Natural History in the Highlands and Islands

What is most heartening in the woodland situation in the Outer Isles is that the crofters themselves are taking an interest in trees for shelter, and in many a garden you will see a host of willow cuttings bravely shooting forth in summer and making some certain headway against the gales and spray from the Atlantic. Rhododendrons are growing quite well in many places and are at least providing the first cover for something else to grow within their shelter.

The sands and the machairs of the Hebrides are often referred to in this book: in the Sound of Harris there are several islands which seem little else but shell sand, such as Ensay and Berneray; and there is Vallay of North Uist. But I would not wish to neglect the cliffs which are also important in the natural history of the Outer Isles. The great ocean pounds against them and must be gradually wearing them away, but the rock is the old gneiss and holds remarkably well. Sir Archibald Geikie in his Scenery of Scotland calls to mind the measurement of the pounding effect of waves which was made at the Atlantic rock of Skerryvore before the lighthouse was begun in 1845. The summer average weight of pounding was 611 lbs. per square foot; in the winter months it was 2,086 lbs. per square foot, and in the very heavy south-westerly gale of March 29, 1845, a pressure of 6,083 lbs. per square foot was registered. Even when it is water alone that strikes the rock, the wearing effect is far from negligible, but when other loose rock is moved by the water and pounded against the cliff, even our short lifetimes may be able to notice the denuding effect of wave action. I remember an incident on North Rona which certainly opened my eyes to what a big sea could do. It was in December, 1938, in a period of south-westerly gales which would veer to west and north-west and begin again from south-west before the wind had fallen. They were worst in the nights and I would go out in the mornings to see the magnificence of sea against the low cliffs of the northern peninsula. These cliffs were perhaps forty feet high, but sheer, and going into deep water. The top was irregular with occasional ten-foot gullies a few yards wide in which were some very big boulders eight to ten feet thick, and a lot more of a size just too heavy for a man to lift. When there one morning, a sudden shower caused me to take shelter under one of the big pieces of rock. Peppered scars were visible all over the big boulder above and on the smaller ones lying on the smooth floor of the gully. It was evident that the sea had come green into here and rolled the smaller boulders up and down. But observation was not critical enough to question how these smaller boulders could pepper the big one several feet above. When sheltering there again after another tremendous night, it was obvious that the big boulder was not in the same place as it was the day before. Those pepperings had been caused by its own rollings to and fro in the gully under the impulse of the sea which had filled the gully thirty to forty feet above its normal level. That boulder, probably, had done much to wear the gully itself in the course of thousands of years.

Some of the cliffs of the Hebridean coasts are impressive and become the crowded haunts of ledge-breeding sea birds. The precipice of Aonaig in Mingulay is 793 feet. The stacks of Arnamull and Lianamull in Mingulay are also very fine. Harvie-Brown thought Lianamull the closest-packed guillemot station he had ever seen. Barra Head or Bernera, the most southerly island of the Hebrides, has some fine cliffs and in front of the lighthouse on the southern face is a gully which takes a terrific updraught of spray in southerly gales and makes the dwelling of the lighthouse suffer a heavy rain of salt water, a rain of sudden torrential showers of a moment’s duration.

The influence of the sea in times of storm has already been mentioned as a land-making one on the western side of the Hebrides where it throws up sand for biological agencies to work upon. The islands in the Sound of Harris probably change shape through the years, sand being laid down in one place and taken away in another. Pabbay, for example, was the granary of Harris but the sand has encroached over the south-east end and has gone at the west. West again of Vallay, a sandy island of North Uist, the remains of a forest of trees may be discerned at low spring tides. This submerged forest is probably the result of Holocene sinkings, but nevertheless the shell-sand beaches have certainly advanced within historical times. The minister in Harris who was responsible for the account of that parish in the Old Statistical Account of 1794 remarks that certain lands had been lost to the plough within living memory, and that when a sand hill became breached by some agency and was eventually worn away, good loam was sometimes found beneath and even the ruins of houses and churches. Whatever we may have lost in the Holocene sinkings, it may be remarked that the last three thousand years have seen more rising than sinking along Highland coasts.

