Книга - Natural History in the Highlands and Islands
Natural History in the Highlands and Islands
F. Fraser Darling
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland are rugged moorland, alpine mountains and jagged coast with remarkable natural history. This edition is exclusive to newnaturalists.comThe Highlands and Islands of Scotland are rugged moorland, alpine mountains and jagged coast with remarkable natural history, including relict and specialised animals and plants. Here are animals in really large numbers: St. Kilda with its sea-birds, North Rona its seals, Islay its wintering geese, rivers and lochs with their spawning salmon and trout, the ubiquitous midges! This is big country with red deer, wildcat, pine marten, badger, otter, fox, ermine, golden eagle, osprey, raven, peregrine, grey lag, divers, phalaropes, capercaillie and ptarmigan. Off-shore are killer whales and basking sharks. Here too in large scale interaction is forestry, sheep farming, sport, tourism and wild life conservation.
Collins New Naturalist Library
6
Natural History in the Highlands and Islands
F. Fraser Darling
D.Sc. F.R.S.E.
With 46 Colour Photographs By F. Fraser Darling, John Markham and Others, 55 Black-and-White Photographs and 24 Maps and Diagrams
TO THE MEMORY OF
WILLIAM ORR, F.R.C.V.S.
† Singapore, December 1945
KENNETH McDOUGALL, M.Sc., M.R.C.V.S.
† Normandy, August 1944
WHO KNEW AND LOVED THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS
AND THE WILD LIFE THEREIN
Editors: (#ulink_be60a949-e570-5f21-b1f1-3d852372cf1b)
JAMES FISHER M.A.
JOHN GILMOUR M.A.
JULIAN S. HUXLEY M.A. D.Sc. F.R.S.
L. DUDLEY STAMP B.A. D.Sc.
PHOTOGRAPHIC EDITOR:
ERIC HOSKING F.R.P.S.
The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wild life of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalist. The Editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native fauna and flora, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research. The plants and animals are described in relation to their homes and habitats and are portrayed in the full beauty of their natural colours, by the latest methods of colour photography and reproduction.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u90e0f87f-ba39-568d-90c4-a529768f2120)
Title Page (#u55370295-9160-55ee-b19d-c4f2590b223e)
Editors (#uedd55b95-7aba-5480-af7a-1872f52d56ec)
Editor’s preface (#u9bf8d416-5b99-56b8-bb42-2162e081227c)
Author’s preface (#u2bf7cb7a-3c9e-55a6-9e5c-7ebb0263fa47)
CHAPTER 1 (#uf2315bab-92eb-5f21-a10c-10456fae32fe)GEOLOGY AND CLIMATE
CHAPTER 2 (#u51dcb2d2-d1e5-5cca-985e-c6848eba4b42)RELIEF AND SCENERY
CHAPTER 3 (#udd4cbcfa-bb43-5eb1-a823-c7caccbe99b7)RELIEF AND SCENERY (continued)
CHAPTER 4 (#u6f1b640b-023e-5d85-8725-f63ae08fd94f)THE HUMAN FACTOR AND REMARKABLE CHANGES IN POPULATIONS OF ANIMALS
CHAPTER 5 (#litres_trial_promo)THE DEER FOREST GROUSE MOOR AND SHEEP FARM
CHAPTER 6 (#litres_trial_promo)THE LIFE HISTORY OF THE RED DEER
CHAPTER 7 (#litres_trial_promo)THE PINE FOREST, BIRCH WOOD AND OAK WOOD
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)THE SUMMITS OF THE HILLS
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)THE SHORE, THE SEA LOCH AND THE SHALLOW SEAS
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)THE SUB-OCEANIC ISLAND
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)THE LIFE HISTORY OF THE ATLANTIC GREY SEAL
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)FRESH WATERS: LOCHS AND RIVER SYSTEMS
Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps showing the distribution of certain animals in the highlands (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Black and White Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Colour Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
EDITORS’ PREFACE (#ulink_356e1e7a-94d5-5250-99cd-b5df249fafbf)
FOR MANY years Dr. F. Fraser Darling has found his field of work in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. One of his pioneer researches was into the social behaviour of a herd of red deer, in an area of Wester Ross dominated by the massif of An Teallach. In 1936 he began the first of two seasons’ work on Priest Island of the Summer Isles, studying the social structure of gull colonies and of small flocks of grey lag geese and other gregarious birds. It was from this work that Dr. Darling was led to enunciate his theory connecting the size of a social group of gregarious animals, with its breeding-time, and breeding-success. Statistical analysis and further observation by other workers have confirmed this theory and shown it to be of wide biological importance. Darling then made protracted autumn and winter visits to Lunga of the Treshnish Isles, and to North Rona, in order to study a further type of animal sociality, that of the Atlantic grey seal, an animal of whose life history we knew surprisingly little. He also worked his small farm on Tanera in the Summer Isles in such fashion as to show that it was possible and reasonable to raise considerably the stock-carrying capacity of the West Highlands and to grow a large amount of human food under crofting conditions.
Fraser Darling is a born naturalist, was brought up to farming, and became a scientist as thoroughly and quickly as academic discipline permitted. His first researches (at the Institute of Animal Genetics, Edinburgh University) were on the Scottish Mountain Blackface breed of sheep. He combines the qualities of a trained biologist and practical farmer with those of a sensitive field observer. As a humanist he is considering the Highland problem with none of the peculiar obsessions with which it has so often been approached: some Highland countrymen believe only in sport, or stalking, or sheep: others believe that no problem is more important than crofting, or water power, or the tourist industry, or the collecting of rare alpine plants. Fraser Darling’s sympathies are with all the interesting problems of living things in the Highlands, not least with the human species which—in this wild part of Britain where man is in such close contact with the natural physical environment—must be regarded in relation to the others. It is in this spirit that he is interpreting his present work as Director of the West Highland Survey.
In this book, which is the first effort, so far as we are aware, to give a picture of Highland natural history as a whole, Dr. Darling has, naturally, expanded on those subjects with which he is most familiar—the life histories of seals, deer and sea-birds, and the ecology of grazing and regeneration of forest growth. Nevertheless, he has a general view, derived from a wide and mature experience, tempered with homely wisdom, and illuminated by his genuine love for the Highlands. There is, in this book, no aura of bogus romance; there are no purple passages or sporting reminiscences: instead, he has given us something of the real essence of Scotland’s land and sea.
THE EDITORS
Every care has been taken by the Editors to ensure the scientific accuracy of factual statements in these volumes, but the sole responsibility for the interpretation of facts rests with the Authors
AUTHOR’S PREFACE (#ulink_27caefa2-b708-50a1-abd7-d84696b29c96)
A MAN does not write a book like this one without a good deal of help. First, there is that host of observers and seekers after knowledge whose works have been scanned for their contribution to this attempted synthesis. Then there is the good criticism given by the Editors, James Fisher in particular, for his friendship has been sorely tried. Charles Elton was good enough to spend part of his first holiday in seven years reading the draft, and his suggestions have been invaluable. Averil Morley has helped me throughout in gathering data and as a constant kindly critic. I am grateful to them all, but would not like to unload on to them any of the responsibility for this book. After all, I have not always taken their advice and must stand or fall alone in what seems to me something of a tight-rope act. This work is not a handbook of natural history; that is why I have refused to call it The Natural History of the Highlands and Islands; that would have been too presumptuous a title. Whole orders of animals and plants escape any mention, partly for want of space but mainly, perhaps, because one man is not omniscient. The aim has been to tell a plain tale of a remarkable region and of some of the causes, interactions and consequences which confront the inquiring mind. One thing I would say: I know more now about natural history in the Highlands and Islands than when I began this book three years ago, and writing it has set me thinking. I want to get into the field again and look into new problems that have occurred to me. If the book has the same effect on anybody else, it will have served some good purpose.
F. D.
Strontian,
North Argyll.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_e5f7ba7e-3275-57f8-9c76-1b2cb57ec2c0)
GEOLOGY AND CLIMATE
IT MAY be truly said of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland that the geology of the country makes the scenery. The geology cannot be ignored in describing the area, as the subject might be if the rocks were overlaid with a great thickness of soil deposited by alluvial drift. Here in the Highlands there is often no soil at all, the bare rocks starkly showing to sun and tempest; or again, a thin layer of acid peat may be the only covering. Such true soils as exist on the hillsides and in the straths are usually of fairly local origin, reflecting the qualities of the rocks near at hand.
Geology, then, linked with climate, determines very largely the nature of the initial vegetation of the Highlands. Man himself determines the secondary vegetation to some extent through his management of animals and of fire, but there are decided limits to what he can do in the face of the geology. Vegetation in its turn, and again governed by climate, has a remarkable effect on the animal life of the region, both in variety and distribution. Geology, through the relief of the land to which it gives rise, also has a definite effect on climate—for example, the presence of mountains results in the condensation of the moisture of the air, hence the characteristic heavy rainfall in their vicinity. The vegetation influences slightly the immediate climate of a region, and the two together may have their effect on the superficial geology, as in woodlands preventing erosion and gullying of hillsides.
We should remember the constant interplay of these dynamic forces as well as life itself in studying the natural history of the Highlands and Islands. It is a noble drama of weather and mountain and sea and plant and animal, the dramatis personae of which may be given this diagrammatic form:
From almost every point of view of natural history, the Highland region of Scotland is demarcated by the sharp geological line known as The Highland Border Fault which runs north-east, south-west across Scotland from the mouth of the Clyde to Stonehaven. Although a good deal of Scotland’s best agricultural land lies along the east coast north of this line, the great mass of the country to the north-west of the Fault (also known in history as the Highland line) is mountainous. The word mountainous does not, however, allow us properly to speak of mountains in Scotland. It is rather an inverted boast of the Scot, secure in his country’s superiority of wild terrain, to inform the visitor that there are reputedly mountains in England and Wales and in Ireland, but in Scotland they are called hills.
The Highlands, also, are not necessarily high ground. The highest point of the Hebridean island of Benbecula is only 420 feet, but Benbecula is unquestionably as Highland in its natural history as in its human cultural relationships.
There is another major geological feature which plays a large part in the topography of the area, in the shape of the Great Glen of Scotland, a second big fault forming Glen Albyn (the English have an annoying habit of calling it the Caledonian Canal!). This great dividing line between the Northern and North-West Highlands on the one hand and the Central and South-West Highlands on the other is marked not only by the Great Glen itself, but by the chain of long freshwater lochs it contains, the most famous of which is Loch Ness, 21
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miles long and of great depth. The loch drains north-eastwards to the short Ness River and the Moray Firth at Inverness. The very low watershed which crosses the Great Glen, in so far as the flow northeast or south-west is concerned, is above the head of Loch Oich and is no more than 115 feet above sea level. The next loch south-westwards is Loch Lochy, and the Lochy River which flows from it runs into the salt water of Loch Linnhe, which ultimately fans out after the Corran Narrows and becomes the Firth of Lorne which is such a distinctive feature of the western coastline. At the south-westward end of the Great Glen and at the head of Loch Linnhe stands the sentinel-like massif of Ben Nevis, the highest hill in Scotland, 4,406 feet high. The summit is only four miles from sea level as the crow flies, so the full sense of height of this mass can be appreciated by the traveller coming eastwards down Loch Eil. Ben Nevis is formed by a granite intrusion between the two great areas of the Moine and Dalriadan schists. It is a wide-topped hill of no particular beauty of shape, but its north corrie is undoubtedly impressive, for it contains the highest sheer cliff face in Britain of about 1,500 feet (Plate I) as well as one of the very few semi-permanent snow patches in Britain. This patch of snow is untouched by the sun’s rays.
The actual summit of Ben Nevis is not of the granite rock of which the main mass of the hill is composed. The summit is the top of a gigantic cylinder of tertiary basalt. Presumably this volcano originally spread the basalt over the whole of the hill, but all except the protected summit has been eroded away.
It is worth noting that the two highest mountainous groups in Scotland are formed of granite—Ben Nevis, and the Cairngorm region, 4,296 feet, east of the Spey; and east again, there is Lochnagar, on the eastern side of the Highland area, also granite and reaching 3,760 feet. The Cairngorms are of much greater extent than the Ben Nevis massif and, partly because of their considerable alpine plateaux at about the 4,000-foot contour, have a special place in Highland natural history. Topographically, the Cairngorms viewed from afar may seem as uninteresting as Ben Nevis, but the physical beauty of these hills is for intimate observation in the magnificent corries and on the high plateaux. It is possible to walk a pony on to these high ridges and plateaux without any trouble, the ground being good all the way.
There are two more striking geological phenomena which will be less obvious to the casual observer than those of the Highland Boundary Fault and the Great Glen. First, that definite line of tectonic tumult known as the Moine Overthrust which reaches from the south-west corner of Skye north-north-eastwards to the eastern shore of Loch Eriboll on the north coast. Here the older rocks of the Moine schists are thrust westwards over younger rocks along a hundred-mile line. Through the whole length, like a sandwich filling between archaean gneiss with the overlying Torridonian sandstone on the west side, and the Moine schists on the east, are beds of Cambrian age including an extremely hard and shiny metamorphosed quartzite which makes a barren strip of country. This rock is so hard and shiny that even the peat finds it difficult to keep a hold on slopes of any considerable inclination. There are many patches of acres of bare rock (Plate 3a) to be found on the passage of the quartzite from Eriboll to Skye, and it may be best described in the climber’s graphic phrase of “boiler-plating.”
Here and there along the line of this uninteresting sandwich filling there appears a geological titbit in the shape of an outcrop of limestone such as the famous Durness limestone of Cambrian age. The effect of this is to enliven the natural history and change the scenery of this vast geological sandwich. Instead of bareness and blackness of peat we get greenness and soil. It is this limestone which makes the Assynt district a place which no naturalist should ignore from the geological, entomological, conchological or botanical points of view. The effect is, perhaps, still more marked around Durness. Even the bird life has its particular interest in this area and so has the world of loch and river. A little farther south than Assynt, in a black area of bog to the east of Suilven and Canisp, there rises an island of limestone a few hundred acres in extent. The climber on these hills in spring or autumn will experience pleasure and something of a shock to see the townships of Elphin and Cnockan on their geological emerald. If he goes down to these thriving villages he will notice that the sheep are larger, the cattle better-looking, and there will be Highland pony mares and foals such as he will see nowhere else so commonly till he reaches the machairs of South Uist. The roadsides are like the verges of an English lane. All this is part of the paradox of the Highlands and of Highland life. They are full of surprises and facts which do not seem to fit in. No sooner does the theorizing type of mind construct a hypothesis which looks neat than some disconcerting fact will create paradox.
