Wild History E-Book

James Crawford

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

From the presenter of BBC One's Scotland from the Sky You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were – who made them, lived in them or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are Wild History. In this book acclaimed author and presenter James Crawford introduces many such places all over the country, from the ruins of prehistoric forts and ancient, arcane burial sites, to abandoned bothies and boathouses, and the derelict traces of old, faded industry. Shortlisted for The Great Outdoors Reader Awards 2024 Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2023   PRAISE FOR James Crawford The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World 'Crawford travels widely to make his points in a text reminiscent of those of Barry Lopez or Robert Macfarlane . . . A thoughtful consideration of the imaginary lines that hold meaning for so many' - Kirkus Reviews 'Crawford's essays, through vivid accounts of historical episodes and contemporary problems, illuminate how the world acquired its current shape . . . Eye-opening' - Literary Review Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings 'Conveys superbly these absorbing tales of hubris, power, violence and decay' - Sunday Times 'Witty and memorable . . . moving as well as myth-busting' - Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement Scotland from the Sky 'A stunning combination of aviation adventure and historical detective work' - Press and Journal 'Crawford is a genuine, risk-taking adventurer' - Daily Express

Leseprobe

James Crawford is a writer and broadcaster. His first major book, Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings was shortlisted for the Saltire Literary Award for best non-fiction. His other books include The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, Who Built Scotland: 25 Journeys in Search of a Nation, Scotland’s Landscapes and Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above. In 2019 he was named the Archive and Records Association’s first-ever ‘Explore Your Archives’ Ambassador.

Praise for James Crawford

The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World

‘Crawford’s essays, through vivid accounts of historical episodes and contemporary problems, illuminate how the world acquired its current shape . . . Eye-opening’ Literary Review

‘Excellent’Guardian

Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings

‘Conveys superbly these absorbing tales of hubris, power, violence and decay’ Sunday Times

‘Witty and memorable . . . moving as well as myth-busting’ Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement

Scotland from the Sky

‘A stunning combination of aviation adventure and historical detective work’Press and Journal

‘Crawford is a genuine, risk-taking adventurer’Daily Express

First published in 2023 byBirlinn LtdWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Text and photographs copyright © James Crawford 2023

The right of James Crawford 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.

ISBN 9781788855259

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Mark Blackadder, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by PNB, Latvia