The tides in the Sound of Harris have an interesting rhythm of their own, accurately noted by the minister in the Old Statistical Account. The following quotation is from the Admiralty Chart of the Sound of Harris: “It may be generally stated that in Summer, in neap tides, the stream comes from the Atlantic during the whole of the day, and from the Minch during the whole of the night. In Winter this precept is nearly reversed. In Spring tides both of summer and winter the stream sets in from the Atlantic during the greater part of the time the water is rising, but never for more than 51/4 hours, and it flows back into the Atlantic during most of the fall of the tide. Where the water is confined by rocks and islands…the velocity is nearly 5 knots…during springs, and not much less during neaps, whilst in other places it does not exceed a rate of 2 to 21/2 knots.”

The east side of the Outer Isles is entirely different from the populous and spacious west side. Admittedly, north of Stornoway there are the sandy lands of Gress, Coll, Back and Tolsta, and the Eye Peninsula, supporting many crofts, but south of there the land is peat-laden and comes to abrupt cliffs at the sea’s edge. The bird life is nothing like so interesting as on the western side and on such cliffs as exist there. Long arms of the sea, such as Loch Seaforth and Loch Erisort, Loch Maddy and Loch Eport, run far into the interior; indeed, the last two named almost reach the west coast in Uist. To me this east coast of the Hebrides is uninviting and curiously dead. It is my experience that many of the islands off the West Coast of Scotland are much more interesting on their western sides than on their eastern shores. Raasay is an exception.

The east side of Harris from East Loch Tarbert to Rodel is well worth a visit to see what man can do in the shape of difficult cultivation. Take for example the township of Manish where the ground rises at a steep slope from the sea. It is in reality a rough face of rock devoid of soil but holding the peat here and there. The lobster fishers of Manish have actually built the soil of their crofts by creating lazy-beds or feannagan with seaweed and peat. By building up these little patches varying from the size of a small dining-table to an irregular strip of several yards long, the inhabitants have overcome the difficulty of drainage. The women carry seaweed up to the lazy-beds each year, all in creels, for the ground could not be reached by ponies. And all cultivation is of necessity done with the spade. Two crops only are grown, potatoes and oats, and the oats are Avena strigosa, which more than one naturalist has thought to be extinct as a cropping oat and only occurring here and there as a weed. The industry of the people of East Harris and their steadfast persistence with a thousand-year-old style of husbandry are remarkable. The potato is the only new thing, being brought to the Outer Isles in 1752. There are many more primitive townships in the Outer Hebrides working lazy-beds, but none in more disadvantageous position than Manish and its neighbours.

The Outer Isles also have their Atlantic outliers, each little group having its own strong individuality. There is St. Kilda (Plate VIIIa) on the west of the Uists, seventy-four miles out from Lochmaddy via the Sound of Harris; this group of magnificent gabbro architecture has already been mentioned, with the fact that it is the largest gannetry in the British Isles and in the world. It is also the place from which the still growing fulmar population of the British Isles may originally have spread. The islands and their peculiar sub-specific fauna will be described in a later chapter. The Monach Isles are only eight miles west of North Uist, and are likely to follow so many small island groups in becoming uninhabited by man. They are islands of sand caught and built up on reefs of Lewisian gneiss. Another reef to the south of them, Haskeir, has not collected the sand. It is much smaller and uninhabitable but has long been a haunt of the Atlantic seal and was one of the last strongholds before the revival of the species in the present century. The Flannan Isles are twenty-two miles west of Loch Roag, Lewis. They are of gneiss and bounded everywhere by cliffs. The seals feed near them, but of necessity do not breed there because they cannot haul out. The relatively flat tops of the islands are covered with very fine grass which feeds a few sheep. The difficulties of gathering and getting the sheep to and from the boats are likely to be the cause of even this usage being discontinued. The lighthouse is the only inhabited place in the Flannans and to get ashore there can be a ticklish job.