So much for the Moine Thrust and its consequences; the second striking geological phenomenon is the mixture in the West Highlands of old rocks and new volcanic ones. From Cape Wrath to Applecross the West Coast is a wild jumble of the ancient Hebridean gneiss and that very old and barren sandstone known as Torridonian. These two formations make for scenery which is exceptionally wild in quite different ways. Then at the foot of Loch Linnhe is the Isle of Mull and, to the north of it, some similar tertiary volcanic rocks in Morvern and Ardnamurchan. Such volcanic rock is a dull grey in colour and amorphous in texture, except where there occur amygdaloid pockets of crystals of much beauty, but it makes some distinctive scenery. These tertiary rocks as we see them in Mull are the remains of immense beds of lava, possibly 50 million years of age as against the 1,500 million years or so of the gneiss farther north. The lava erodes into terrace-like formations which correspond to the actual flows, and on which terraces the soil is found to be brown and rich—a real soil without peat—and the grass grows thick in summer. The country of the tertiary terraces is cattle country and turns up again in the western part of Skye. Sometimes the terraced denudation gives way to a natural castellated architecture such as the Castle Rock of the Treshnish Isles (Plate Va), and further still to towers and spires like the Quirang and the Old Man of Storr in Skye (Plate II). This latter rock is like a natural Tower of Pisa and visible from many miles away. Sometimes, again, the tertiary basalt has solidified in a peculiar way to make those giant hexagonal columns much visited at Staffa, the small island between Iona and the Treshnish Isles. Such columns may also be found elsewhere, as in Mull, Canna and Oidhsgeir, on a much smaller scale, but probably the most impressive examples in Scotland are those of the northern face of Garbh Eilean of the Shiant Isles. Though the steamer from Kyle of Lochalsh to Stornoway passes within four miles of the Shiants, these islands are rarely visited, and the tremendous columnar architecture remains almost unknown. The Shiants are the northern outposts of Scotland’s youngest rocks; only four miles away to the west is the east coast of the Hebrides, composed of her oldest rock, the archaean gneiss. Geology is a hard subject to learn, but it helps one to understand scenery, and with a little knowledge it gives great sense of wonderment at the immensity of the movements of the earth’s crust.
The Moine Thrust has been mentioned as one of the major geological features of the Highlands. The Moine schists which occur to the east of the Thrust are the most extensive group of rocks found in the Highlands as a whole. They are sometimes called the Undifferentiated Eastern Schist, and words such as gneissose and schistose crop up in a detailed geological description; but whatever the names, the group of rocks reaches in a broad, roughly parallel-sided band, fifty miles wide, from the north coast of Scotland to the foot of the Great Glen where it comes up short against the tertiary basalt of Mull and western Morven. South of the Great Glen, similar schists and gneisses, the Dalriadan, underlie a large part of the Central Highlands and reach far into Aberdeenshire. Many of the high tops of the Highlands are on this formation—Ben Lawers 3,984 feet, Craig Meagaidh 3,700, Mam Soul 3,862 and Carn Eige 3,877 feet. The schists form a great plateau on the western side of the Spey opposite the Cairngorms. This schist plateau has the Gaelic name of Monaliadh —the grey mountains—and the Cairngorms across the valley are called the Monaruadh—the red mountains. The grey is most obvious when it comes up against either the granite as on the east side of the Highlands, or against the reddish-purple Torridonian, as on the west. Though schists and gneisses are intimately associated and both very ancient, the schists break down more easily, and as they contain a fair quantity of alumina they often make good soil, and produce a different vegetational complex from the adjoining Torridonian, for example. The presence of overmuch peat, of course, may entirely cut out the influence of the slowly-disintegrating rock.
FIG 1.—Geology of the Highlands The exposures of Tertiary and Cretaceous are not large enough to show on this scale
An igneous rock known as gabbro is of infrequent occurrence in the Highlands, but its appearances and the consequences of glacial action on the gabbro constitute some of the most spectacular scenery not only in the Highlands but in the whole world. The more important masses of gabbro are closely associated with the tertiary lava and are in fact intrusive masses of molten rock which solidified underground but have since been exposed by denudation. The small example of gabbro scenery in the shape of Ardnamurchan Point, the most westerly point of the mainland of Great Britain, is wild, but not high enough to be considered grand, but this rock in Skye is the stuff of the Cuillin hills (Plate IIIa) which rise to 3,309 feet. Gabbro is hard and knobbly, which makes it safe for the experienced climber, and by the coincidence of the Cuillin range being the centre of an ice cap in glacial times, the glaciers working outwards to the perimeter have carved the great corries and left the sharp ridges in which we delight to-day. With the retreat of the glaciers the shape of the moraines becomes obvious, and subsequent weathering of the hills has produced some great scree slopes.
South-west of Skye there is another fairly large island of nearly 30,000 acres, called Rum. Its highest hills do not go beyond 2,600 feet, but in beauty of line they are not less than the Cuillins; and when we come to examine their geology, we find that nearly a third of the island, including these fine hills, is composed of gabbro.
Another mass of gabbro and allied rocks occurs over a hundred miles farther west to form the group of islands known as St. Kilda. They are unique in British scenery and in British natural history. Here, the Atlantic has not allowed the accumulation of the fragments which result from weathering and make the scree slopes seen in the Cuillins. Instead, the gabbro stands up out of the sea in naked pinnacles. The highest point of the largest island, Hirta, is 1,396.8 feet above sea level, from just below which is the highest sheer sea-cliff in Britain. (This is disputed by those who say the Kame of Foula, 1,220 feet, is the highest.) Even so, the island being three miles or so across, the height of this cliff is not so striking as the smaller island of Boreray on the north side of the group, which being roughly triangular and less than a mile across rises to 1,245 feet. Stac Lee and Stac an Armin are mere rocks in the sea, a furlong or less across at their foot, but they rise to 544 and 627 feet and make a difficult climb for a good man (Plates XXIb and XXIX). It is on these stacks of gabbro in the western ocean that the largest gannet colonies in the world are found.
Finally, the 70-foot stack of Rockall (Plate XXII), 184 miles west of St. Kilda, is of a rock allied to gabbro though more acid in composition. The natural history of that rock, in so far as it is known, would not fill a volume. No birds breed on it regularly though guillemots do from time to time. Lichens there may be but no other vegetation. Gannets and other sea birds are often found resting there in summer. Near it is Leonidas or Hazelwood Rock, usually awash. Farther away Helen’s reef, about a mile long comes to the surface only at spring tides in one place, so the geological nature of this submerged land is unknown to us. The naturalist, of all men, cannot resist the temptation sometimes to dream of what Rockall would have been had it thrust itself just another hundred feet through the waves and been able to withstand the wave action which has reduced it to its present proportions. We should have had a long low island with a hump and a few smaller eminences. What sort of a place would it have been botanically? What haven would it have made for nesting birds from the sea, and would the Atlantic seal have been an altogether more numerous species than it is, by having a North Atlantic sanctuary which would usually have been unapproachable during the autumn breeding season? James Fisher tells me that on an exceptionally calm day the Leonidas Rock may dry out and would provide the only possible hauling-out place for the seal; but in fact, the Atlantic seal has been seen only once in the vicinity.
I have very roughly indicated the geological character of the Highlands in so far as it affects the topography; there remains, however, the phenomenon of glaciation as the most tremendous carver of scenery from the matrix of rocks of one kind or another. I mentioned the effect of glaciation on the Cuillins, but that was a minor area of ice action compared with the Highlands as a whole. Glaciologists now appear to be agreed that there were four glacial periods in which the Highlands were involved, though it is improbable that the whole region was covered by the ice each time. There were certainly ice caps on the North-West Highlands and on the Grampians.
From these two or more central ice caps there are well-defined radial courses which have gouged out or deepened many of the glens and polished the summits of some of the lower hills. The country of the Hebridean gneiss in Sutherland and north-west Ross has been heavily scored by glaciers flowing westwards from the direction of the higher Torridonian sandstone hills inland and in the melting of the ice many boulders of this dark red rock have come to rest on the grey gneiss hills. Such erratic blocks are often well-worn and rounded: the stalker in this ground is sometimes tricked into putting his glass on them if he does not know it well, thinking such boulders are deer, seen from a mile away. And in the Torridonian area we see some fine hanging corries facing eastwards at about 1,750 feet, with a large area of boulder moraine below the lip of the corries. Where the boulders, long carried in the ice, have been open to the weather, only the deeper scorings and the rounding are obvious; but I have had occasion to move some of these boulders from their bed of fine glacial sand, their tops being in the way of my plough. The lower faces of such rocks, which had lain in their beds since the melting ice had lost momentum to carry them farther, were flat, scratched in some places but carrying quite a high polish on other parts of the sole. The coarser qualities of Torridonian sandstone do not take a smooth surface easily, but these surfaces gave the finger-tips a palpable sensation of polish.
The glaciers have not only carved and gouged the countryside but have had a profound effect on the subsequent natural history. The rock surfaces, shorn and left bare, have often remained bare or have gathered only a superficial layer of peat on which there grows but a poor vegetation. Again, some of the gougings have made saucer-like depressions which will not drain completely and either become lochs or peat-filled bogs with their own flora. The moraines are exceptionally well drained and the herbage grows in the rock detritus or on a very thin layer of peat. The best heather in the West Highlands—where heather does not normally grow well—is on the moraines.
The Spey Valley, and perhaps the Dee Valley also, is probably the best coniferous-tree-growing area in Scotland, a point to which return will be made later in the book: what is emphasized here is the comparative dryness of the ground of all this region, caused by the immense quantity of glacial drift (Plate 1) which drains readily and has only a thin layer of peat above it. The glacial drift of the Highlands is sandy and gravelly, not the boulder clay which is found in the north of England and in parts of the Central Plain of Scotland; for which fact we can be heartily glad, for to have boulder clay beneath our feet in a country of high rainfall would be unendurable.
CLIMATE
The relation of geology and scenery we have taken for granted; that of geology, climate and vegetation we take almost for granted, and because of that we are too apt, perhaps, to generalize. Our old school geography books informed us that the climate of the British Isles was mild and humid and that the laving waters of the Gulf Stream (which we now call the Atlantic Drift) kept our insular climate an equable one. Though it is generally true that the south-eastern side of Britain is drier than the north-western, it is for the naturalist to inquire more deeply into such generalizations, for he knows that altitude, position and slope in relation to sun, nearness to sea and so on have considerable local effects on climate. At least, he is finding out that he must know local climates quite well if he is to be a good naturalist—for example, Loch Tay is 20 miles long; from east to west there is an increase of an inch per year of rainfall for every mile you go. We should rightly judge, therefore, that the more detailed natural history of Killin would show considerable differences from that of Aberfeldy on the scoe of rainfall alone. When I lived at Dundonnell at the head of Little Loch Broom I found the rainfall to be about 72 inches a year. Seven miles to the south in Strath na Sheallag beyond the Torridonian cones of An Teallach (Plate IIIb), the rainfall in my gauge there measured 100 inches. Seven miles north of Dundonnell lies Ullapool, which receives an average of 48 inches. Both snow and frost are more severe in Strath na Sheallag than in Ullapool. The differences in the vegetational complex of these two areas were marked, and so were those of the animal groupings, though of course it would be wrong to put it all down to the climate. If climates can alter so markedly within a few miles—and that is the rule rather than the exception in the Highlands—so can they alter within a few yards. The ecologist, the man who studies organisms in relation to their environment, is now giving more attention to what are called micro-climates. That gully in the north corrie of Ben Nevis which was mentioned previously as never getting the sun, and where the snow sometimes remains the year round, is an example of a distinct micro-climatic region. What is its annual mean temperature and its extremes? What does its relative-humidity chart look like? How much light gets in there? We do not know. And coming to its living things, what plants are found there? Perhaps the fauna would include a few spiders, some of which creatures have a habit of living in unlikely places on mountains. Again, knowledge remains incomplete. The distinctive natural history and weather data of that micro-climate remain to be discovered and set down, despite the fact that a meteorological station was maintained on the summit of Ben Nevis for twenty years from 1884 to 1903 and hourly records of all kinds taken.
The north side of a tree has a micro-climate quite distinct from that of the south side, and as a result of this there are definite zones of disposition of mosses and lichens. Similarly, the upper canopy of a tree has a different climate from that at its foot. The micro-climates of such a broken-up area as the Highlands are legion and beyond the scope of this book: attention will have to be confined to some of the variations likely to be met in our passage here and there through the hills, glens, lochs and islands.
Let us first of all realize the amount of indentation of the land of the West Highlands, which allows the sea to enter far into the countryside. That in itself, the western ocean being relatively warm for this latitude of 53–59° N., makes for mildness in the immediate neighbourhood of the sea lochs. It must be remembered, however, that altitude far outweighs latitude and distance from the sea in the matter of climate. West Highland hills tend to rise steeply from the sea, and as a great deal of ground lies above the 1,500-foot contour, the over-all temperature is low. The coasts, especially in favoured places, are exceptionally mild, and years may pass without more than 2° F. of frost being recorded. Only the coasts of western Wales and southern England can exceed the mean annual warmth of those of the West Highlands. The mean January temperatures of the West Highland coasts are between 40 and 42° F. compared with 38° and less on the east coast of Scotland. The July isotherms tend to go east and west rather than north and south, but as the west coast of Scotland is reached they take a distinct dip south-westwards and show the West Highlands to have a mean summer temperature of 55–57° F. compared with 56–58° F. on the east coast. If we take the differences between annual mean summer and winter temperatures, there is only 14° F. of difference on the West Highland coast, compared with 20° F. at Dundee and 24° F. in London, Kent and East Anglia. These, of course, are sea-level temperatures. The Highlands show a completely different story as soon as you go uphill, and when you truly go inland into the Monaliadh or Cairngorm regions, conditions are much more extreme. Much work has been done on mountain climate in Britain by Dr. Gordon Manley, President of the Royal Meteorological Society. The twenty years’ work on Ben Nevis is available to me in summary and I give these figures as a comparison with the sea-level conditions which pertain on the coast only a few miles away. The mean temperature of the hottest month, July, was 41.1° F., and of the coldest month, February, 23.8° F., a range of 17.3° F. The extreme records were, Maximum 66° F. (28 June 1902) and Minimum 1° F. (6 January 1894).
