in any case been dealt with by many writers. I would add only one point. Nowhere is the dominance of the sea more extensive. There are many tidal currents, flowing in different directions. They do not merely rise as far as the shoreline and recede again. They flow far inland, wind around, and push themselves among the highlands and the mountains, as if in their own realm.

When Agricola led his army beyond the Tay, Tacitus noted that in the previous summer’s campaigning season, the governor had prudently consolidated his gains south of the firths of Clyde and Forth. These were separated from Caledonia ‘by a narrow neck of land’ around what is now Stirling, and ‘the enemy had been pushed back, as if into a different island’. Although not explicitly stated, it seems that Caledonia was then the name for only the north of Scotland, the lands beyond the Forth and Clyde.

The route to the north taken by the legions can be securely traced by a string of defensive camps they dug at the end of each day’s march. From their frontier posts on the Gask Ridge, not far from Bertha (Perth), the Romans skirted the great forest and its mountains and glens, more or less following the line of the Highland Boundary Fault, establishing a fort at Raedykes, close to Stonehaven. They then turned north to Kintore and then north-west through the Moray coastlands as far as Bellie, near Fochabers. The marching camp there may have been substantial (a great deal of archaeology was destroyed by the building of a much later army camp during the Second World War) at thirty acres and it lay close to the River Spey and could have been easily supplied by ships anchored in Spey Bay. The only native kindred noted by Tacitus in the Agricola is the Boresti, and the name may be cognate to Forres, a town not far from the camp.

In AD 83 the governor of Britannia launched his seventh and final campaign. The enemy was the Caledonian kindreds, what may have been a confederacy of Highland warbands (Tacitus called them ‘states’), and once more the advance of the Roman army skirted the fringes of the great forest. Somewhere in the Angus glens, Agricola appears to have made a near-fatal tactical blunder – although Tacitus does not call it that (he is always supportive of his father-in-law’s reputation). Agricola divided his forces ‘into three divisions and advanced’. In one of his most brilliantly written, most authentic passages, Tacitus recounts what happened next:

When the enemy discovered this [that Agricola had divided his forces], with a rapid change of plan they massed for a night attack on the Ninth Legion, as being by far the weakest in numbers. They cut down the sentries and burst into the sleeping camp, creating panic. Fighting was already going on inside the camp itself when Agricola, who had learned of the enemy’s route from his scouts and was following close on their tracks, ordered the most mobile of his cavalry and infantry to charge the combatants from the rear and then the whole army was to raise the battle-cry. At first light the standards gleamed. The Britons were terrified at being caught between two fires, while the men of the Ninth regained their spirits and now that their lives were safe began to fight for glory. They even ventured on a break out and a fierce battle followed in the narrow passage of the gates. Finally the enemy were driven back before the rival efforts of two armies. The one wanted to show that it had come to the rescue, the other that it had not needed help. Had not marshes or forests covered the retreating enemy, that victory would have ended the war.

Agricola might have ended the war, and not with Rome as the victor, if he had not remembered the fate of Gaius Varus and had instead allowed his army to pursue the Caledonians into their deep, dark forest. As it was, he regrouped and marched further north. Probably at the foot of the singular hill of Bennachie, not far from Inverurie, the Caledonians made their own, fatal, tactical blunder. Instead of retreating to the sanctuary of the great forest and conducting a guerrilla campaign of attrition, they gave Agricola what he wanted, a battle in open field. Below what Tacitus called the ‘Graupian Mountain’, the disciplined, tight formations of Roman auxiliaries and legionaries slaughtered the charging warriors of the Caledonian Confederacy. They were led by Calgacos, perhaps the first Highlander to be named in the historical record. His name means ‘the Swordsman’, and he was the earliest in a long line of famous swordsmen from the north, the last of them being defeated at Culloden in 1746.

There was one other arrival from the Mediterranean who cast a long, ancient and very intriguing shadow over the history of the Highlands and Islands. Pytheas of Massalia (Marseilles, then a Greek colony) wrote a periplus, a route guide for traders, known as On the Ocean, meaning the Atlantic and the North Sea. Compiled sometime after 320 BC, it has very sadly not survived but was much quoted and even plagiarised by later writers. Pliny had read it and included information from the intrepid author in the Natural History, and he informs us that in Britain, ‘the tide rises 80 cubits [about 120 feet]’. It may be that Tacitus’ reference to other writings about the ocean and its tides is an oblique reference to the Greek adventurer’s work. Copies of On the Ocean were still circulating in the first century AD.

It was the tin trade that brought Pytheas to Britain. It is a rare metal in Europe and was necessary to make the very valuable alloy known as bronze. The traveller was also the first to call Britain ‘Britain’. When he reached the Channel coast of what is now France, he probably asked the natives what the peoples across the sea called themselves. Pretannikai was how he rendered the answer. It means the ‘People of the Tattoos’, and though body decoration was clearly still widespread amongst the ancient British, it had probably died out in what became Gaul. Pytheas wrote down the name of the island as Pretannike and the Romans changed it only a little to Britannia, before it finally settled and became Britain.

The Greek was making notes for a guide for merchants and was an explorer who took accurate measurements as he circumnavigated Britain. He wanted others to follow him. Reckoning in stades, about 200 yards, Pytheas believed that the circumference of Britain was about 40,000 stades. That works out at about 4,830 miles and shows that he was taking very accurate measurements. The actual circumference of the British coastline is 4,710 miles.

Just as Agricola’s naval captains were to do almost 400 years later, Pytheas saw the Highlands and the Islands from the sea. Using a measuring stick called a gnomon, he took readings of latitude as he travelled further and further north. Given his accuracy, it is almost certain that he landed on the Atlantic shore of the island of Lewis, very close to where the standing stones of Calanais were set up almost 2,000 years before. Even though they had long been abandoned, they must still have impressed this remarkable, brave and endlessly curious Greek traveller. He was also the first to note the name Orkas, his version of Orkney. It almost certainly means something like the ‘Boar Islands’.

From Pliny’s Natural History, Tacitus’ crisp prose and other noted Roman historians (some of whom, like Diodorus Siculus, lifted whole passages from On the Ocean), the Caledonian Forest passed from documentary history into the half-light of Celtic myths and unreliable narratives. The Historia Brittonum, the History of the Britons, was compiled by Nennius, an Old Welsh-speaking monk