Then to the north and north-east of the Butt of Lewis are Sula Sgeir (Plate XXIIIa) and North Rona (Plate XXIVb), forty and forty-five miles away respectively. There are no beaches on these islands. Their natural history will be described in greater detail in Chapter 10. Suffice it to say here that Sula Sgeir is a gannetry, and like North Rona, St. Kilda and the Flannans, is a station for Leach’s fork-tailed petrel. It is doubtful whether we should be justified in calling Leach’s petrel one of the rarest British birds, but its breeding places are so few and so remote that it is unknown to all but half a dozen naturalists.

We have come to the end of our arm-chair tour of Highland country, from the frontier zone of Perthshire and Angus to that other frontier, the oceanic zone of the Atlantic. I have given but a glimpse of what is without doubt one of the finest scenic and faunistic areas in the world. Whether it survives as such depends very much on the good will and active, participant care of British people. Any area of natural history which is adjacent to a highly populous industrial region is in peril from that very proximity, but there is always the point of view that men’s minds become awakened to natural beauty and the right of wild life to existence for its own sake, and then the proximity may be to the advantage of wild life and the wild places, in the same way that no country sparrows or moorhens are as tame and safe as those of St. James’s Park.

CHAPTER 4

THE HUMAN FACTOR AND REMARKABLE CHANGES IN POPULATIONS OF ANIMALS

IT IS of the very nature of humanity to alter the complex of living things wherever man is found. Man must be considered as part of the natural history of the earth’s surface, however unnatural he may be. Of course, all animals alter the rest of the complex of living things in some way or other, but none does it with reflective intention as man does, and, I might add, none does it with much less regard for consequences. The animal, lacking the power of reflection, is as much at the mercy of its environment as the environment has to endure that particular animal; but man has power quite beyond his own physical strength; he can make the desert bloom, or ultimately fill an oceanic island with the beauty of bird song, and equally he makes deserts as spectacularly as any horde of locusts.

What has man done to the Highlands and Islands and what is he doing? Something of that story will be discussed in this chapter, but not so much as might be desired. Professor James Ritchie, now Regius Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh, has written a large volume entitled The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland. It is an interesting and often depressing story, but Professor Ritchie would probably be the last to suggest that he has told the complete tale. There is much of the story we do not know or are only just learning how to infer and deduce. And our methods of recording are never complete enough to mark down, for future minds to work upon, the doings of the present generation of men.

Scotland, and the Highlands particularly, have nothing like such a long human history as England has. The last glacial epoch prevented that, for Scotland was under the ice thousands of years after man had inhabited the south of England. The tradition apparently established at that time has persisted with remarkable tenacity, because many people still seem to think that the north of Scotland endures arctic conditions in winter—which is a pity, considering the picnics this writer has enjoyed on a New Year’s Day, and the times he has taken his siesta in comfort in the sun on a Highland hill in December and January!

It is generally accepted then that the Highlands as a whole have a human history of but a few thousand years as against tens of thousands in southern England, and it is possible that such areas as West Sutherland and the north-west corner of Ross-shire did not know man until two or three thousand years ago. When man first came to the Highlands the sea was 50 feet higher than it is at present. His kitchen-middens appear near the 50-foot raised beaches in various places such as Colonsay, Mull, Islay and Oban. He was a hunter and fisher and knew no arts of husbandry. One wonders what large effects early man can have had, because a small population of hunters taking life only for its own subsistence, and not for any export, would hardly bring to extinction many of the animals we know were present at that time. It is probable that natural causes were much more important in changing the natural history of the Highlands in those days. A few degrees’ change of temperature for a period of years, for example, whether up or down, would work very great changes in the tree line and the specific constitution of the forests. The mountain tops would appear from the ice or disappear under it again for considerable spells, and everywhere the vital factor of moss growth would be affected. The growth-rate of sphagnum moss under optimum conditions has, in the deduced history of the Highlands, felled forests as surely as the fires and the axes of mankind.