FIG. 2a.—January Isotherms (reduced to sea level)
FIG. 2b.—July Isotherms (reduced to sea level)
FIG. 3.—Average annual rainfall in the Highlands Based on a map prepared in the Meteorological Office and reproduced by permission of His Majesty’s Stationery Office Crown copyright reserved
When we come to rainfall we see how easy it is to fall into a trap by generalizing that the west coast is wetter than the east. The beltof very high rainfall is not on the coast but a few miles inland, and even then it does not extend uniformly from north to south of the Highlands. Reference to Bartholomew’s Atlas of Scotland will show the monthly rainfall distribution in fair detail. Coming south from Cape Wrath, the strip of country with a rainfall over 100 inches a year does not start until Latitude 57.30° N. and then goes southwards and slightly south-eastwards to Latitude 56° N. There is a good area all round this strip with a precipitation of 60–100 inches, but the coastal promontories, especially in the north, and the Hebrides, receive only 40–60 inches of rain, a low figure which is not reached elsewhere in the true Highlands until the central area. A very few parts of the eastern Highlands receive as little as 30–40 inches. There is no doubt that Skye and the Inner Isles are partly responsible for the heavy precipitation on the mainland coast to the east of them.
These two climatic factors of temperature and rainfall are of immense importance in determining the vegetation of an area, but there are interrelations of these two which must always be taken into consideration when natural history is being studied. For example, something must be known of the rate of evaporation relative to the precipitation. The ratio between these two in any given situation has a big influence on the types of plants and to a lesser extent on the animals to be found there. The evaporating power of the air is measured by what is called the saturation deficit, which can be calculated from the difference in temperature between the wet and dry bulb thermometers when the temperature of the air is known. The saturation deficit is a measure of the humidity of the air. It is found in practice that there is often a constant variation in the saturation deficit during the day, and where such variation pertains, it may in itself influence the grouping of living things. The evaporation rate tends to be high in summer on the West Highland coast and for some way up the hills, but in the glens and on the high tops the evaporation rate is generally low. The annual average difference between wet and dry bulb readings on Ben Nevis was only 0.7° F., which must be quite the most humid climate in Great Britain.
Sunshine records in the Highlands are highly variable. Broadly speaking, the amount of sunshine is in inverse proportion to the rainfall, so the strip of the Highlands to which allusion has already been made as enduring 100 inches or more of rain enjoys least sun. It is also possible to draw a line bisecting the Outer Hebrides longitudinally, showing an annual total of sunshine of less than 1,200 hours on the west side and 1,200–1,300 hours on the east. I remember very well during several months on North Rona, equidistant 47 miles north of the Butt of Lewis and Cape Wrath, how much oftener it was possible to see Cape Wrath lighthouse quite clear than the north end of Lewis which would be shrouded in cloud. The resident in the Highlands knows well how much more sun there is on the little islands and promontories than on even the general run of coastal areas. The published figures probably do not show the true position because the number of sun gauges is few in the West Highlands. One of the surprises of the West is the local area of high sunshine records for the island of Tiree (Plate 25), the outermost of the Inner Hebrides. The island is low (beneath the waves, as Gaeldom described it in the old days) and has but little cloud-stopping or cloud-gathering power. The soil is mostly of shell sand or loam, so its moisture drains or evaporates quickly. It was not without good reason that in past days Tiree was known as the granary of the Isles. Only the south coast of England equals or exceeds Tiree’s record. Grain needs sunshine to ripen it and fill it, but apart from that agricultural fact the plant ecologists say it is hard to demonstrate the precise effect of differing amounts of sunshine on vegetation. It remains probable, nevertheless, that actual lack of sunshine or a very low summer figure would inhibit the growth of such plants as broom and harebells, and encourage others such as the bryophytes (mosses and liverworts).
Tradition has it that the climate of the Highlands and Islands has deteriorated in living memory and in the fifty to seventy years before that. The meteorologists are always telling us we are wrong in thinking the weather was better in “our young days.” All the same, in the North-West Highlands salt pans were in general use many years ago for evaporating sea water, but it is said the fall in the amount of sunshine—much more than the remission of the salt tax—was responsible for their use being discontinued.
It will be best for us to consider the climatic factor of snow when we come to note its effect in the higher mountainous regions. But let it be said that the Highlands as a whole do not suffer nearly so much snow as the Southern Uplands of Scotland or the Pennine Chain of England. Snow comes earlier and stays later on the tops of the hills because the factor of altitude is concerned, but the Atlantic mildness pervades much of the lower ground. Nearness to the sea is a considerable factor in determining how low the snow will come on a hill face and how long it will stay. This is brought home to anyone living offshore from the West Highland mainland and who has for a view a wide range of peaks stretching from three to twenty miles inland. Snow as a climatic factor can be of much importance in a region long after it has fallen if the catchment area of the snow is large. The Cairngorm hills provide an excellent example: their greatest accumulation of snow is at the end of April or even in early May, whereafter there is a steady melting which is not complete until August. It is in the dry month of June that the snow held on the spacious tops and plateaux of this region can maintain the water even in rapid-running rivers and affect the fish life down in the Spey and Dee Valleys. Obviously, snow has a great effect on plant and animal life in areas where it lies long, but we are here dealing with the general climate of the Highlands and must not be drawn away into discussion of local and micro-climates.
The shore line of the West Highland mainland is particularly free from snow. I have known years when the snow has not lain for more than a couple of hours in a whole winter—and then, like as not, it has been at the end of April or in the first week of May. That first week or so of May is regularly a wintry period, and is so well known in the North that it is called the Gab o’ May. Taken all in all, it is remarkable how little is the effect of snow on vegetation in the Highlands except on the summits and in those places where it drifts and packs. Its influence on the behaviour of animals may be profound, but of that more later.
Frost has a distribution in the Highlands somewhat like that of snow, except for the peculiar conditions which will produce spring or autumn frosts on the floor of a glen and not at a few hundred feet up the hillsides. That is a phenomenon, of course, which is known all too well in the fruit-growing districts of England. The shore line of islands off the western seaboard may, as has been said, register no more than 2° F. of frost all winter, but occasional bad years such as the early 1940’s may show up to 14° F. of frost. I remember seeing very thin pancake ice forming on the flat-calm sea of the Anchorage of Tanera in January 1941. Tanera is well out to the Minch and the sea is of fairly high salinity there.
Wind is a climatic factor of great variability and of exceedingly great importance in Highland natural history and the topography of the area. It would be entirely wrong to call the Highlands windswept; it cannot even be said truly that the coastal areas are windswept, for here on the shores of Loch Sunart where I am writing, the trees round the house are of beautiful symmetry and of great height, yet only 150 yards away on a shingle beach the wind blows much harder. The summits of the hills are windswept and the outer coasts are still more windswept, and it should be understood that the outer coasts of the North-West Highlands are the windiest part of Great Britain; much windier, for example, than the Shetland Isles or the outer Norwegian coast, or Valencia Island off south-west Ireland. The gales above 4,000 feet are worse than on the coast; the meteorological data from the Ben Nevis Observatory period gave an average of 261 gales a year of more than 50 m.p.h.
On the outer coasts of the Highlands gusts of 100 m.p.h. occur from time to time, and in certain places, where the configuration of the hills governs the play of wind, there are freak gusts and up and down draughts of excessive strength. In December 1938, I was going over the hill of North Rona during a three-day southerly gale to fetch water from the well on the southern cliff face. The wind was not so bad as it had been in the night, but I had to go on hands and knees over the ridge at 300 feet, from which there was an unbroken downward sweep to the sea on the south. When I reached the edge of the 70-foot cliffs which were at an angle of 30° from the vertical, I saw the turf at the edge of the cliff being lifted like the edge of a blanket, and the outer fringes of it were being torn off and flung inland just as a blanket would wear in a wind. All this is common enough in the islands; I had seen it before. But a few yards inland I saw two bare patches in the turf where two boulders had rested for years; the black surface of the bare patch was a good inch below the turf, and the boulders themselves—a foot to eighteen inches across and about eight inches high—were rolled uphill a distance of about three feet. The seals might well have shifted them had they been there, but no seals wandered in that part of the island. Only the force of the wind could have moved those stones, and as I still cannot believe that any wind we know could turn up the dead weight of a boulder well set with a flat bottom in the turf, presumably the cliff being set at that angle had the effect of multiplying the force of the wind at the upper edge; and a fairly large area of turf must have been lifted and stretched in some of the gusts, with the result that the boulders would be thrown out of their sockets uphill. The effect of wind is much less farther inland from the sea. The tree line on the coasts may be no more than 200 feet—assuming that trees will grow at all—whereas it is 1,800 feet on the western side of the Cairngorms. The prevailing wind in the Highlands is from the south-west. Such winds come off the relatively warm waters of the North Atlantic Drift and are laden with moisture. The weather is rarely cold during the time they blow. If the observer is far enough out from the high hills to see what is really happening in the sky, he will note that the south-westerly gales are predictable from the movements of the clouds before the wind is felt at sea level, or he may see a great bank of cloud out to the west in the Atlantic the night before. The south-westerly gales are gusty even out on the coasts, but they are so moisture-laden that one’s sense of smell is heightened: earth and sea have a beauty of their own at such a time through the scents they convey. The observer is watching the sky for signs of the end of the gale and sees a break of blue sky for a moment; then he notices that the clouds are no longer moving from the south-west but from the west. Soon he feels the wind to be coming from the west at sea level and the clouds are moving from north-west. Finally the wind veers farther to north-west and falls light in the north. That is the end of the gale.
The trough of low barometric pressure is left behind and the recording needle marks a steady rise and then levels off as the wind reaches the north. These gales have a closely similar pattern: in winter they may last several days; or only twenty hours in summer, sometimes completing the pattern day after day, beginning in the early morning with short gusts which are the forerunners and falling light in the late evening. It is the West Highland coast which shows up these gales as if under a magnifying glass. They will be mere breezes a few miles inland or at the head of a sea loch. Only their raininess will be felt there. The barograph shows less pronounced movement also, back in from the coast.
It is obvious that the effect of wind on the outer coasts is very great, for there is not only the period of great gales in the winter, when there are no leaves on the shrubs and no leafy vegetation at ground level, but there is the continual wearing of the summer period. I have seen leaves die from shaking through three days of blowing. Such trees as exist take on a distorted appearance, not one branch or twig managing to survive on the windward side of the trunk. It is a remark commonly heard that a tree has been bent by the constant action of the wind, but this is not true. Distortion is brought about by the continual lack of survival of all growth on one side. The distal ends of twigs are killed and the tree develops more and more a fuzziness of short annual shoots from the main stem. The influence of wind on the coastal region is further complicated by the spray which it may carry, for most broad-leaved plants object to a deposition of salt on their foliage. This is a subject we shall touch on later in the book.
North winds are relatively uncommon in the Highlands, but are recognized as bringers of snow in winter, snow which sets up its own train of events in natural history. A north wind in June or July means the best of sunny weather, but in August the north wind brings rain. East winds blow most regularly in spring, but gales from the south-east occur as well in the West Highlands. They are very cold for the district, as the south wind can be as well, for the air has come over a mountainous region where it must become chilled. The southeasters are dry winds and have a desiccating effect on the autumn herbage, sufficient to curtail the grazing season in some years. The south winds of summer mean a leaden sky and rain.
To conclude, the climate of the Scottish Highlands and Islands is rapidly changeable and far from uniform. The coastal climate is maritime or oceanic, but in the Central and Eastern Highlands it is more continental—more extreme temperatures, less wind, less rain and drier air. The meteorological tendency to drier air in the central region and the Dee Valley is further added to by the capacity of the ground to drain rapidly.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_3f79c5f4-a1a5-5573-8075-0730565f6e99)
RELIEF AND SCENERY
LET US look at a physical map of Scotland and allow ourselves to make a tour of the Highlands as observers of country rather than as naturalists making detailed studies of habitats. We shall then be able to see those habitats with eyes wider open for the comparative sense we shall have gained. It will be convenient to divide the Highlands into five zones to which we cannot fairly give definite boundaries, though the zones themselves are significant in natural history. The divisions are my own and do not carry the weight of the acceptance of a committee of biologists. I should call them:
1 The southern and eastern Highland fringe which is in effect a frontier zone.
2 The Central Highlands, which may be likened to a continental or alpine zone.
3 The Northern Highlands, a zone with sub-Arctic or boreal affinities.
4 The West Highlands south of Skye, which may be called the Atlantic or Lusitanian Zone.
5 The Outer Hebrides and islands of Canna, Coll, Tiree, and such small islands as the St. Kilda group, the Treshnish group, the Flannans, North Rona and Sula Sgeir; an oceanic zone.
THE SOUTHERN AND EASTERN HIGHLAND FRINGE
FIG. 4.—Generalized relief features of the Highlands By courtesy of the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain
This zone follows the line of the Highland Border Fault from Helensburgh almost to Stonehaven, and then turns at right angles north-westwards to include the middle Dee. The Lochnagar massif, 3,786 feet, may properly belong to the Central Highland zone, but it is a good pivotal point and its long southern slopes all drain into the eastern plain below the Highland Border Fault. From Lochnagar we can cross to Pitlochry and thence to Loch Tay and south-westwards to the head of Loch Lomond and to the sea at the head of Loch Fyne.
The land to the south and east of this zone is highly productive agricultural ground which shows some of the best farming in Scotland.