Contents

Map

Introduction

Worked

Belnahua, Firth of Lorn

Cauldstane Slap, West Lothian

Fasagh Ironworks, Loch Maree

Ard Nev Deer Trap, Isle of Rum

The Fish Road, Loch Glascarnoch

Ben Griam Beg, Sutherland

Kirnie Law, Innerleithen

The Viking Shipyard, Isle of Skye

Ard Neackie, Loch Eriboll

Fethaland, Shetland

Ailsa Craig, Firth of Clyde

Sandwood Bay, Sutherland

Salisbury’s Dam, Isle of Rum

Lassodie Village, Fife

Sacred

Callanish XI, Isle of Lewis

Viking Boat Burial, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan

Glencruitten ‘Cathedral of Trees’, Oban

Tigh na Cailleach, Glen Lyon

St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross

Sgorr nam Ban-Naomha, ‘The Cliffs of the Holy Women’, Isle of Canna

Dun Deardail, Glen Nevis

Cathkin Park, Glasgow

Na Clachan Aoraidh, Loch Tummel

Jacksonville Hut, Rannoch Moor

Square Cairn Cemetery, Bay of Laig, Isle of Eigg

The Forest Pitch, Selkirk

Contested

Dere Street Roman Road, The Borders

Culbin Sands Poles, Moray

Clach na Briton, Glen Falloch

X-Craft Midget Submarines, Aberlady Bay

Cairn Cul Ri Albainn, Isle of Mull

Royal Observer Corps Monitoring Post, Kinbrace

Roman Signal Station, Rubers Law

The Atlantic Wall, Sheriffmuir

Inchkeith Island, Firth of Forth

North Sutor Battery, Cromarty Firth

John Randolph, Torrisdale Bay, Sutherland

Cramond Island, Firth of Forth

Garva Bridge, General Wade’s Military Road

Ardoch Roman Fort, Braco

Sheltered

The Bone Caves, Inchnadamph

Peanmeanach, Ardnish Pensinsula

Cracknie Souterrain, Borgie Forest, Sutherland

‘The Bothy’, Isle of Staffa

Coire Gabhail, ‘The Lost Valley’, Glencoe

Hermit’s Castle, Achmelvich

Shiaba, Isle of Mull

Northshield Rings, Eddleston

Mingulay Village, Outer Hebrides

The Sgurr, Isle of Eigg

Moine House, Sutherland

Mavisbank, Loanhead

Cove Harbour, Berwickshire

Tap O’ Noth, Rhynie

The Shepherd’s House, Pentland Hills

Postscript

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Index

Worked

1. Ailsa Craig, Firth of Clyde

2. Ard Neackie, Loch Eriboll

3. Ard Nev Deer Trap, Isle of Rum

4. Belnahua, Firth of Lorn

5. Ben Griam Beg, Sutherland

6. Cauldstane Slap, West Lothian

7. Fasagh Ironworks, Loch Maree

8. Fethaland, Shetland

9. The Fish Road, Loch Glascarnoch

10. Kirnie Law, Innerleithen

11. Lassodie Village, Fife

12. Salisbury’s Dam, Isle of Rum

13. Sandwood Bay, Sutherland

14. The Viking Shipyard, Isle of Skye

Sacred

15. Callanish XI, Isle of Lewis

16. Cathkin Park, Glasgow

17. Dun Deardail, Glen Nevis

18. The Forest Pitch, Selkirk

19. Glencruitten ‘Cathedral of Trees’, Oban

20. Jacksonville Hut, Rannoch Moor

21. Na Clachan Aoraidh, Loch Tummel

22. Sgorr nam Ban-Naomha, ‘The Cliffs of the Holy Women’, Isle of Canna

23. Square Cairn Cemetery, Bay of Laig, Isle of Eigg

24. St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross

25. Tigh na Cailleach, Glen Lyon

26. Viking Boat Burial, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan

Contested

27. Ardoch Roman Fort, Braco

28. The Atlantic Wall, Sheriffmuir

29. Cairn Cul Ri Albainn, Isle of Mull

30. Clach na Briton, Glen Falloch

31. Cramond Island, Firth of Forth

32. Culbin Sands Poles, Moray

33. Dere Street Roman Road, The Borders

34. Garva Bridge, General Wade’s Military Road

35. Inchkeith Island, Firth of Forth

36. John Randolph, Torrisdale Bay, Sutherland

37. North Sutor Battery, Cromarty Firth

38. Roman Signal Station, Rubers Law

39. Royal Observer Corps Monitoring Post, Kinbrace

40. X-Craft Midget Submarines, Aberlady Bay

Sheltered

41. The Bone Caves, Inchnadamph

42. ‘The Bothy’, Isle of Staffa

43. Coire Gabhail, ‘The Lost Valley’, Glencoe

44. Cove Harbour, Berwickshire

45. Cracknie Souterrain, Borgie Forest, Sutherland

46. Hermit’s Castle, Achmelvich

47. Mavisbank, Loanhead

48. Mingulay Village, Outer Hebrides

49. Moine House, Sutherland

50. Northshield Rings, Eddleston

51. Peanmeanach, Ardnish Pensinsula

52. The Sgurr, Isle of Eigg

53. The Shepherd’s House, Pentland Hills

54. Shiaba, Isle of Mull

55. Tap O’ Noth, Rhynie

Introduction

You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. The crumbling remains that our ancestors left behind; moss-covered, tumbledown ruins; giant, overgrown earthworks; a circle of forgotten stones. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no signs or plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were – who made them or lived in them or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history.

. . .

How can history be wild? Well, in one sense, it can’t. Wilderness – true wilderness –means somewhere unaltered by human activity. Today, very few wild environments can be found anywhere on Earth. And arguably, even where they can, the scale and extent of human-influenced climate change has filled the very atmosphere, or seas, or soils around them. This is the product of the Anthropocene, the ‘human time’ – the name that has been given to our newest geological era, conceived to acknowledge that the presence and influence of people is no longer just something written on the surface of the Earth but has become woven irrevocably into the very fabric of the planet.

Scotland long ago lost any claim to true wilderness. Since the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, this land has been moved through, occupied, cut up, cut down, dug out, built on and entirely changed. No parts – even those areas that are perceived as the most ‘extreme’ or ‘remote’ – have been left untouched by people. What has happened to our landscape is an accumulation. Of interventions, of events, of life. It began with hunters stalking their prey north and killing and cooking on land that we now call Scotland. In the process they left behind simple piles of shells and bones in rubbish pits known as middens – fish bones, deer antlers, hazelnut kernels. The scorch marks of the millennia-old fires that they lit, the hearths that they gathered around, have persisted, in the depths of the loam, all the way up to the present day.

As time passed, these traces – so faint and fragmentary at first – built inexorably. Much was destroyed or erased or lost. But not everything. The not everythings from one era merged with the not everythings from another. The fires stopped moving, the walls around them grew solid, the accumulation intensified and accelerated. Ploughshares started to rip up the ground. Axes – and a colder, wetter, windier climate – began to clear the forests. Bit by bit, communities overspread the land, turning the wilderness to their own ends.

The result is that, today, we live entirely among the physical impression and presence of the past. Often it emerges in the shapes of our towns and cities; in the ways our fields look; in the bare reaches of our sheep-wandered hills and moorlands. Just as before, so much has been destroyed or erased or lost. But at the same time, the list of the not everythings from successive periods has grown vast. Some have even been afforded special status, segregated from the present to be offered up as preserved, curated ruins and tourist attractions; even adopted as national icons. A handful receive millions of visitors each year.