The biggest effect man has exerted on the history of the Highlands has been in the destruction of the ancient forest—the great Wood of Caledon. This has happened within historic time, partly between A.D. 800 and 1100 and then from the 15th and 16th centuries till the end of the 18th. Even our own day cannot be exempt from this vast tale of almost wanton destruction, for the calls of the two German wars have been ruthless (Plate 7a). Much of this priceless remnant in Strath Spey and Rothiemurchus has been felled for ammunition boxes and the old pines of Locheil Old Forest went up in smoke during Commando training. These facts should never be forgotten as one of the consequences of war, and if nature reserves ever become a reality in the Scottish Highlands (as something distinct from National Parks, which are lungs for the people and playgrounds), the authorities should go to a great deal of trouble to bring about regeneration of the true Scots pine which is a tree different in many ways from the sombre article commonly grown in plantations as Scots. The true Scots pine (Plate 17) of the old forest is a very beautiful tree: its bottlegreen is distinctive, and so is the redness of its boughs; the needles are very short and the shape of the mature tree is often much more like that of an unhindered hardwood than the commonly accepted notion of a pine. A long clean stem is not necessarily typical. The true Scots pine is not easy to grow now, and when it is suggested that the authorities should be prepared to go to a lot of trouble to bring about its regeneration, it is because care and patience will be needed in addition to willingness. Regeneration, however, is a subject for a later chapter; we are now woefully concerned with destruction and its effects.

The old forest consisted of oak at the lower levels, with alders along the rivers and in soft places, and pines and birches elsewhere. Pines clothed the drier portions and birch the higher and the damper faces of the western hills. The true Scots pine is a relic in the ecological sense, and where fire or the hand of man swept away an expanse of the old pine it was birch which within a year or two provided the new growth. An excellent example of this opportunism of the birch is to be seen at Rhidorroch, above Ullapool, Ross-shire, where the early felling line is clearly marked, pines above and birch below, the opposite arrangement to what would be found in nature. The oak forest has nearly all gone, Argyll and southern Inverness-shire being the main parts where it is to be seen to-day in any quantity. Scarcely anywhere is it being taken care of, or regeneration active.

Nairn (1890) says that the great Caledonian Forest extended “from Glen Lyon and Rannoch to Strathspey and Strathglass and from Glencoe eastwards to the Braes of Mar.” The imagination of a naturalist can conjure up a picture of what the great forest was like: the present writer is inclined to look upon it as his idea of heaven and to feel a little rueful that he was born too late to “go native” in its recesses. But probably it was not so idyllic; the brown bears would have been little trouble, nor would the wild boar, and perhaps the wolf would not have given too many sleepless nights, but there would almost certainly have been more mosquitoes than at present, and malaria would have been a constant menace to our enjoyment of this primitive sylvan environment and its rich wild life.

The main trouble between A.D. 800 and 1100 was the Vikings, whether Danes or Norwegians. They were a destructive and parasitical folk, however colourful and well organized the civilization of the North may have been. Sometimes they set light to the forest to burn out the miserable natives who had taken refuge within it, and sometimes these same poor folk set light to strips of forest to act as a protection and screen from the Vikings. It would all depend on the airt of the wind, but the forest suffered anyway. The tradition of the burning by “Danes “ or “Norwegians” still exists in legends which may be heard in the North-West Highlands to-day. I know of several places said to be concerned with the burning in the forest of a Viking princess and the site of her grave has been pointed out to me in two places fifty miles apart. The West Highlands were also a source of boat-building timber for the Norsemen in Orkney and Iceland (Brögger, 1929).

The wanton burning of the western portions of the forest would doubtless be eased after Somerled’s Lordship of the Isles became established in the 11th century. This period was the most cultured and well ordered the West Highlands were to know for hundreds of years. Even as late as 1549, Dean Monro speaks of the wooded character of Isle Ewe and Gruinard Island in Ross-shire, affording good hiding for thieves and desperate men.

