Landscape Change in the Scottish Highlands : Imagination and Reality

The Scottish Highlands have a strong appeal to the public imagination. Indeed, as a result of the writings of Sir Walter Scott, they are now symbolic of Scotland as a whole: a land of mountains, glens and lochs, of golden eagles and red deer; a land with a rich cultural history of clans and clanship, of kilts and castles, of crofts, crofting, Highland cows and sheep, of music and dance. But does this imagined landscape relate to the actuality? Is it in fact a wild landscape which has escaped the pressures of the modern world, or does such untrammelled wildness only reside in the mind? The aim of this book is to answer this last question by taking an objective look at the history of the Highland landscape, how it has changed over the centuries and how it is still changing. It challenges the view that the Highlands are, to quote the famous ecologist Frank Fraser Darling, ‘a devastated landscape’ – that is a landscape damaged by centuries of overgrazing and human exploitation. Instead it points out that the evidence suggests that the traditional unwooded Highland landscape of open hill and moor is one of the most natural remaining in northwest Europe, showing only minimal signs of human impact over the millennia; apart, that is, from the areas of human settlement. The occurrence of woodland as only isolated fragments scattered across the land is in fact a key biodiversity feature of the Highlands, distinguishing the far northwest of Britain from most of western Europe, where woodland would undoubtedly be a dominant habitat. There certainly were significantly more trees in the past but the woodland declined naturally over the millennia for a complex variety of reasons. Hence the current approach of putting trees back in the landscape, nowadays termed ‘reforesting’ or ‘rewilding’ is in fact destroying the very essence of the land. Similarly, the current activity of ‘restoring’ peatland can also result in a loss of the naturalness of the landscape. Indeed, loss of natural