But the majority do not. Rather, they exist in a state of continually fading obscurity, spread out across those parts of the landscape which people once knew, but now, largely, don’t. They are what this book is about. The uncurated and the ignored, the unfiltered and the abandoned. Those places that are not wilderness, but rather feel post-human: the shadows of people’s lives in the landscape, sometimes growing faint, but still persisting. They are what I mean by wild history. History set adrift, let loose, let go. History, in some sense, set free. Just there: overgrown, overlooked – and increasingly untamed.

. . .

For a decade, I worked in an archive which, at the time that I came to join it, was exactly 100 years old. It was a slightly odd kind of an archive, with rather unusual origins – not least that, when it was first founded in 1908, it wasn’t supposed to be an archive at all.

It had been established as a Royal Commission, tasked by King Edward VII with making ‘an inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments and Constructions connected with or illustrative of the contemporary culture, civilisations and conditions of the life of the people in Scotland from earliest times to the year 1707’. Only a few years earlier, in 1882, Parliament had passed the first-ever Act for the preservation and protection of ancient sites and structures. That Act came with a list of those places throughout the UK deemed most important. A third of them were to be found in Scotland, but it still amounted to just twenty-one sites – a few stone circles, a handful of burial cairns. There wasn’t even a single castle. Everyone knew that there had to be more: it was just that no one had ever been tasked with identifying them.

This job fell to Alexander Ormiston Curle, the Royal Commission’s first Secretary, and its only full-time member of staff. The original intention was that he would carry out a desk-based study, compiling a master list from previously existing maps and accounts – but Curle and the six commissioners appointed to oversee his work were having none of it. In the first hour of their first meeting, held in Edinburgh in February 1908, they decided that ‘it was essential that the Secretary should visit each county in turn with the object of personally inspecting each monument’.

By the summer, Curle was out in the field on his bicycle, navigating the quiet backroads of Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders, maps and measuring instruments strapped to his crossbar. On day three, he set off south from the village of Coldingham to arrive at a place called Habchester, marked on his Ordnance Survey (OS) map with the enigmatic title ‘site’. ‘I made use for the first time of my surveyor’s staff and clinometer and found them most handy,’ he wrote in his notebook, which he later titled The Private Journal of a Wandering Antiquary. What he was recording was the remains of a 2,000-year-old hillfort. ‘Though one half has been entirely obliterated,’ he said, ‘it is still a most striking fort, with two ramparts.’ While he humbly doubted the accuracy of his measurements, he resolved that they were, at least, ‘better than the word “site”’.

Curle kept going with this first survey up until the beginning of November, travelling some 300 miles by bicycle – and, as he proudly recalled, only five times by horse and trap and twice by car. Of walking, he said, ‘The number of miles I have tramped by moorland and meadow I have no reckoning of but they are many. It has never been anything but the most intense pleasure to me.’ In the process, he visited and explored over 260 sites, seventy-one of which had never been recorded before. And, although he did not realise it at the time, all those journals full of scribbled accounts, observations and measurements, marked the beginnings of an archive.

A year later, Curle was in Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, working all summer and autumn in often harsh conditions. There, he wrote, ‘The monuments and constructions of Sutherland were found to greatly exceed in number those previously known to exist.’ His second report was three times the length of his first. Curle continued his relentless progress. By 1916, when the Royal Commission’s work was suspended until the end of the First World War, he’d visited five of Scotland’s twenty-five counties. At that rate, the Royal Commission was on course to finish its task sometime around the 1950s. Except, as Curle’s Sutherland report noted, rather matter-of-factly, ‘There still exist a certain number of objects which have not come under our observation.’ So, in essence, even when the survey of a county was complete, it wasn’t actually complete.

As the work began again after the war, and as the decades passed, the field notes and reports were increasingly supplemented by survey drawings, maps and photographs of sites. The ‘inventory’ of the places themselves continued to grow (as did the number of staff – although Curle had resigned as Secretary in 1913 to take up the position of Director of the National Museum of Antiquities, he had continued to assist with the Royal Commission’s field surveys). But so too did all the material that went into creating and evidencing that inventory. The Royal Commission had become a kind of living archive. In capturing the traces of the human presence in the landscape, it was, in effect, reproducing itself – and the landscape – over and over again.