The zone itself is largely occupied by sheep farms which graze the Blackface breed, but the farther north-eastwards we go from Cowal to the Glens of Angus the better are the sheep, and the same hills on which they graze become easier and better grouse moors. That part of the zone east of the Tay Valley has a very high value as grouse moors for they are among the best in the kingdom. There are also deer forests in the area—west of Loch Lomond where cattle and sheep are also grazed, the Forest of Glenartney, south of Loch Earn and east of Loch Lubnaig, and Invermark Forest south of Lochnagar and in the upper reaches of the Glens of Angus.
The changing nature of this zone within historical time may be gathered from such names on the maps as Forest of Alyth and Forest of Clunie. There would be a large number of trees there hundreds of years ago, but the word forest would be given in the particular connotation of a large uncultivated tract, a usage of the word with which we are more familiar in the Highlands where a deer forest may be practically treeless. The Forests of Clunie and Alyth are now places of rearing farms for cattle and sheep, though, of course, there are still large areas of grouse moor. The golden eagle has gone from here, no longer tolerated by grouse-shooters and the farmers, and the country is not rough enough to give it sanctuary. But in Invermark Forest at the head of the Angus Glens the eagle is given protection. One might say that the red deer have gone from the forests of Clunie and Alyth, and so they have as full residents. This, however, is a frontier zone by our definition, and in winter and hard weather the stags come down the long glens of Glen Isla, Glen Fernait and Atholl. It is in this zone that there is so much outcry against the deer, which become such predatory bands on young corn crops, fields of turnips and potato clamps. A fair amount of coniferous timber is grown in this northeastern area of the frontier zone because the climate is fairly dry and the drainage good.
Dunkeld is one of the gateways to the Highlands proper, at the foot of Strathtay. From Dunkeld to Pitlochry we are in a valley made famous by an earlier Duke of Atholl in his zeal for planting. Larch became one of our most important conifers after the Duke had planted it so extensively during the 18th century. It is interesting to note, also, that it is in this afforested country that the new hybrid between the European and Japanese larch has occurred by a fortunate accident. The hybrid, with its hardiness and immunities, is expected to be a notable forester’s tree in the future. All this area and that already described carries a big stock of roe deer. Despite its unpopularity with the forester, the roe happily persists, apparently as strong as ever.
West of Dunkeld we are into Strath Bran, still timber country, grouse moors and rearing farms. The fauna of Highland hills are constantly pressing down into this zone and are as surely being scotched before the plain of Strathmore is reached. Peregrine falcons, wild cats, eagles, foxes, red deer—all these come through and rarely return. There are no high tops in this area until the head of Glen Almond where the summit of Ben Chonzie, 3,048 feet, dominates everything else in the district; yet there is big country here which the relative smoothness of the hill faces tends to emphasize. The streams have good brown trout and the valleys are always well wooded among the numerous farms. The bird population is rich and varied.
West again, we come into the Forest of Glenartney with its two sharp peaks of Ben Vorlich, 3,224 feet, and Stuc a’ Chroin, 3,189 feet, which are visible from Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh. Glenartney is the most southerly of the deer forests proper, and though the high country of the two peaks is very suitable for deer, the winter trek of the animals makes the forest harder and harder to maintain in an age when the voice of agriculture is clamant.
The country now is getting much wilder and the easily walked slopes of good heather are giving way to some bare rock faces, to wetter sedgy hills and birch woods rather than conifers. Such is the country either side of Loch Lubnaig where the Forestry Commission is changing the face of the hillsides. The varied scheme of plantings here can serve as a model to confound those who hold that forestry spoils scenery. The same kind of country exists in the Trossachs round Loch Katrine of tourist fame. A Highlander hesitates to call the Trossachs Highland but there is no doubt of the beauty of the scenery. Birch and oak woods line the shore of the loch and hold a good number of black grouse still.
We now come to Loch Lomond, beginning at the foot of Glen Falloch as a narrow and quite uninteresting loch. It becomes more impressive the farther south we go down its twenty-odd miles. The shores are fringed with birches and oaks, and on the west bank particularly there are some fine groups of deciduous trees. Spring and autumn in this region have a charm beyond that of many Highland areas—and autumn, be it known, is a time when Scotland is at her most magnificent. If Ben Lomond looks splendid seen across the loch from Tarbet or Luss, a still finer view can be obtained from the other side where there is no road except the transverse one from Loch Katrine to Inversnaid Lodge, which can be reached also from Aberfoyle. The view westwards from above Inversnaid includes a group of “Munros”
(#litres_trial_promo) draining to Loch Sloy—Ben Vorlich (another of the name) with its two peaks, and Ben Vane and Ben Ime. This is the scene of a hydro-electric project and a road is to be made into the area which will certainly allow more people to see the fine scenery than have been able heretofore. This group of hills is in the West of Scotland fair and square and has a high rainfall. The most southerly of the group is Ben Arthur (the Cobbler), 2,891 feet, where there is much bare rock and excellent climbing. At the foot of the sedgy slopes of this hill we are on the west coast at the head of Loch Long. The role of frontier zone is practically lost here, for there is not the rich agricultural land immediately to the south. There is water, and, as the foot of Loch Lomond is reached, the industrial area which is but an extension of Glasgow.
Glasgow is fortunate in its landowners to the north. On both sides of Loch Lomond fair access is given to all, and every attempt is made to preserve the natural woodland and the forest fauna. The Loch Lomond-Trossachs area has priority as a projected national park area. The area would link up with the National Forest Park already established by the Forestry Commission west of Arrochar, and which now includes the privately-given peninsula between Loch Goil and Loch Long. This extremely broken stretch of Highland country, ironically called Argyll’s Bowling Green, is within a few miles of the busy industrial Clyde. The establishment of a national park, and the faithful implementation of the Town and Country Planning Act which is now in force in Scotland, should ensure to Glasgow an area of pristine beauty with a rich natural history, much of which yet awaits patient investigation.
THE CENTRAL HIGHLAND ZONE
This area gives the nearest approach to continental and alpine conditions that we have in Scotland. The southern boundary may be made a line drawn from Lochnagar to the head of Loch Lomond, including the high hills on the north side of Loch Tay. The western boundary would be a line from Loch Lomond through Ben Nevis to Carn Eige and Mam Soul, thence almost due east across the Great Glen at a point just south of Urquhart Castle. This northern line would continue from that point to Tomintoul, one of the highest inhabited villages in Scotland, at 1,280 feet; and the line from Tomintoul to Lochnagar could well form the short eastern boundary. The south-western and north-western corners of this arbitrarily delimited zone are the least typical, in that they lose the plateau-like quality of the Central Highlands proper, but on reflection I should not like to include the peaks round the head of Glen Lyon in the West Highland zone, nor do I think the triangle of country north of the Great Glen may rightly be said to have the sub-arctic-heath complex of vegetation like that of the Northern Highlands. Between 80 and 90 per cent of the ground in this central zone is above the 1,000-foot contour. Arable farming is scarcely practised except in the narrow straths. The farms of Glen Moriston constitute one of the incongruities of the north-western corner of our area, much more so than those of Cromdale and Boat of Garten on the northern edge east of the Spey, for these latter are typical upland farms. The slopes of the hills are mainly of good heather and after 2,500 feet become alpine desert.
The Central Highland zone has its particular interest for naturalists who may be specialists in some branches. There is the botanical field of the high tops, among which Ben Lawers, 3,984 feet, has always held a special place. The schistose of which this hill is composed breaks down easily, and there are exposures of other rocks as well, providing soil which allows a greater variety of alpine plants to grow than on some other summits. The richness of Ben Lawers is also due, probably, to the likelihood of the summit escaping the last glaciation.
The Cairngorm region is of special interest to ornithologists wishing to study the snow bunting and dotterel. The ptarmigan (Plate XVIIb) is common there and the golden eagle (Plate XIIIa) enjoys practical sanctuary, for even sheep-farming is absent from much of the area. The Cairngorm tops are our most considerable arctic relic. The ancient pine forests at the eastern and north-western foot of the Cairngorms are also a relic of a past age and contain the Scottish crested tit (Plate XV) and the Scottish crossbill. The entomologist also finds these forests of special interest. The central Highland area contains some of the biggest deer forests in Scotland, such as Blackmount in Breadalbane of over 80,000 acres (Pl. XV, p. 108), the Forest of Mar, which is almost as large, and the wonderful deer country between Loch Ericht and Loch Laggan, which includes Ben Alder, 3,757 feet.
Our central zone holds the upper reaches of three large river systems—the Dee which flows eastwards from the Cairngorms and the Grampians; the Spey which rises from tiny Loch Spey in the Corrieyairick Forest north of the high top of Creag Meagaidh above Loch Laggan; and the Rivers Garry, Tummel and Tay flowing southwards, joining and continuing as the Tay outside the central alpine zone. The much shorter River Spean which flows westward from Loch Laggan has now disappeared because of the erection of a hydro-electric dam and aqueducts at the foot of Loch Laggan. The Spey, rising at 1,142 feet on the backbone of Scotland, runs 120 miles in a north-easterly direction to the sea in the Moray Firth. It gathers its waters from the Monaliadh hills, from the Grampians and the Cairngorms, the largest area of long-snow-lying country in the Highlands. The River Truim, the Spey’s first large tributary, runs through Badenoch, one of the barest parts of the Highlands. It rises near the Pass of Drumochter, 1,500 feet, which takes the main road from Perth to Inverness. Badenoch has the appearance of a devastated countryside; an appearance partly due to nature and partly to the destructive hand of man several hundred years ago. This area was fought over many a time and bands of broken men were burnt out of their retreats just as the last wolves were a century or two later. The rock is a dull grey and apt to break down into a shaley scree. To my mind, the Forests of Drumochter and Gaick, a little to the east, are the most depressing part of the Highlands. The hills are big humps without individuality, there are screes but not fine cliff faces, and trees are few and far between. Even the weather has a habit of being leaden. The practice of burning heather is always obvious in that no hill face seems to bear an unbroken dark green surface of untouched heather.
West of the road, in the upper Spey Valley region and south of Loch Laggan, the hills become sharper and more shapely and there is a good deal of natural birch, among which are many stands of coniferous timber which in no way spoil the landscape. The Spey and the Truim join above Newtonmore, and from there until the Spey leaves the central zone, the straths and the slopes to over 1,250 feet hold large stands of planted coniferous timbers. There is still plenty of natural birch and juniper scrub as far as Aviemore and beyond. We are in a very beautiful area which is one of the most popular holiday resorts in Scotland for those who like quiet, a mixture of woodland and high hill and a sharp healthy climate of low summer rainfall. At Aviemore the Valley of the Spey widens, and if the observer climbs the wooded hillock of Craigellachie south-west of the village, he will see the old Scots pine forests of Rothiemurchus (Plate 16) and Glenmore as the floor of a great basin formed by the Cairngorms and the little range of hills to the north which culminates in Meall a’ Bhuachaille, 2,654 feet. Loch Morlich (Plate 2) lies in the middle of the basin and its bright sandy shores at the eastern end are visible. The dark green of the timber stretches through the pass or bealach at the foot of Meall a’ Bhuachaille into the Forest of Abernethy (Plate 17). The old trees have suffered more heavily here and have been replaced by plantations of Scots pine, but Abernethy is still beautiful and the birch and juniper take away the grim formality of the solid stands of planted timber.
The Cairngorms, which form the heart and the most extreme alpine conditions of our central zone, are fairly easily reached from Aviemore by means of the track and the pass known as the Lairig Ghru. The Lairig splits the granite massif of the Cairngorms into two halves at a height of 2,750 feet, and is the most spectacular part of the Cairngorms seen from Aviemore or farther west of the Spey. Ben Macdhui, 4,296 feet (Plate 20), is on the east side and Braeriach and Cairntoul on the west side of the pass. The summit of the Lairig is also the county boundary between Inverness-shire and Aberdeenshire. Just south of the summit are the very small lochans known as the Pools of Dee. The water is extremely clear and probably originates from springs. This is the source of the Dee which in twelve miles becomes a considerable river at the Chest of Dee. By time the Linn of Dee is reached (the uppermost limit of salmon in the river) we are into forest again, mostly planted Scots pine until we get below Braemar, where Ballochbuie still holds a fine show of the old pines. These are part of the Royal property at Balmoral.
The Grampian Hills south of the Cairngorms give a sense of vastness. Ben Iurtharn, 3,424 feet; Glas Thulachan, 3,445 feet; and the tops of Beinn a’ Ghlo, 3,671 feet; all these and many another 3,000-footer can be easily climbed on a pony, and once on those clean, smooth summits the pony can be let out to a gallop, so different are they from the sharp peaks, the broken ground and the boggy approaches to the high hills of the West. This country is remote from everywhere and since, once there, it is difficult to get lower than 1,500 feet, there is a great exhilaration in movement through these hills. The snow lies long up here but in summer there is a wealth of excellent grazing for deer, sheep and cattle. I have found patches of beautiful brown soil as high as 1,800 feet. One of the best routes into the Cairngorms is up Glen Tilt from Blair Atholl, past the Falls of Tarf. It is a long and arduous defile or U-shaped glacial valley for most of the way until the Bynack Shieling is reached at 1,500 feet. After that there is the sense of height and space, and the high hills of the Cairngorms lie ahead in a much more picturesque group than when seen from the west. This time it is the noble Glen Dee which splits the massif rather than the sharp nick of the Lairig Ghru. Trees are few up here, though the narrow dens which cut down to the Tarf from Fealar and round about have plenty of small birches, and curiously enough there are a few well-grown spruces at the Bynack Shieling; out of which spruces one day I frightened a capercaillie (Plate XIc). He must have come out of the wooded area of the Dee below Derry Lodge, where this bird is relatively common. The Forest of Mar was one of the places where the caper was reintroduced (unsuccessfully) in the early 19th century.