The woods of the Central Highlands were destroyed from the south-east. Gentlemen like the Wolf of Badenoch (floruit 1380) who was a brother of King Robert of Scotland, wandered through the country with large armed bands bent on plunder. Once more it was found that setting light to the forest was an easy way of smoking out or finishing off anyone who resisted. Local clan feuds must also have been a constant cause of forest fires of greater or lesser extent. The forests about Inveraray were destroyed by Bruce in an expedition against Cummin.

All these causes of destruction considered, we are still brought back to what I believe is a fundamental factor in the relation of man to the wild life around him, whether animal or vegetable. Man does not seem to extirpate a feature of his environment as long as that natural resource is concerned only with man’s everyday life: but as soon as he looks upon it as having some value for export—that he can live by selling it to some distant populations—there is real danger. The forests of the Highlands were discovered (this word was used at the period) by the Lowland Scots and the English at the beginning of the 16th century. Queen Elizabeth of England prohibited iron smelting in Sussex in 1556, and in the Furness district of Lancashire in 1563, because of the devastation caused to English woodlands. The smelters had to move farther north. The Scottish Parliament saw to what this would lead and passed an Act prohibiting anyone “to tak upoun hand to woork and mak ony issue with wod or tymmer under payne of confiscatioun of the haill yrne.” We can see exactly how this Act would work from the operations of black markets in Britain during the second German war. The game was so profitable that an occasional heavy fine was accepted as a normal tax on trade.

At this time also the woods were being destroyed actively for another reason—or perhaps two reasons. Thieves and rebels hid in the woods and wolves bred therein. It seems that infestation of the forests with these two forms of predatory fauna was so bad that it could be endured no longer. Menteith in The Forester’s Guide quotes an order by General Monk, dated 1654, to cut down woods round Aberfoyle as they were “great shelters to the rebels and mossers.” Ritchie, in giving an account of the extinction of the wolf in Scotland, mentions local tradition and definite record of woods being destroyed in the districts of Rannoch, Atholl, Lochaber and Loch Awe for this very purpose.

The suppression of the first Jacobite rebellion of 1715 gave an impetus to destruction. English business enterprises such as the York Buildings Company purchased forfeited estates and quite unashamedly set out to exploit them. Whatever was worth taking was taken, and the timber was one of the first things to go. But for the obstructive tactics of the Highlanders themselves it is probable that every vestige of pine forest would have gone at this time. The York Buildings Company went bankrupt, but not soon enough from the naturalist’s point of view. Even after this period between the rebellions, the higher standard of living which was more or less imposed on Highland proprietors by their taking up the English way of life, caused them to sell large areas of forest for smelting purposes. The prices paid for the trees were often ridiculously small. Ritchie says:

“The destruction wrought by these later and larger furnaces was irreplaceable. In 1728, 60,000 trees were purchased for £7,000 from the Strathspey forest of Sir James Grant…About 1786 the Duke of Gordon sold his Glenmore Forest to an English company for £10,000; and the Rothiemurchus Forest for many years yielded large returns to its proprietor, the profit being sometimes about £20,000 in one year.”

The last of the felling and smelting with charcoal seems to have been as late as 1813. The brothers Stuart, 1848, mention twelve miles of pine, oak and birch being burned in Strathfarrar to improve the sheep pasture.

The effects of the normal spread of arable cultivation with a rising population may be taken for granted, but this does not by any means round off the story of the changed face of the Highlands through the destruction of the pine and oak forests. The passing of the forests heralded another biological phenomenon of great significance for the natural history of the Highlands, and which was also brought about by man’s agency. This was the coming of the sheep. The old husbandry of the Highlands and Islands was a cattle husbandry, a well-ordered sequence of rearing in the islands and of feeding in the mainland glens and on the hillsides before the strong store beasts were driven away south to the great fairs such as Falkirk Tryst. The Highlands were a country unto themselves into which Lowlanders ventured with some wariness. The collapse of the second Jacobite rising in 1746 allowed flockmasters from the Southern Uplands to think about the exploitation of the new expanses of grazing in the North. “The Coming of the Sheep,” as this colonization of the Highlands was called, is one of the epic events of Scottish history, though it is one not commonly referred to in history books.