The parameters of what it was supposed to be recording kept changing too. During the Second World War, the threat of destruction from Luftwaffe air raids saw the date range for inclusion in the inventory shift by over a century, from 1707 to 1815, to ensure that it included Edinburgh’s New Town. After the war, the remit of the Royal Commission was extended again, incorporating the archive of the Scottish National Buildings Record, which was set up in 1941 to make an emergency record of the nation’s historic architecture. Before long, any date limit on what to record or collect was dropped completely. Soon, an organisation that had started by inspecting stone circles was moving into recording sites of heavy industry and modernist architecture – factories, foundries, steel works, high-rise tower blocks. The original Royal Commission wasn’t even meant to be an archive, and here it was holding hundreds of thousands – and then over a million – photographs, maps, plans and drawings relating to almost every aspect of Scotland’s archaeology and architecture.

The eccentricity of this archive was, in many respects, what interested me. My role there, put simply, was to make sense of the stories it contained and to find ways of communicating them to a wider public – who were almost entirely unaware of its existence. In the process, I developed an enormous affection for the idea that lay behind it, minted in that very first meeting in 1908: that the best way to truly understand the history of our landscape is to get out there and explore it yourself. That this idea had gradually evolved into an impossibly large, perfectly quixotic endeavour only increased its appeal.

The longer that I spent among the archive’s shelves, negatives, boxes and plan chests – full of photographs, sketches, drawings and faded, handwritten notations – the more it put me in mind of a famous short story by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Called ‘On Exactitude in Science’, it is just one single paragraph long, and describes a fictional empire where the art of cartography has attained such perfection that ‘the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’. Borges, in turn, had been inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in which two characters discuss how, in an unnamed country, they went from mapping six inches to the mile, to a mile to a mile. One character asks the other if they have used this map yet. To which the reply comes, ‘It has never been spread out . . . the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’

The archive of the Royal Commission, originating with Curle’s journal, had grown so exponentially over the course of a century – and was rapidly in the process of duplicating itself into a mass of binary code through the process of digitisation (what one of Curle’s successors as Secretary, Roger Mercer, called the archive’s ‘Big Bang’ moment) – that it had begun to aspire towards the same ‘exactitude’ that Borges and Carroll described. The ultimate inventory of a nation, created by perfectly assembling a record of every physical aspect of that nation: the two constantly shifting and changing in lockstep.

. . .

It was my work in the Royal Commission’s ‘impossible’ archive that inspired this book. Curle and those who followed him were involved in a process of reading and translating the tangible remains of the human impact on the landscape of Scotland: with the result that they found that impact everywhere, to such an extent that it seemed unfeasible to account for it all, even if that didn’t stop them from trying. The story of their effort remains largely obscure and untold – and is reflected, too, in the enduring obscurity of many of the sites that they visited over the course of more than a century.

A few years ago, I began travelling out into the landscape to see some of these sites for myself. What follows is just a fraction of what is out there, a glimpse, if you like, into a whole world of ‘wild’ histories. This is a guide to those sites, but it is a partial and provisional one made up of a series of vignettes from journeys across the country to places that – with a handful of exceptions – see very little in the way of passing traffic.

They include a 2,500-year-old hole in the ground found on a lonely knoll in Sutherland, leading down into what may be Scotland’s oldest surviving basement. Colossal ancient border markers delimiting the boundaries of long extinct kingdoms. Drowned roads and fading drove roads. Beached shipwrecks and rhododendron-choked modernist wrecks. Medieval deer traps and prehistoric cattle ranches. Lost valleys and lost villages. Pictish ‘cities’, Viking boat-burials, a shrine to the goddess of winter and a stone circle surrounding a three-millennia-old lightning strike. A Roman signal station, a concrete hermit’s castle and the regrowing ruins of a cathedral made of trees. A moorland on the cusp of the Highlands that once served as a surrogate for Gallipoli. Five miles of beach and tidal sands studded with the bone-bleached uprights of over 2,000 wooden poles.

Largely, I was alone on these journeys, although sometimes I travelled with others. Like Curle, I did a lot of walking and cycling – although, I confess, rather more than just two trips in a car. And I photographed every single site, just as I found it, whether in sun or rain or frost or snow. I thought a lot about how to organise these sites, what information to include on how to reach them. Some are very easy to find and access. Others offer rather more of a challenge. In the end, I resolved to provide just one simple clue – a grid reference.

Each grid reference is your starting point. Locate it on an OS map, see how it has been rendered and translated into the curves and whorls of contour lines. From there, you can begin to build up a sense not just of this one point, but also of what surrounds it: first ‘reading’ the landscape, and then working out how to get from wherever you are to wherever it is. All these layers of preparation enrich the journey itself: the realisation of what you may have imagined previously only through the map, or experienced at a remove, through pictures and photographs, accounts written by other travellers from other times. Maybe you walk or cycle as you try to connect the abstraction of the grid reference to the reality of the mountains, hills, rivers and moorlands that surround you.

Once you reach the site, stop for a while, if you can, and watch how the landscape moves and shifts around it. Most likely, there will be no one else there. It is a process that offers up a particular intimacy with the landscape; and which allows you to commune, in whatever way you like, with a history of place. To think of what these sites must have been when first created, or used, or lived in; but also to reflect on their persistence, their ability to be both ‘out of time’ and still here, right in front of you, undeniable features of the modern world.