THE NORTHERN HIGHLANDS, A ZONE OF SUB-ARCTIC AFFINITIES
The northern end of Drum Albyn and its coasts becomes definitely a harder country north of Loch Carron than the West Highland Atlantic zone. The large island of Skye, set athwart the Minch, has an undoubted effect of checking the flow of warm water of the North Atlantic Drift. The coasts of the North-West have several long sea lochs, but the coast as a whole is tighter-knit than the islands and coasts of the Atlantic zone which fans out from the Firth of Lorne into the Atlantic Ocean.
The rocks of the northern zone on the western side are mostly very hard, and poor in such minerals as make good soil; they are Lewisian gneiss, Torridonian sandstone and quartzite; these three have little either of calcium or of fine particles which will become clay and contribute to the soil picture. Furthermore, where the bed rock itself is not showing through (and often it is over 50 per cent of the landscape) the ground is covered with peat which has no bottom of shell sand or clay which, on disintegration or removal of the peat, might become productive soil. Sand dunes occur on the coast at only a few places such as Gairloch, Gruinard Bay, Achnahaird on the north coast of the Coigach peninsula, across Rhu Stoer and at Achmelvich, and at Sandwood Bay a few miles south of Cape Wrath. None of these are of shell sand.
It is a hard, rocky coast to which a multitude of short, rapid rivers run from Drum Albyn—the Laxford from Loch Stack and Loch Mor into Loch Laxford; the Inver from Loch Assynt into Enard Bay; the Kirkaig out of the lochs below Suilven; the Polly, the Kannaird, the Broom and the Dundonnell Rivers; the superb Gruinard River which is only six miles long on its run from Loch na Sheallag; the Little Gruinard, even shorter, coming from the Fionn Loch which is one of the most famous trout lochs in the North; and the River Ewe, only two miles long after it leaves Loch Maree, but very broad; the Kerry River running into Gairloch, famed for its pearls; and the Applecross River which drains much of the peninsula of that name. Most of these rivers are noted for salmon and sea trout, though some are curiously poor. As things stand at the moment the rivers of this region, so variable in their flow from day to day, make up in economic value for the poverty of the land for agricultural and pastoral purposes and for general lack of timber.
The boreal or sub-arctic affinities of the northern zone are most marked on the two geological formations already named, the gneiss and the sandstone. Each rock has its very distinctive form and each contributes to what is probably the wildest scenery in Scotland except for the small area of the Cuillin Hills of Skye (Plate IIIa). But here in the interplay of gneiss, sandstone and quartzite the naturalist may walk for a week or more and see no human habitation other than an occasional stalker’s cottage. So rough and wild is the country that habitations unconnected with sport are difficult to find away from the sea’s edge. The outcrop of limestone in the Assynt district allows the exception of the crofting townships of Elphin and Cnockan to which allusion was made in the first chapter.
The Lewisian gneiss of the mainland rises to greater heights in the general run of the country than it does in the Hebrides, except in Harris and at one place in South Uist. Also, it is not hidden under such a blanket of peat as in Lewis. The gneiss country of Sutherland and Ross is one of a myriad little hills of great steepness, with little glens running hither and thither among them. The lochans are seemingly countless and most of them have a floor of peat. The gneiss hills themselves are like rock buns, looking as if they had risen in some giant oven and set into their rough shapes. This ground holds up the water in pockets in the rock and allows the formation of cotton sedge bogs and such very shallow lochans as grow water lobelia and water lilies. When these lochans are near the sea and grow reeds the bird life is rich. Greenshanks (Plate XIIb) are common in the gneiss country—say one pair to 3,000 acres, which is quite twice as many as may be found on the adjoining Torridonian sandstone. Heather (Calluna) is not common on the gneiss; the complex is one of dwarf willow, sedge and poor grasses. Also, this type of vegetation does not appreciably alter in the altitudinal range of the gneiss. For example, I could find no major difference in sample patches in the Gruinard Forest at the foot of Carn nam Buailtean at 600 feet, and at the top of Creag Mheall Mor in the Fisherfield Forest at over 2,000 feet. The hills maintain over all their mottled pattern of green and grey, and when the snow is on the tops there is never the distinctive line at about 1,750 feet which is commonly seen on the Torridonian formation.
The gneiss is difficult country to walk through: by keeping to the little glens it is impossible to steer a straight course for any distance and no one would attempt to go in a straight line over the hills. On the upper gneiss country where many detours are necessary round rock faces and soft spots, a speed of one mile an hour is quite good going. It is also quite easy to lose one’s self, for these little round hills are all very much alike.
The crofting townships on the gneiss are strictly coastal. Their arable grounds (Plate 7b) are usually tiny patches of an acre or less in the hollows or in the less steep faces of the rocks. Loch Laxford, a sea loch, shows some typical low gneiss country with crofts at Foindlemore and Fanagmore.
The gneiss tends to get higher the farther it goes inland. A’ Mhaighdean (the maiden) reaches 2,850 feet above the Dubh Loch in Ross, 10–12 miles from the sea as the crow flies. It forms a high cliff face on this hill of exceptional grandeur, a rare thing for the formation on the mainland. Its sea cliffs are nowhere impressive here because they are never sheer or higher than a couple of hundred feet. Even the Torridonian, a formation which one might expect to make magnificent cliffs, does not provide these in any quantity at the sea’s edge. The island of Handa, near Scourie and opposite Fanagmore at the mouth of Loch Laxford, is a splendid exception. The Torridonian rock is stratified horizontally, so the vertical breaks make nesting ledges for sea birds such as guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes. There are sheer cliffs of nearly 400 feet on Handa, and in the little screes of earth among these, now covered with fescue and scurvy grass, there are large colonies of puffins and fulmar petrels. The white-tailed sea eagle nested on Handa until the second half of the 19th century. Handa is one of the few places on the Torridonian sandstone which provide true sea-bird cliffs. No other place on the formation can compare with it for numbers of auks, except perhaps Clo Mor, about four miles east of Cape Wrath, where there is a cliff of over 800 feet.
The splendour of the Torridonian is in the peaks it makes inland. Some are fantastic and others superb. There is only one Suilven and it is undoubtedly the most fantastic hill in Scotland (Plate 3b). It rises to 2,309 feet out of a rough sea of low gneiss. Seen from north and south it has a distinctive shape of a very steep frontal cliff and rounded top called Casteal Liath (the grey castle), then a dip and a lesser knob before a more gentle slope down to the east. But when seen from west or east the extreme thinness of the hill is apparent. Probably the Dolomites would be the nearest place where such an extraordinary shape of a hill could be seen. Suilven means the pillar which is a good name for the hill seen from the west. It is often likened to a sugar loaf, also. There are greyish-white quartzite boulders sprinkled on the top, yet there is a little alp of grass up there and an occasional bed of Rhacomitrium moss. The great terraces of Caisteal Liath itself are but thinly marked by such grasses and sedges as Festuca ovina forma vivipara and Luzula spicata as can send their roots far into the cracks.
One of the striking things about the Torridonian peaks of the far north-west is their isolation, caused by the vast denudation which has taken place, leaving these few hard cores of sedimentary rock overlying the wilderness of gneiss hillocks and innumerable lochans. The term hard core is here being used metaphorically and not geologically. North of Suilven and Loch Assynt is the massif of Quinag, five conical peaks capped with quartzite, with a fine rampart of cliff and scree on the west side, which is nearly three miles long. The massif is no higher than 2,653 feet, but how much more impressive is it than half a hundred three-thousand-footers in the Central Highlands! South of Suilven there is Cul Mor, 2,786 feet, surrounded on three sides by great precipices; and Stac Polly, 2,009 feet (Plate 4b and Plate 10) the narrow ridge of which is like one of those fairy castles of childhood tales perched on the top of steep slopes. Ben More Coigach rises to over 2,000 feet in under a mile from the sea as the crow flies. The air of this countryside with its lower rainfall is generally much clearer than farther south in the Highlands and adds to that sub-arctic quality which characterizes the area.
Before leaving this far northern corner, the ranges of Foinaven, 2,980 feet, and of Ben More Assynt, 3,273 feet, must be mentioned. The group culminating in Foinaven is without doubt the barest range in Scotland, and composed of that unyielding white rock, the Cambrian quartzite. The northern part is like a giant E, the crossbars being ridges peppered heavily with boulders which form screes again below the shoulders: the hollows of the E are fine corries on the slopes of which the snow bunting has bred. The southern part is a horseshoeshaped ridge of which Ben Arkle, 2,580 feet, is the western rampart. This hill of Cambrian quartzite with its banding of white scree may be viewed to perfection from the highroad on the shores of Loch Stack; but for the greatest glory of this range a six-mile trek must be made to reach the vast horseshoe corrie and Loch an Easain Uaine, the loch of the green falls. It is well to rest here awhile and realize that the pine marten is probably commoner in this neighbourhood than anywhere else in Britain, to remember the snow bunting up in the tumble of boulders and possibly see him feeding on the buds of Saxifraga oppositifolia. The alpine species of plant creep far down these bare hillsides and one wonders what there is here to recompense the deer for the energy used in attempting to graze these slopes. The boreal affinity of this range was further emphasized by the occurrence of alpine butterwort (Pinguicula alpina), which was found nowhere else in Britain but on the high tops of Sutherland and Ross; unfortunately this species may now be quite extinct, as it has not been found since 1900, according to Druce’s Comital Flora. The same authority puts 1794 as the last date on which this plant was found in Skye.
Ben More Assynt itself is a solid quartzite cap with igneous intrusions set upon a mass of Lewisian gneiss. There has been a series of geological overthrusts in the region, in which tumults areas of limestone have come to the surface. This limestone has affected the natural history of the whole region, causing a wealth of crustacean and other aquatic life on the waters affected by the limestone, differences in the temperature of the water of some streams which suddenly rise from the rock, allowing the formation of water-worn caves in which have gathered soil and bones of animals of earlier times. Such organic remains are rare in the Northern Highlands.
The comparatively low ground of all this northern region of the gneiss, so difficult of access and so plentifully strewn with lochs, is also a place where sub-arctic birch scrub (Plate IV) is common and there is a certain amount of hazel. There are large stretches of birch in Inverpolly Forest (Plate 4b) in the vicinity of Loch Sionnascaig, which is one of the most beautiful lochs in the whole Highlands. There are pristine birch-wooded islands in the loch where the grey lag goose bred not so long ago and where the pintail duck has bred recently. There is more birch round Lochinver and below the north face of Quinag, and many a stretch may be found on the hill far from the roads, in places which are almost unknown to the naturalist. Some day we may find the redwing building in these woods, for this bird has been heard singing here from time to time in April, and the redwing is essentially a native of the sub-arctic birch wood.
The eastern side of the extreme Northern Highlands is given up to extensive sheep-farming. The hills are of no great height and are of easy slope. The herbage is sweet and good. The largest sheep farms in Great Britain are here, some having upwards of 10,000 ewes. The breed kept is the Cheviot of the distinctive lustrous-woolled Sutherland type. The lambs are sold annually at the great sales at Lairg. No man was more responsible for the development of Cheviot sheep-farming in the North than Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, in the 1790’s. The influence of sheep-farming on the natural history has been profound and will be given special attention in a later chapter.
This far northern area has been treated at some length, because it is the most remote part of the Highlands and one of which detailed studies in natural history have been rare. It may be recommended as an exhilarating and fruitful field for exploration.
South of Loch Broom, the Torridonian hills are more thickly grouped and reach their highest peaks. Their spiry form and the high corries facing to the east are distinctive. The quality of herbage is generally poor and the terraces formed in the lower reaches of the Torridonian hold up the heavy rainfall so that it is often quite impossible to get about dryshod. How different is the nature of the ground from those smooth dry slopes of glacial sand and gravel which are such a marked feature of the Central Highlands! The differences brought about in the vegetational complex have not been sufficiently stressed by plant ecologists in the past. The ground has not been well walked through and explored as yet.
There are two high hills of the Torridonian which have north-eastern corries quite the most magnificent of their kind and few who have seen them both can decide which is the better. This in itself should show how similar are such groups of hills and the forces which moulded them. I allude to An Teallach of Dundonnell (Plate IIIb and Plate 4a), 3,485 feet, and Beinn Eighe, 3,456 feet, between Kinlochewe and Loch Torridon. Each of these hills has three corries facing NNW. to NE. Coire Mhic Fearchair is the most westerly of the corries of Beinn Eighe, and the Toll Lochan corrie of An Teallach is the easterly one of the range. Some of the buttresses in Coire Mhic Fearchair are exceptionally fine and the corrie makes an almost perfect horseshoe, but for myself I think I prefer the Toll Lochan corrie, for the cliff face at the head of the lochan is of greater depth and of superb architecture, nearly 1,800 feet of it.
Between An Teallach and another corried Torridonian peak, Beinn Dearg Mor, 2,934 feet, is the broad amphitheatre known as Strath na Sheallag, at the head of Loch na Sheallag, from which the Gruinard River runs. This strath is beloved of the deer, and though so remote it draws cattle, sheep and ponies to it from far away. Just as An Teallach has Beinn Dearg Mor as an outlier, so has Beinn Eighe her Beinn Dearg, 2,995 feet, almost a replica of its cousin of Strath na Sheallag. Liathach, 3,456 feet, Beinn Alligin, 3,232 feet, and Slioch, 3,217 feet, these are just three more of these splendid Torridonian peaks—clear of peat from 1,750 feet upwards and often topped with a white cap of quartzite boulders. The sudden change from wet peat-laden terraces to the upper slopes of bare rock, or thin covering of brash and alpine vegetation, results in a sharp snow line in winter which gives these hills a special seasonal beauty. This sudden cessation of the peat immediately allows a different flora, one of plants which can withstand droughts and sudden changes of humidity, and which prefer sweeter conditions than are possible on peat. Here and there among the alpine poa grass and viviparous sheep’s fescue are straggling plants of dwarf juniper, clinging close to the rock. Sea pink and thyme are also to be found on the gravel. Eagle, peregrine falcon and wild cat abound in this country, and as it is all deer forest and not grouse moors of any consequence, the eagle is allowed more sanctuary than it has been given farther south and east.