Perhaps more than anything else, this book is an invitation. An invitation to see for yourself just how much of the past still lives with us in the present. An invitation to explore the unexplored and make pilgrimage to the lost and overlooked. An invitation to ‘use the country itself, as its own map’ – and to see where it will take you.

. . .

The sites in this book are split into four categories – reflecting, in the broadest terms, how people have used the landscapes of Scotland over the millennia.

There are the remains of worked landscapes, tracts of Scotland that have been turned over, opened up and emptied out by those who sought to use the natural environment as a resource, whether for subsistence or for profit.

There are those places that, for reasons both known and unknown, have been marked out as sacred: spaces of ritual or worship, imbued with some sense of spiritual meaning, even if that meaning has long vanished.

There are the lingering traces of conflict, of contested earth, the marks left behind by wars, both recent and ancient, that reflect the seemingly eternal human capacity for fighting over space, driven by the desire to own and dominate territory.

And finally, and most simply, there are sheltered landscapes: dwellings and homes, from bare and simple bothies to now-ruinous Enlightenment visions of ‘perfect’ houses. The fading remains left by those who once chose to set down roots and carve out a life on one particular patch of soil or rock.

Think of these four categories as signposts to your journey into a lost Scotland: way-markers to our wild history.

James CrawfordEdinburgh, March 2023

Belnahua, Firth of Lorn

NM 7130 1270

On the island of Belnahua, emptiness takes on an obvious, physical character. It is a hollow place. Even more specifically, a hollowed-out place. Absence defines it now. The people are missing, the cottages that they lived in stand in neat, ruined, roofless rows. But far more than that, large chunks of the island are missing too. For centuries, the fabric of this landscape was hewn away – chipped and cracked, battered down and blown up, to be taken elsewhere. Until, that is, there was no more left to take, and no one left to take it.

I had approached from the north-east, sailing away from the small jetty at Cuan to round the tip of the island of Luing. The sky was an unbroken blue, the water below it a rich navy, streaked white with flickering sunlight. Although there was almost no swell, a strong breeze was blowing in from the west, brushing the whole surface of the sea into tiny, persistent, fast-moving ripples.

Belnahua itself is little more than a ripple. It is only around 300 metres long and 200 metres wide, and its highest point, a solitary rock crag, reaches up just seventy feet. The rest of the island is a perfectly flat slab: a tiny, grass-topped pebble dropped right into a fast-flowing confluence of seas and oceans. The waters of the Sound of Luing, the Firth of Lorn and the Atlantic course around it. Or, when storms hit, as they often do on this part of the west coast, break right over the top of it.

There is no jetty now, no place to safely moor a boat, so I had to land by rib, jumping onto a ridge of black rock jutting out from the southern shore. The instant that you set foot on the island you are confronted by the reason for both its one-time occupation and its destruction. Slate. Fragments of it are everywhere, cracking and skittering underfoot. The beaches that surround the island are formed entirely of slate, and huge piles of it have accumulated in endless, precarious heaps above the shoreline.

The slate that makes up Belnahua – along with the series of other islands running in a seam down this stretch of the Argyll coast – began to be formed some 400 million years ago. Colossal geological shifts folded, compressed and heated layers of mud that had once lain on the bed of a shallow prehistoric sea. The result was the creation of a rich blue-black slate, everywhere flecked with little gleaming stars of iron pyrite, or fool’s gold. Just like the seas that surround it, Belnahua slate has a distinctive rippled surface. As if even the rock here is windblown.

In effect, Belnahua became one giant island quarry. Slate was worked here from at least as early as the seventeenth century, but the real acceleration in the extraction process began at the end of the eighteenth century. At peak, over 200 people lived here – quarrymen and their families. There were workers’ cottages and a schoolhouse, but all supplies, even drinking water, had to be brought from the neighbouring island of Luing.

Over the course of a hundred years, Belnahua’s rock was worked down to the bone. It did not take long to find the main source of this slate. Walking just a few metres up from the beach, I came to a cliff edge. Below me was an expanse of turquoise water, so large that it took up maybe a third of the area of the island. This was no inland lake – or, at least, no natural one. The centre of Belnahua had once been a quarry, its slate rock scooped out, down to a depth of some sixty feet below sea level. Workers were constantly pumping water out of this great gouge of a hole. And then, when they left, there was nothing to stop the sea breaking in, or the rain filling it up. The result is a kind of doughnut island, surrounded by sea, but also with the sea at its centre.

Slate from Belnahua travelled the world. Roof tiles fashioned from its rock went as far afield as Nova Scotia. For a time, it was a place of incessant noise and movement – and dust. Great clouds of slate dust birled up from the quarry floor, coating the land and whipping out across the sea on the breeze. It so thickened the air that the women had to travel a mile south to Lunga to wash and dry their clothes and bed linen. The traffic of boats was constant, bringing people and food, unloading equipment and loading up quarried slate.

Everywhere I walked on the island I found the traces of industry and activity. Along with the discarded slabs (slate quarrying was notoriously inefficient – for every usable piece that was produced, nine imperfect ones had to be thrown away) there was a mass of old machinery. Winding engines, the intricate cogs and pistons of steam-driven derrick cranes, boilers, the wheels and tracks of quarry carts. All had turned a russet orange with rust. Dandelions and pink thistles grew among them. The constant wind made the island’s overgrown wild grass bend and sway around me in running waves.

No one has lived on Belnahua for over a century. The industry collapsed around the time of the First World War, and most of the workers were called up to fight. The quarries flooded beyond the point of ever being usable again. Yet, all the same, I felt a sense here of an abandonment that was at once total and strangely recent. Everything had been left behind exactly as it was. Handles ready to be cranked, cogs poised in the act of turning, piles of slate waiting to be lifted and loaded. It was as if the people had just walked out of their front doors one day and boarded a boat to the mainland, fully intending to return. Except no one ever did.

Cauldstane Slap, West Lothian

NT 1166 5877

The way ahead was faint, overgrown, sometimes hard to discern – but there was always just enough of it visible to lead me onwards. A hint in the bog and the mud. An impression that unrolled into the distance, punctuated by wooden planks which had been set in place to cross a series of tiny streams and burns. And while these traces of a path curved and oscillated, the general direction was still clear – heading just a fraction off due-south, towards a pass running between the twin hills of East and West Cairn.

People do still walk this route today, although not in great numbers. Its starting point is a tiny car park, hidden in trees opposite a disused quarry a few miles west of Edinburgh along the A70. The modern road here skirts the lower slopes of the Pentland Hills, avoiding their heights to run on into South Lanarkshire. The old path I was following, however, takes the opposite approach. Known as the Cauldstane Slap – ‘slap’ is the Scots word for ‘pass’, ‘cauldstane’ is simply ‘cold stone’ – it makes no detour, just cuts straight across the Pentland ridgeline, plotting a course through the middle. Go back just a few centuries and this boggy slope was, in effect, one of Scotland’s main roads.

Most particularly, it saw the passage of cattle. Tens of thousands of them every single year. Many were on their way south, first to West Linton and Peebles, then all the way across the Borders to England. Some would have travelled hundreds of miles, leaving the Highlands to be sold and bought at the cattle markets of Crieff and Falkirk before continuing their journey. Others would be travelling back north, purchased in Linton and then driven for weeks or even months up to the glens. This movement back and forth would have been constant for hundreds of years – perhaps from as early as the fifteenth century, but certainly heavy and sustained in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In his landmark work The Drove Roads of Scotland, first published in 1951, A.R.B. Haldane described this route. ‘To this day,’ he wrote, ‘the marks of animal traffic through the Cauldstane Slap can be seen in the soft broken ground to the east of the small burn which feeds Harper Rigg Reservoir.’ The tenant of the local farm – whose family had worked this land for generations – told of seeing drovers using the Cauldstane Slap as late as the end of the nineteenth century, and that he had often heard his father and grandfather speak of how busy the route had been. The cattle, he said, passed just beside his farmhouse, so they would always try to make sure that their ‘meadow hay’ had been cut before the droves came – ‘for the beasts went pretty much as they chose, and the drovers were none too careful in herding them’.

Often the herds would rest up for the night on the north side of the pass, waiting till dawn to set off on the high crossing between the two hills. The thousands of cattle would be ‘stanced’ in an irregular line leading for miles upslope, with the drovers sleeping beside them – while the owners (or ‘tops-men’) would be given beds in the farmhouse. The tenant told Haldane of how his father had once seen the cattle make their way here through an early autumn snow, with the white slopes ‘reddened from the feet of the beasts, presumably worn by the hard roads which they must have used for part of their journey from Falkirk’. It is a potent, visceral image – the drove road drawn out across the landscape in a long line of blood.

The ‘marks of animal traffic’ that Haldane reported are long gone now. There was no pattern I could see in the grass and heather, no real trace of the centuries-long tread of hooves on the vegetation – or, at least, nothing beyond a general sense of a ‘flattening’ of the land, which could easily have been my imagination.

As I approached the pass a more solid path emerged, rocky underfoot, but still wet in places, often carrying sections of a stream downslope. It began to rise steeply to meet the saddle between the two hills, topping out at some 440 metres. Cloud had obscured the warm September sun with a mass of grey, and the wind had come on strong: as if it, too, was drawn to follow this route through the hills. From the head of the pass, I could look south over a wide expanse of high moorland, carpeted almost entirely in blackening heather. In the distance were the hills of the Tweed Valley. This place felt open, exposed, and yet, at the same time, hidden and isolated. I could see for miles. But in those miles, there was no sign of roads or buildings or towns or villages. There was just the line of the path, the way onwards, the way behind me – and nothing else.