The glens of the Torridonian area of the North are often well wooded. They have been owned by people with a fair (or perhaps unfair!) measure of worldly riches, who have been able to spend a good deal of money on planting for amenity. Take Dundonnell for example, at the head of Little Loch Broom: the loch side is bare of trees and is given up to crofting townships, but soon after the head of the loch is reached one is into a fine wooded glen. There are a few hundred acres of Scots pine of greatly varying density stretching up the southern side to an altitude of 1,000 feet. There are alders, oaks, rowans, and hazels along the river bank, and some hundreds of acres of birch at the head of the glen reaching up to 1,500 feet. But all round the cultivated strath and the house which was built in 1769 there are signs of planting for beauty: limes, many fine beeches, sycamores, ashes, elms, oaks, chestnuts and big old geans; and until a few years ago there were many acres of fine larches on the north side. The wild life of such a glen is obviously profuse and varied. We have these men of a past age to thank for planting that which we now enjoy, just as we may blame those of a century earlier who were denuding the Highlands of timber.
Loch Maree is another place where there are some very fine woods, but here the sub-arctic quality of the northern zone is being lost and replaced by the complex of sub-alpine vegetation. Near where the Ewe River from Loch Maree goes into the sea in Loch Ewe there is a famous garden which grows a great variety of rhododendrons and azaleas and many sub-tropical plants and plants from Oceania. This is just another facet of the Highland paradox, the garden at Inverewe lying between the stark precipices of Ben Airidh Charr and the bare windswept slabs of Greenstone Point where the sea is never still. And if I may add one more touch of paradox, I saw a kingfisher on the rocks at Greenstone Point at the edge of the tide, one September day.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_31808313-a35d-5317-a253-4380d442e1aa)
RELIEF AND SCENERY (continued)
THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS OR ATLANTIC ZONE
SOUTH of Skye the coasts of the West Highlands fan out much more than to the north of that island. Indeed, there are several considerable islands reaching out into the Atlantic. The Outer Hebrides are not masking the influence of the Atlantic on this area as they do on the north coast of Skye. The influence of the Atlantic Ocean on this zone is both direct and inhibitory, and indirect and encouraging to a wealth of plant growth. The island of Islay, for example, changes character completely between its western and eastern halves. On the Atlantic side there is the lack of trees and shrubs and the presence of short sweet herbage salted by the spray from innumerable south-westerly gales, whereas there are beautiful gardens, palm trees and some forestry on the south and east sides. The Rhinns of Islay on the Atlantic coast are not heavily covered with peat as is a good deal of the eastern half. Islay is an island of many good arable farms, and it has several square miles of limestone country.
The waters of the North Atlantic Drift cast up on these Atlantic shores pieces of wood and beans of West Indian origin, and plants such as the pale butterwort (Pinguicula lusitanica), pygmy rush (Juncus pygmaeus) and the moss Myurium Hebridorum which occur again on British coasts only in the south-west, here turn up in fair numbers. The pale butterwort occurs in the bogs of Portugal and western Spain, and on the west coast of France; Myurium moss is found in the Azores, the Canaries and St. Helena as well as in our Outer Isles. Dwarf cicendia (Cicendia pusilla) has also turned up in this zone, though previously found in the British Isles only in the Channel Islands. More recently, Campbell and Wilmott (1946) have found another Lusitanian plant in Stornoway Castle park, namely Sibthorpia europaea. The work of Professor Heslop Harrison and his group from the University of Durham should be consulted. It is his opinion that these western cliff edges escaped the last glaciation and thus their Pleistocene flora was not exterminated. Others hold that the flora must have been introduced since then.
Jura is not so well served with the rich quality of vegetation we may find in Islay or even in small Colonsay and in Mull. It is composed of quartzite, which is poor stuff. Jura is also heavily covered with peat and suffers in consequence. A thick blanket of peat has a very great depressing effect on the variety of vegetation and in limiting the growth of deciduous trees. Jura is an island of high hills. The Paps rise to 2,571 feet and are quite rough going. It was on these hills that Dr. Walker of Edinburgh in 1812 conducted his classic experiment on the differential boiling-point of water at sea level and at the top of the Paps. Jura has a very small population of human beings on its nearly 90,000 acres. The island is so poor that its long history of being a deer forest will probably continue. In mythological literature Jura appears as being uninhabited and a place where heroes went a-hunting. It was on Jura during the latter part of the 19th century that Henry Evans conducted careful studies on the red deer. His were the first researches of a scientific character on Scottish red deer, yet he never set out to be more than a scientific amateur.
The island of Scarba, of about 4,500 acres, high and rocky, lies north of Jura. The Gulf of Corrievreckan is in the narrow sound between the two islands. This celebrated whirlpool and overfalls is caused by the strong tide from the Atlantic being funnelled through a strait, the floor of which is extremely uneven. The sound is quiet at the slack of the tide but is dangerous to small craft when the tide is running. The largest whirlpool is on the Scarba side of the sound, but there is a spectacular backwash on to the Jura coast which used to be reckoned very dangerous in the days of sailing boats. The maximum current is probably about 8
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knots which is very fast for a large bulk of water. No herring drifter or ordinary motor fishing-boat could hope to make headway against such a current, for their maximum speed in calm water is not more than 10 knots.
This West Highland zone has what the North Minch lacks, a number of sizable islands which are not big enough to lose their oceanic quality, and not so small that they are utterly windswept. The islands of Colonsay and Oronsay, west of Jura, are an excellent example of islands which have the best of almost all worlds. Naturalists may be glad that Colonsay is in the possession of one who recognizes its value and beauty in the natural history of the West. Most of the island is of Torridonian sandstone of a different complex from that farther north, but there are overlays here and there of limestone and its derivative soil, and the 100-foot beaches are another place of good soil. There are sand dunes, cliffs and rocky beaches where several rare maritime plants are to be found. There are fresh-water lochs with water lilies and the royal fern in profusion. Natural woods of birch, oak, aspen, rowan, hazel, willow and holly also occur, and beech has been planted. The sight of these, so near the Atlantic and its gales, may be imagined from this short passage from Loder’s exhaustive book:
“The woods are being rejuvenated by young plantations of Birch and Aspen, which are springing up naturally and contending for supremacy with an annual luxuriant growth of bracken. The Woodbine twines over the trees, and festoons along the edges of the numerous rocky gullies that cut up these slopes. Ivy has climbed up and formed pretty evergreens of the more stunted of the forest trees. The Prickly-Toothed Buckler Fern grows in profusion, and the little Filmy Fern is also to be seen under mossy banks.”
There has been considerable planting of coniferous and deciduous trees for amenity in this Atlantic island so that it now presents a luxuriant and well-wooded aspect in the neighbourhood of the house. But in gazing on these woods now and noting Colonsay’s wealth of small birds, we should remember the effort entailed in beginning to establish these conditions. Loder says:
“When planting in the island first began, the trees made so little headway that it was considered amply satisfactory if they formed good cover. For the first ten years or so they made little progress, and many places had to be planted over and over again. Protection from animals and weather was provided in the first instance by dry-stone dykes, 5 feet high. Alder and Sea Buckthorn were planted along the most exposed edges. Alders and various species of Poplar were used in wet situations but the poplars did not last well, and were liable to be blown over. It was only as the trees made shelter for each other that they began to show any vigorous growth. Indigenous species such as Birch, Oak and Rowan, have sprung up on hilly ground where the planted trees failed to establish themselves.”
The trunks of trees in these Atlantic places tend to become covered with lichens such as Parmelia perlata and Usnea barbata, and mosses such as Eurhynchium myosucoides (on birch), Ulota phyllantha, Hypnum cupressiforme and Brachythecium rutabulum. These trees seem to be much more affected by the humid climate than such exotics as Escallonia, Ceanothus, Verbena and Mimosa (Acacia) which grow luxuriantly. This is one aspect of Colonsay, but there are also its sedgy and heathery moors like those of many another island of the West, and at the southern tip, where the Atlantic has full play over the Torridonian and mudstone slabs gently rising from the sea to make platforms and pools near the tide level, the Atlantic grey seal breeds in fair numbers. Elsewhere, on the cliffs, kittiwakes, razorbills and guillemots breed; and there are three species of tern, arctic, common and little, breeding on the island.
Colonsay and Oronsay together might well be looked upon as an epitome of the West Highland world in its full range and consequences of Atlantic exposure and sheltered mildness.
Farther to the north-west are Coll and Tiree, two more islands which receive practically the full force of the Atlantic, but which show decided differences in natural history. Tiree is very low indeed. The rocky portion of the island, of Lewisian gneiss, reaches its highest point in Ben Hynish, 460 feet, but by far the greater part of Tiree (Plate 25) is but a few feet above sea level and composed of blown shell sand resting on a platform of gneiss. The island is one of good-sized arable crofts and is so far different from most West Highland districts that it has a Clydesdale horse-breeding society of its own. The sandy pastures of Tiree are deficient in cobalt but recent researches in mineral nutrition of animals have allowed the farmers of Tiree to dress the land with as little as 2 lbs. an acre of a cobalt salt and prevent the onset of pine in sheep. The island has particular interest for the birdwatcher: first, it is on a migration route and gets both summer and winter visitors which would not be seen anywhere in the North Minch, and its rich arable land also attracts a large number and variety of birds. Loch Vasapol of Tiree is a famous place for various duck. Tufted duck breed there and the gadwall is found there in winter though so uncommon elsewhere in the West. The vast beaches encourage certain waders, including the bar-tailed godwit, sanderling and greenshank. In the past the snipe-shooting was reckoned the best in Europe. Happily, there is less of it now.
Glacial action in Tiree is shown by the Ringing Stone, a huge rounded boulder of augite which probably came to rest there after a journey in the ice from Rum. The stone is marked by many ringed hollows on its surface.
The island of Coll, once one is within it, reminds one of the low gneiss country of Sutherland. Here the innumerable little hills are still smaller than in Sutherland and not so steep, none rising above 339 feet. The island presents a uniform rocky appearance when seen from a distance on the east side. On the west side of Coll are miles of shell-sand dunes, a feature which tends to be characteristic of many of the islands which meet the full force of the Atlantic and are low enough to have allowed the sand preliminary lodgment. The interior of Coll is just peat where it is not bare gneiss, yet with its western pastures it has always had the reputation of being a good place for cheese and sound dairy cattle. This island is important for the student, of distribution of plants in relation to the last glaciation and associated changed ocean levels.
The low, sandy islet of Gunna lies between Coll and Tiree. It is a great place for Sandwich, common and arctic terns and I believe the little tern nests there too. Such burrowers as the sheld-duck are plentiful, of course. Barnacle and grey lag geese are common in winter.
The small group of tertiary basalt islands known as the Treshnish Isles lie between Coll and Mull. The most southerly one has a rounded cone of an old volcano, 284 feet high, which gives the island the name of Dutchman’s Cap (Plate Va). The middle island of the group, Lunga, also has a volcanic mound rising to 337 feet, but the other small islands are all flat-topped with sheer sides of amorphous basalt resting on a platform of lava. This platform is of great importance in the natural history of the Inner Hebrides because it makes a breeding ground for the Atlantic grey seal. The Treshnish group, especially the Harp Rock of Lunga (Plate XIXa), is a nesting place of kittiwakes and auks and fulmars. Storm petrels nest in the Treshnish also, and the Manx shearwater on Lunga at least. The quality of grass on these islands is excellent and attracts a vast flock of barnacle geese in winter. The green rich grass of the islands is reflected again in the presence of large mixed flocks of starlings and peewits. In winter-time hundreds of blackbirds and a good many thrushes live on the Treshnish group. Lunga, being infested with thousands of rabbits, has a stock of seven buzzards.
The Cruachan of Lunga will be a good place to rest for a few moments and look at the topography of Mull, that very interesting member of the Inner Hebrides, Mull of the Mountains as the Gael calls it. The eye is first struck by the shapely peak of Ben More, 3,169 feet. This is the highest point reached by the tertiary basalt in Scotland. The cone itself is the result of great weathering, and the various beds of this amorphous lava are evident now in the truncated edges of the lower slopes of the hill. For sheer hard going, the descent from the summit to Loch Scridain takes a lot of beating, for the traveller is constantly having to make his way round these faces of rock which are not readily obvious to him as he comes down the hill. The terraced quality of Mull is obvious in a large part of Loch Scridain, the terraces being exactly the same height on either side. The peninsula between Loch Scridain and Loch na Keal reaches on the north side a stretch of some miles of very fine cliffs with sweeping talus slopes at their foot. The cliffs of Balmeanach are to my mind one of the striking features of Mull. The 1,600-foot basalt cliffs have trapped the cretaceous sandstone layer beneath them. The cretaceous sandstone—the local representative of the chalk—may be found in a narrow stratum just above sea level. These cliffs are difficult to explore and remain largely unexplored. Down below, the small island of Inchkenneth, the burial place of old Scottish kings and chieftains, is also composed of low strata of this cretaceous sandstone. If there is anywhere where chimneys must have cowls it is on Inchkenneth, for the down draughts from the great cliffs in a south wind are tremendous. Slates have to be specially cemented on the roofs. Corn and hay stacks suffer badly in this abnormal situation.
The whole of the north end of Mull consists of green even terraces with occasional gullies. The islands of Ulva and Gometra are similarly terraced flat cones with occasional gullies. The ground is porous and does not form basins for freshwater lochs; peat is absent. Bracken grows rampant here; indeed, Ulva is almost a museum piece for showing what luxuriant growth bracken can make in the Highlands. On the terraces, only the tips of the horns of Highland cattle can be seen above the fronds, but in the gullies the bracken tries to reach the same height as the plants on the terraces and may grow to a height of 12–15 feet. Trees of many kinds grow well in the sheltered parts of Mull on this soil from the volcanic rock. Just as trees were impossible on the tertiary basalt cliffs of Balmeanach and on Inchkenneth, they reach extraordinary luxuriance and beauty where the calcareous cretaceous sandstone appears again round the edge of Carsaig Bay on the south coast of Mull. This pocket will well repay a visit from the botanist and, I should imagine, from the entomologist. The cliffs to the west of Carsaig are by no means as impressive as at Gribun, but in their face there is to be seen a fine fossil tree fern first brought to the notice of geologists and naturalists by Dr. Macculloch in the early 19th century (Macculloch, 1824). Delicately coloured crystals are also to be found in these cliffs of the south coast.