Cauldstane Slap had the nickname – admittedly shared by many drover routes – Thieves Road. Robbers were reputed to have hidden in the dense heather here: ‘cattle reivers’ looking for opportunities to break animals off from the herd and escape with them into the hills. In his history of The Water of Leith from 1896, John Geddie quotes from a sixteenth-century source that ‘the Slap’ was used by the ‘broken men’ of the Borders, who had ‘schakin all fear of God, reverence of the law, and regaird of honestie’, to make raids from Eskdale and Liddesdale into the lands of the Lothians. Others came here to meet in secret. In 1684 a Covenanter preacher supposedly spoke to an assembled crowd – of perhaps as many as 200 men and women – from the natural pulpit of a rocky outcrop known as Wolf’s Craig.

Drovers, topsmen, cattle, reivers, preachers, Covenanters and ‘broken men’. Much has passed within, and passed through, Cauldstane Slap. Yet little has clung on. The mass movement of livestock was once one of the defining features of life in Scotland. As Haldane put it, ‘There are few glens in the Highlands, even few easy routes leading to the South over moor and upland country, which have not known the tread of driven cattle.’ To even attempt to map these tracks was, he said, a futile exercise because, ‘through the very multiplicity of routes’, you would soon arrive at a meaningless knot. All the same, on the ground itself, the years ‘increasingly dim and obscure the mark and memory of the men and beasts that once travelled the drove roads’. Paths, when no longer walked, grow out. The physical remains of the lines dwindle and fade. The flattened earth rebounds. Eventually, even the landscape forgets.

Fasagh Ironworks, Loch Maree

NH 0115 6542

The Fasagh river dropped down from Loch Fada, brimming over the lip of the steep-sided, natural reservoir formed between the towering peaks of Slioch and Beinn Tarsuinn. A small dam and sluice gate had been erected to control the waters, allowing them to well up and then be released when needed. The descent was steep and rapid, falling from Loch Fada’s height of 300 metres down to sea level in less than three miles. The river fed into the great stretch of Loch Maree at its eastern end, slicing right through the middle of a flat fan of land. It was here, on its southern bank, that the channels were cut into the earth to divert its course to surround a small cluster of buildings.

Those buildings were fixated on extreme heat. Trees from the abundant forests on the slopes of Loch Maree were chopped down and their wood burnt to make charcoal. This charcoal was then heaped alongside quantities of iron ore in pear-shaped structures of stone and clay and kindled – using bellows often fabricated from sheep or goatskin – to temperatures of over 1,000°C. The river water was used as an essential coolant or lubricant. Then, as the ferocious fires intensified, the iron ore would turn molten, and suddenly bloom into life.

This is a process that had been known about for thousands of years – ironworking using ‘bloomeries’: small hearths that produce a spongy slag that can be beaten into shapes. At Fasagh, however, there were signs of a change. Not in the technology, but in the scale. Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, iron was being fashioned here continually and in great quantities. When the chemist and antiquarian William Macadam explored the site in the 1880s – at least 200 years after it had been abandoned – he wrote of how the whole place was ‘surrounded by immense heaps of iron slag of the oldest black type’. He uncovered traces of buildings, the stone walls that contained the rediverted river, large tree stumps covered in ‘molten matter, which has cracked the wood and flowed into the cavities, filling them up’, along with large solid slabs of cast iron that had once been used as anvils.

I could find very little of this when I came to Fasagh. I had walked the two and a half miles from Kinlochewe to the north-eastern bank of Loch Maree on a day of incessant rain. There was no wind, and so the drops just fell straight down, in near silence. The landscape was saturated, swollen with moisture. A huge waterfall was cascading down the sheer grey cliffs forming the flank of Meallan Ghobhar and, at the point where the Kinlochewe River entered the loch, it had risen above its banks and flooded a swathe of the surrounding trees. The site of the old ironworks was covered almost entirely in tall, orange bracken. I walked around and across it, soaking myself in the process, looking for Macadam’s walls and black slag, for any sign of the old water channels, or those tree stumps in their molten casings. But there was nothing – some barely discernable humps and bumps in the level of the land, mostly concealed beneath the undergrowth (or, perhaps more accurately, overgrowth). Time and nature had steadily erased this once bustling industrial landscape.