The south-east end of Mull is dominated by bosses of gabbro called Sgurr Bhuidhe and Creach Bheinn (2,352 and 2,344 feet). From them we may look down on the north side to the long, bare, impressive valley of Glen More and on the south to the tree-lined waters of Loch Uisge and Loch Spelve. The southern peninsula of Laggan, formed by Loch Buie and Loch Spelve and almost made an island by Loch Uisge, reaches nowhere to more than 1,250 feet, but it is extremely rough and rocky, with plenty of scrub birch. Few people have walked through that ground which for many years now has been kept as a small and very private deer forest of 5,000 acres.
The islands of Muck and Canna are both of tertiary basalt on an erosion platform at tide level of lava that looks like clinker. Their soil is so good and their position in the Atlantic so favoured that these islands can grow what are probably the earliest potatoes in Scotland, i.e., May 31. The sheep of these islands do extremely well and come to the mainland in such good order that mainland buyers are hesitant to buy the lambs because they know they have nothing so good to offer them to keep them growing. The wealth of species of insects, molluscs and other invertebrates on these tertiary basalt islands is much greater than would be found on those of the Torridonian or gneiss formations, even though the basalt does not tend to allow lochans to form. The Glasgow University Expedition to Canna in 1936 published a full report of their extensive finds. Muck and Canna both offer the right kind of cliffs for sea birds, and Canna is also a breeding station for the Manx shearwater.
The island of Eigg (Plate 5) is a big shearwater station, the birds nesting well up towards the Sgurr, 1,280 feet. The Sgurr is the most obvious physical feature of Eigg and by far the island’s most interesting natural phenomenon. It is a geological curiosity which has shed light on the geology of other areas far distant. The late Sir Archibald Geikie solved the riddle which Hugh Miller answered unknowingly at an earlier date. The Sgurr itself is of pitchstone, resting on a thin river bed of conglomerate which contains fossil pieces of driftwood from some far distant time. Beneath this is the tertiary basalt again. The pitchstone shows columnar jointing in places, a character which is still more strongly marked on Oidhsgeir, 18 miles away to WNW. This low islet of pitchstone is considered to be part of the same sheet as the Sgurr of Eigg. There is one other feature of Eigg deriving from its geology which should be mentioned here—the musical sands of Camus Sgiotag, a small bay on the north side of the island. These sands are of partially rounded quartz grains of similar size. If the sand is dry a shrill sound is heard as one walks over it.
To return for a moment to the few acres of Oidhsgeir, an islet which does not reach higher than 38 feet above sea level. Here on the top of the pitchstone columns which are 8 inches or so across the top are found the nests of kittiwakes in the season. There are also great numbers of common and arctic terns and eider ducks. Harvie-Brown, visiting the islet several times in the ’80’s and early ’90’s of last century found teal breeding and was convinced that the pintail duck had nested there also. This phenomenon of a small islet in the open sea gathering to it an immense number of living things for the purpose of their reproduction is one to which we shall return in a later chapter on the oceanic island. The deep-cut channels among the pitchstone columns are also a playground for the Atlantic seal. One channel on the south side runs up into a pool where a boat may lie in perfect safety. Many are the occasions when lobster fishers and venturers in small boats have been glad of the quiet pool of Oidhsgeir. What a strange feeling it is to be lying snug in such a place with the mighty ocean pounding but a few yards away and the spray flying over!
The island of Rum, with its three rock types of gabbro, Torridonian and granite, is for the most part a closed book to naturalists. We may hope this unfortunate period of its history is drawing to a close and that it may yet have a future as a priceless wild-life reserve. There are red deer and wild cats on Rum, there are otters round the shores and on the burns, and such species as badgers and roe deer could be introduced if introductions were thought desirable. Some of the finest kittiwake cliffs in the kingdom are to be seen on Rum, and the Manx shearwater nests in holes high up the 2,600-foot hills. The golden eagle is there still, though the sea eagle disappeared during the second half of the 19th century. Given the chance, we may expect the chough to return to Rum.
Skye may be looked upon as the northern outpost of the Lusitanian zone. It has suffered human depopulation like many another Highland area, but Skye is still one of the most heavily crofted areas of the West. Preservation of game has practically ceased and almost all the hill ground is now crofters’ grazing. Topographically, Skye is magnificent, with its Cuillins and its Quirang, but from the point of view of wild life it is somewhat disappointing. The whole area facing the Minch is faunistically poor, as was pointed out by Harvie-Brown fifty years ago.
The island of Raasay, however, between Skye and the mainland, has a surprisingly rich variety of small birds, doubtless as a result of the woods and the large amount of park-like ground which is of Liassic origin. Personally, I should say that the Lepidoptera of Skye and Raasay would repay close scrutiny, not only from the point of view of numbers of species, but from the areas of distribution. Heslop Harrison and his group have already made fruitful researches in this direction. Raasay, like Mull, has its own sub-species of bank vole (Clethrionomys = Evotymys).
The islands of the Atlantic zone are by far the most interesting part. The mainland coasts are often hidden and tend to lose character. But the country bordering the long sea lochs is of exceptional beauty and contains some habitats—such as the indigenous oak woods—which are almost unique in Scottish natural history. To walk the length of Loch Sunart, ten miles out of the twenty through these oak woods, in the fine weather of June is an aesthetic experience, if only for the sight of the redstarts which are here in great numbers. The scenery of the distance is as beautiful as the redstart among the oaks and hazels near at hand. Perhaps the better way is to travel eastwards from Kilchoan and Ardnamurchan Point where the quality of ocean is apparent as on the islands. Sanna Bay on the northward tip of Ardnamurchan is one of the most beautiful shell-sand bays of the West, but it is rarely visited because of its remoteness. East of Glenborrodale the sense of sea is lost and we are in the woods with the loch below us. The peak of Ben Resipol, 2,777 feet, dominates the landscape and is most shapely when seen from this airt. The traveller can hardly miss seeing Ben Iadain, 1,873 feet, and on the other side of the loch in Morvern. It is a little cap of tertiary basalt perched on the Moine schist, but between the two is a very narrow band of chalk. The sight of this little hill cannot fail to impress one with the immense amount of denudation which must have taken place to remove this molten layer of amorphous volcanic rock from so much of this countryside.
Though the oceanic birds such as kittiwakes and auks are lost as one moves up these long sea lochs, it is surprising how many sea birds are to be found breeding in the season. Arctic terns, eider ducks, herring gulls and mergansers—all are here in numbers. And where there are shallow shores and estuaries there are parties of curlews, oystercatchers and ringed plovers. The hillsides above these long sea lochs are almost devoid of heather. The vegetational complex is one of various species of sedge, a few grasses such as flying bent and mat grass, and bog myrtle and deer’s hair sedge. Heather will appear at the edge of a gulley perhaps where the drainage is good. From a distance the most obvious plant may be bracken—great sheets of it, darker green in summer than the herbage and red in winter.
The ecology of the long sea lochs and their intertidal zones is a subject of great interest for those who have the techniques to follow such studies. The gradual increase in salinity from head to foot of the loch, the diurnal variation caused by the tide, the spasmodic variations caused by spates and droughts, the currents formed, and their effects on the life of the waters, still remain to be worked out in detail. Space will not allow of individual description of all the narrow and long sea lochs from Loch Fyne to Loch Alsh: each one has its similarities and distinctions, and certainly each should be visited by the naturalist who is also keen on good country. Most of these narrow lochs have high hills rising from their shores, which means that their south side loses the sun for four months in late autumn and winter. Loch Hourn is particularly sombre in winter because the hills of Knoydart, which reach to 3,343 feet, seem to tower above the loch. Loch Nevis, on the other hand, is sheltered from the north by these same hills, and the North Morar hills to the south of this wider loch do not rise above 1,480 feet. Inverie, therefore, in its sheltered bay on the north side of Loch Nevis, is one of the kindest places in the West Highlands, despite the high rainfall. Indeed, the West Coast is full of these pockets of kindly shelter allowing luxuriant growth. Many of the policies of the large houses have magnificent specimen trees which have grown within a hundred years or so to a size which would have been impossible in a large part of England.
When these sea lochs narrow at their mouth there is a diurnal tide race of considerable force. That at the Corran Narrows of Loch Linnhe runs at 8 knots at ebb and flow, but that at Connel Ferry on Loch Etive is very much more than this and is quite impassable at half tide. When the tide begins to flow here there is the extraordinary sight of a waterfall in reverse, made by the inrush of sea water.
This section may be concluded with mention of the fine piece of country round the shores of Loch Etive (Plate Vb) and up to Glen Coe (Plate 6). Ben Cruachan, 3,680 feet, is one of the landmarks of the Highlands. Cruachan and Ben Starav, 3,541 feet, are of granite and lie either side of Glen Kinglass which runs from the east bank of Loch Etive. There is happily no road through this glen and it is therefore almost untouched. The sides are lightly wooded; the river is of that clarity which is common in waters coming off granite, and as one climbs past the trees and by numerous falls the Forest of Blackmount is reached. This great high place has lost all western character which was expressed at the foot of Glen Kinglass. Blackmount has always been deer forest. Its swan song is that charming book by the late Marchioness of Breadalbane, The High Tops of Blackmount. You may object to all that this great lady stood for, but if you have a fine taste for country and appreciate writing which conveys the atmosphere of particular country you should read her book.
If one makes a cross-country trek from the heart of Blackmount to the head of Glen Etive, a country of high, spiry peaks is reached. What is more, it belongs to the nation. The Royal Forest of Dalness, Buachaille Etive, Bidean nam Bian, and some of the best climbing ground in Scotland is included, and it is probable that adjacent areas will also come under state ownership before long. The botanical and geological interest of the area is considerable, but the student of animal life will find it rather bare. Once more, at the head of Glen Coe we are on the border of our zone. As we look eastwards across the dreich Moor of Rannoch (Plate VIa) it is into Central Highland country.
THE OUTER HEBRIDES OR OCEANIC ZONE
This is the most westerly portion of Scotland, the seventh degree of West Longitude passing down through the middle of this long range of islands which effectually shields the northern half of the West Highland coast. If we study a population map we see that the greater part of the people on the Long Island, as the whole group is called, are fairly densely packed on to the western fringe. Some more dense places are also found on the extreme east of Lewis, as on the Eye Peninsula or Point as it is always called in Lewis. By merely looking at a map one might ask why the people are so densely grouped on the west side where harbours are fewer and where the force of the Atlantic Ocean is unbroken. The very fact of human density of population is surprising to anybody accustomed to the alarming rate of depopulation on the mainland shore of the West Highlands. The Hebridean has a love of home which is unconquerable. There he has remained through thick and thin, sticking to his fringe which is between the mighty ocean and the deadening peat bog of the interior.
The half-million and more acres of the Outer Isles mean nothing in relation to the human population which lives there because to a large extent the interior is just as uninhabitable as the ocean. The people being confined to the coastal fringe live what might be called an open urban existence without town planning.
The overpowering reason for the human species being confined to this fringe is that here the awful blanket of peat ends and the ocean has thrown up an immense weight of shell sand. As the dunes have stabilized through the millennia and the stiff marram grass has given way to kinder herbage, a light lime-rich soil has formed. There are miles and miles of the white sand on the Atlantic shore, and above it the undulating machair (Plate XIXb) of sweet grass on which are reared great numbers of Highland and cross cattle. Flocks of barnacle geese come to the machair in winter and add to the humus content of the sandy soil. The prevailing south-westerlies continue to blow winter and summer, year after year, century after century. The tangle from the shallows of the ocean, the various Laminarias of the marine botanist, is torn from its bed and washed up on the beaches. Man comes down with his ponies and carts and creels and takes up some of it to spread on ploughed portions of the machair. All these things are helping to make soil, and the sand itself in these gales, especially if the winds are dry, is being blown up towards the blanket of peat which overlies the archaean gneiss of the Hebrides. The sand sweetens the peat, causes its barren organic matter to be unlocked and become fruitful of herbage for man’s beasts. Their dung still further ameliorates the peat. Such is the constant process, in which the storm is a necessary and beneficent factor in allowing and maintaining fertility. But once the coastal strip is crossed the peat reigns supreme. Its blanket must have increased about ten feet since early man came to the Outer Isles, for only the tops of the fine Megalithic stones at Callernish, Lewis, were showing when Sir James Mathieson of the Lews undertook their excavation. The landscape in the bog is shortly described—a low undulating plateau of peat, bare grey rock of gnarled shape, and thousands of small and large lochans of brown acid water. If we wander through these areas of peat we shall come upon drier knolls where the rock comes to the surface or is not far beneath, and here we shall find turf and greenness for a space. The shielings of Lewis have been and still are here. They are the summer dwellings of a pastoral people taking advantage, for their cattle and sheep, of the short spell when the peat grows its thin crop of sedge and drawmoss. The people lived on the little knolls as on islands, bringing their cattle up to them twice a day for the milking; throwing out their household waste—little that it was—and adding their own quota of dung and urine. The shieling life is mostly gone but the green knollies in the sea of rock and peat remain.
We may digress at this point to consider the nature of peat, this substance which covers a million and a half acres of the Highlands and Islands and the existence of which is a most important factor in the natural history of the area and of the scenery. A study of the peat is interesting not only for what it grows and harbours now, but for the history to be deduced from a deep profile of it. Peat forms under the influence of certain definite conditions and their consequences: the first requirements are high precipitation and a general coldness of atmosphere in the growing season sufficient to inhibit bacterial activity in the waterlogged soil, but not cold enough to prevent growth of certain plants. A vegetational complex of sour bog plants, such as sphagnum moss (Plate 22b), sedges of various kinds and cross-leaved heather, soon occupies the ground to the exclusion of all those plants which need a well aerated soil and a supply of basic compounds. The rain impoverishes the original soil by washing out plant foods and then, by creating waterlogged and therefore anaerobic conditions, prevents the action of normal soil bacteria in breaking down the dead vegetation into humus. Such necessary decomposition does not keep pace with vegetative production by the plants, so that a gradually thickening layer of peat forms. The peat, thus composed of organic matter without lime, is highly acid in character, which is a still further check to bacterial action. Even the run-off water from the poor rocks such as gneiss and Torridonian is charged with unneutralized carbonic acid. With compaction and age, the peat becomes colloidal in texture, a fact of much influence in the behaviour of peat in holding water or being dried. The normal water content of peat as it lies in the bog is as high as 93.5 per cent.