I crossed the Fasagh river by footbridge – it surged beneath me in a hissing torrent – and continued along the bank of the loch. On the northern half of the fan of land, I passed the large, rectangular walls of a sheep fold, their stones just visible above a sea of orange. Beyond that, the lochside became a wall of steepening cliffs, apart from one last flat shelf with a depression at its centre, containing a tiny lochan. Here and there among the grass and bracken were little clusters of boulders: the last traces of some twenty-three graves. In Gaelic, this place is known as Cladh nan Sussanach – ‘the burial ground of the Englishmen’. Local tradition has it that outsiders – sussanach, English-speakers, either from south of the border, or perhaps simply Lowland Scots – came here to work the iron, and those that died were buried on this shore. The story also goes that the little lochan, now known as Lochan Cladh nan Sussanach, was where they threw their tools when the furnaces at Fasagh were finally abandoned.

Fasagh was not the only site of ironworking on the banks of Loch Maree. In fact, although extensive, it was also the most primitive. Just five miles to the north-west, surrounded by the forest of Letterewe, was the site of Scotland’s first-ever blast furnace. Right alongside the fast-flowing Abhainn na Furneis – ‘the burn of the furnace’ – was a new innovation in the process of ironworking. The fires in bloomeries could not reach the melting temperature of iron, and so produced molten slag from which wrought iron could be extracted only by continuous reheating and reworking. Blast furnaces, however, could reach the required melting point for creating liquid iron, and could run constantly, so long as they were kept topped up with fuel. In 1610 a proto-industrialist, Sir George Hay of Nether Liff, was granted an exclusive commission by King James VI ‘to make iron and glass within the said kingdom of Scotland’ for a period of thirty-one years. Another blast furnace was built at the far north-western end of Loch Maree, at a place that became known as Red Smiddy.

For a time, iron production was relentless. Ores were brought by sea from Fife to the loch head at Poolewe, then transported on to the furnaces. The fires were stoked by charcoal created by felling and burning huge tracts of the trees that covered the entire northern shore of Loch Maree. The devastating impact of ironworking on the environment had already long been recognised – royal prohibitions in both Scotland and England, going back to Elizabeth I, had been issued to prevent, as one Scottish edict put it ‘the utter want and consuming of the said woods’. But with the ban lifted on Loch Maree – and Loch Maree alone – the pace of cutting and burning was astonishing. At peak, Hay’s ironmaking venture, and the furnaces of Letterewe and Red Smiddy, were consuming upwards of 300 acres of forest a year. Forges fashioned the liquid metal on site, in particular casting cannons, which were being traded both within Scotland and abroad.

The work continued at pace for over a decade and then, all of a sudden, seemed to be snuffed out. Reports suggest that by 1624, the furnaces had gone cold. Hay had transitioned from industry to politics – becoming Scotland’s Lord High Chancellor – and had seemingly lost interest in his venture on Loch Maree. Some accounts suggest that production continued, much scaled back, up until the 1660s; but either way, the industry had moved on. Ironworking would return in the eighteenth century, in the colossal foundries and furnaces of the Central Belt, but its origins in the far north-west High-lands would largely fade from memory. Just some obscure names on the map – the furnace burn, the sassenach graveyard, the rock of the iron and the hill of the mine – and clusters of, mostly overgrown, rivers of slag.

I watched the ceaseless rain patter in a static buzz on the surface of the lochan behind the burial ground. And I wondered if those tools from Fasagh – a heap of 400-year-old hammers, tongs, billows and anvils – still lay somewhere beneath its waters.

Ard Nev Deer Trap, Isle of Rum

NM 3418 9928

The first sign of the trap was a line of stones, curving up the hillside. I could see it coming into view long before I reached it, appearing in the distance as I crossed the small plateau of ground linking the lower slopes of Ard Nev to the tight valley of Glen Duian. On the ground, it began as a smattering of small boulders, giving out to fields of scree – hard to define as anything, really. But after another half-kilometre, the rocks cohered: a solid wall emerged from the heather, in places so substantial as to rise above my head. Clearly man-made, it could, perhaps, be mistaken for a boundary marker, or the remnants of some old drystone dyke. Except that on one side it was pressed right up against the almost-sheer slope of the mountain. This wall wasn’t built to divide, but to enclose.

There is a second wall too, following the contours across the glen, just beneath the summit of another mountain, Orval. These two walls both start far apart down in the valley, but as they approach the high saddle of land between Ard Nev and Orval, at around 1,500 feet up, they come closer and closer together, until there is just a few metres between them. At this point it is clear that you are arriving at a bottleneck – nearing the business end of a giant, landscape-sized funnel.

It had taken another half hour of walking to reach the saddle. It rolled upwards and then began to drop down sharply, like a cresting wave. Suddenly, unfurling ahead of me was a remarkable view. First was the jagged black line of the Skye Cuillins. This was followed by a sea of polished blue, flat and pristine. And then, finally, came the land directly below me, the empty stretch of rocky moor that makes up the north-eastern corner of Rum. I moved to rest on a slab of stone breaking through the grass on the precipice of the saddle, just where the ground began to dip down at an increasingly sharp angle. And that was when I saw it right in front of me – a creamy-white deer antler, five points branching out from an elegant curve of bone.