Peat varies in consistency from being highly fibrous to the state of a black amorphous substance, depending on age and the type of vegetation. The Highland crofter is well aware of these details and his methods of winning peat for fuel vary from place to place. Cottonsedge peat is tough and fibrous and can be “footed” (i.e. set up on end to dry in pyramids of four bricks) and handled later with very little loss. Lower, older, amorphous peat is very brittle and cannot be set up.
The ages of the peat deposits have been tentatively fixed as beginning about 7000 B.C. at the close of the Boreal period. The warmish dry climate which grew forests of pine, birch and hazel now became warmish and wet, bringing about destruction of the scrub hazel vegetation by moss. The Atlantic period closed between 5000 and 4000 B.C. and a cooler and somewhat drier sub-Boreal period set in with a rapid development of peat. This continued until near our era which may be termed cold and wet and sub-Atlantic. The peat to-day is still making in some places as on the main bog of Lewis, and receding in others, as in parts east of the Cairngorms where the stumps of forest trees are coming forth as the peat crumbles away. Continual burning on western hills is probably having more influence than we know in checking or denuding the peat which is the only cover the rocks have, but in Lewis there is very little burning, the slopes are gentle and the succession of blanket bog is not being much disturbed, except by cutting for fuel.
The colours of the Atlantic coast are vivid blues and greens and the bright cream of sands. Inland, sombre colours are paramount and the lochans do not reflect the colour of the sky from their dark depths as does the sea above its floor of white sand. But the Hebrides are not all a dark plateau. The southern end of Lewis (Plate VII) and most of Harris are hilly. The Forest of Harris gives us rough going as anywhere in the Highlands and the Clisham rises to a fine peak of 2,622 feet. The red deer which live in these fastnesses are small, but have very well-shaped heads. The pine marten was also to be found there until recently. Its very wildness is the best protection this piece of country has. The lower deer forests of Park and Morsgail are fairly heavily poached of their deer, in an island of such heavy human population.
The Hebridean burns a lot of peat. His peat stacks are far larger than those of the mainland. By cutting peats he is doing two jobs—providing the wherewithal for comfort at the fire, and removing some of the great pervading blanket. He does not come upon bed rock at the foot of the peat banks but on to a layer of boulder clay which, when mixed with the top thin layer of sedge and peat, will shortly turn into fairly good soil providing much better grazing than anything from the top of the peat. The boulder clay came there by glacial action before the peat was laid down. Our Lewisman makes new ground this way and there is no doubt that if the modern mechanical tools such as the scraper and bulldozer were brought into operation on what is commonly called the skinned land, the agricultural scientist could make much good land in Lewis without attempting to conquer the upper layer of the peat.
As might be expected, the bird life of the interior of the Outer Hebrides is poor in variety and scanty, the nesting grey lag geese and red-necked phalarope (Plate XXXIIa) being probably the most interesting members. The geese feed on the crofting ground and on the machair but return into the maze of the interior to nest. The coasts are rich in sea birds, ducks and waders.
The Outer Hebrides are often described as being treeless, but the term is relative. The people who write about them are usually those who have a considerable experience of trees and tend to take them for granted. The Outer Hebrides are neither treeless, nor need they continue to be so desperately short of trees as they are. The grounds of Stornoway Castle on the east side of Lewis are famous. There are hundreds of acres of trees here, mostly conifers, but with a fair sprinkling of hardwoods and deciduous trees. These are Lady Mathieson’s legacy to the Hebrides. Indeed, it needed courage to start tree-planting from scratch. She planted another piece with larch and other conifers half-way across Lewis, near Achmore, and these made good trees, but were blown down by a terrific gale on March 16, 1921. There are 90-year-old Corsican pines of hers at the head of Little Loch Roag, growing quite straight to 35 feet high. There is another plantation of deciduous and coniferous trees at Grimersta on the Atlantic coast of Lewis. Another plantation of conifers sheltering a house, Scalisgro, on the east side of Little Loch Roag, is less than twenty-five years old, and twelve years ago several acres of conifers were planted in Glen Valtos in the Uig district of Lewis. Sycamores are the great standby of a tree lover on an ocean coast. Several good ones are to be seen at Tarbert, Harris. And at Borve on the west side of Harris there are several acres of stunted mountain pines. More trees are to be found about Ben More Lodge in South Uist, and there are a few more in the north glen of Barra. Heslop Harrison has recently drawn attention to the birch wood, complete with bluebells and wood sorrel, on the slopes of the Allt Vollagair, South Uist. As has been mentioned already, many of the islands in the Lewis lochs are covered with dwarf rowans. That the Outer Hebrides were once a wooded area may be deduced on archaeological grounds as well as on the living relics. Baden-Powell and Elton (1936–37) excavated an Iron-Age midden at Galson on the north-west coast of Lewis. They found bones of wild cat and blackbird among the refuse, both creatures of woodland and savannah. The age of the midden was reckoned at 1,500 years or thereabouts.
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 5
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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 2
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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 (#ulink_b3cf913d-6e06-5e0d-af39-c0c44520f616)
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.
The end of the rising of 1745 meant an end of internecine warfare among the clans, which in turn favoured the survival of more men. The human population of the Highlands rose considerably during the second half of the 18th century, a fact we know as a result of Dr. Alexander Webster’s industrious work in effecting a census in 1755. Yet the extension of sheep-farming on the ranching system of the Southern Uplands meant a way of life in which fewer men were needed; also, the new sheep farms needed the crofting ground of the glens for winter pasture. The Highland gentry at this time varied greatly in achievement of the aristocratic ideal. Some had little thought at all for the clansfolk in the glens now that they had no further military significance, and others, finding themselves drawn into English metropolitan life, needed ready money—and a lot of it. Whether they were sorry or not to see their forests go in the space of a few years, it is unlikely that they considered with anything but satisfaction the new and profitable use to which it was now possible to put their land. The flockmasters offered high rents which the new clean ground amply repaid.
The old sheep of the West Highlands and Islands were akin to the present Shetland breed, but apparently they were never very numerous. The sheep now coming north with the Border men were Blackfaces which had been bred there since the 16th-17th centuries. The Scottish Blackface (Plate 8), now so common on Highland hills and through the Islands, should not be thought of as indigenous. Its origin is in the Southern Uplands; before that the north of England; before that the Pyrenees (where a prototype may be seen to-day) and possibly before that somewhere in Central Asia. The sheep were crossing the Highland Line into Dumbartonshire before 1760; by 1790 the occupation was complete in most of Argyll and in Perthshire and the sheep were plentiful in Mull and Inverness-shire. The first sheep farm in Ross-shire was settled in 1782 where it is said the occupant was a lonely man for some years. He was joined by many others at the turn of the century. Cheviot sheep-farming in Sutherland (Plate 3a) and Caithness was begun largely through the energy of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster in the early years of the 19th century. Extensions continued until 1850. Profits were large for both landlord and farmer, but the poor folk found themselves in a bad way. Their husbandry was relatively intensive, the ground being made into lazy-beds (feannagan) wherever slope and exposure made cultivation possible. These well-drained ridges, all turned by hand, grew good crops of barley and oats, and later of potatoes, which crop in itself allowed a greater density of population by its great increase of food supply. Fencing was relatively unimportant for there were so few sheep and the cattle were tended and kept out of the arable ground by the old men and children. The arrival of a heavy stocking of sheep on the hill made the position of these people untenable. They were cleared by the landlords and many thousands chose to emigrate. The folk who remained were pushed to the coasts where their crofting townships are to-day.
Sometimes these coastal townships were places of such extreme exposure and poverty of soil that after a hundred years of hand-to-mouth existence the crofts have gone empty. The sight of such a derelict and decrepit township (Plate VIIIb) is a most saddening and disturbing thing. It does not present the ruin of a civilization by sack or natural catastrophe, but the quiet failure of simple folk to obtain subsistence from their environment. In other places, the shift to the coast has proved almost a salvation, for the people have found a mild, sheltered and early climate, and natural resources in fish and seaweed which have enabled them to live much better than they could have in the inland glens. These coastal crofting communities vary greatly in habits and thus in their influence on local natural history. Some have a shore from which they can fish, others have a rocky shore or no aptitude for fishing and they turn their energies inland to breeding sheep. It is an unfortunate characteristic of many of the crofting townships, whether fishing or pastoral, that the small quantity of arable land is being neglected, and the vegetational complex of rushes and sedge is creeping in to both unoccupied and occupied crofts.
The coming of the sheep finished the process of changing the face of the old Highlands of the time of the forests. Large areas of birch scrub were burned. Where the birch trees were larger they were cut that their bark might be exported for tanning material for sails and rope. I know of one sheep farm in the North-West Highlands (now back to a famous deer forest) where the shepherds were paid in part with the value of birch bark which they themselves had to cut and peel while they were in the hill. The flockmaster’s firestick was a destroyer of ground cover over hundreds of thousands of acres, for even where the pine trees had been cut a new growth of birch was taking place which might yet have made a less bare Highlands than we know to-day. Every spring some patch of heather or purple moor grass (sometimes known as flying bent grass or Molinia coerulea) would be burnt and seedling trees would suffer. Much birch was cleared in the 19th century by the bobbin-makers working for the cotton mills of the Lowlands and Lancashire. The pirn mill at Salen, Loch Sunart, was the principal reason for the establishment of that settlement.
The sheep themselves, as we shall see in the next chapter, are the destroyers of a habitat in which scrub trees such as birch, willow and rowan are a part (Plate 23a). Regeneration in places where they reach beyond a very low density is impossible, and even the many flowers of the countryside disappear beneath their ever-questing and selective muzzles.
Even the sheep have not been quite the last straw in man’s despoliation of the Highland forests, because his railways have happened to run through some of the last expanses. The old Highland Line (now L.M.S.) running through the Grampians and Strath Spey has been the cause of burning a good many acres of the ancient pine woods. This incidental destruction is hard to bear in a time when we have come to treasure the few remnants of primitive sylvan beauty. But I would say this: we still do not take enough care. Every year or two there are fires in Strath Spey which take away more and more of these beautiful trees. The present Laird of Rothiemurchus, discussing the question of national parks with me, said that 3,000 acres of wood had been burnt in his lifetime. If some of the last remnants of the forests are to become the property of the nation, each one of us must be conscious of his personal responsibility in preserving them.
The destruction of the forests meant the end of a habitat for much other wild life which thereupon became extinct, was compelled to change its habits or was reduced to a very low population which would be in danger of extinction from other and often obscure causes. It has come to be generally understood nowadays, that the animal population of a region is not static. There is constant fluctuation in progress. But the purpose of this chapter is not to dwell on this natural rising and falling of numbers, so much as to mention the more startling events such as actual extinctions, retrogressions, resurgences, and introductions of new species within the area of the Highlands. The list of such events and movements is a considerable one.
The causes of extinction may be various but in the main, as has been said, the active disturbing factor is man, and as one looks through the list, the losses of the last 200 years are large in proportion to those of the previous 10,000 years.
Changing climate is an immensely important mover of species and when climate changes in a relatively small island such as Britain, extermination is often the fate of land mammals which cannot readily adapt themselves. Again, if man is present and the animal of fair size, he may speed the influence of climate.
The lemming and the northern rat-vole may be taken as examples of changing climate being the dominant factor in exterminations in the Highlands and in the country as a whole. They must have disappeared with the advent of the warmer Atlantic climate and the extension of forest growth. Vestigial arctic climates such as that of the 4,000-foot plateaux of the Cairngorms have been insufficient to maintain the lemming, which occurs in similar country in Norway.
The giant Irish elk (Megaceros hibernicus) disappeared in prehistoric days also, probably before the advent of man. Climate was an active factor, but the organism itself was heading for disaster. The biological principle of heterogonic growth was at work in extravagant fashion. The evolution of antler form and weight had no particular relation to function, but was a concomitant of increasing body size and followed a different growth rate. The great annual drain on the constitution of the Irish elk, of growing 80–90 pounds of bone tissue, was too much in an age which was changing from that of the rich pasturage of the Pleistocene. Whereas the red deer grew smaller in every way, and thus adapted itself, the giant deer apparently died in all its glory. It is thought that the northern lynx persisted in the Northern Highlands until man came, but soon afterwards it became extinct. The species was probably in decline with the rise of the warm Atlantic climate, but was given the final push into extinction by Neolithic man. Bones of the northern lynx were found near the hearths in the limestone cave of Allt na Uamh near Inchnadamph, Sutherland. Ritchie says this is the one appearance of the species in Scottish history.
The brown bear was probably never a numerous species in the Highlands. The assumption of its disappearance in the 9th–10th centuries means that man must have been responsible, for climatic change had long ceased in its more violent forms and the destruction of the forests had scarcely begun.
The reindeer inhabited the Northern Highlands well into the historic period. The rise of the Atlantic climate may have reduced its original numbers, but had it not been for man’s influence it would probably have survived as the woodland type of the species. The destruction of the forests must have greatly restricted its range and finally its extermination must have been due to direct hunting. The Orkneyinga Saga mentions the hunting of the reindeer by Rognvald and Harald of Orkney, and the date assigned to the event is about the middle of the 12th century, but the species was extant later than this.
The elk (or moose) persisted in the north until rather later than the period of the brochs, defensive stone towers which were built about the 10th century, and given up when the Norse raids developed into conquest, i.e. about A.D. 1000–1100. Man, by direct hunting and the indirect means of destruction of forest which had then begun, was the cause of its disappearance by about A.D. 1300. Legends of a large dark species of deer are common in the Highlands.
The beaver was found in the Highlands until the 15th–16th centuries, Hector Boece mentioning its existence about Loch Ness, and its being hunted for its skin.
We may consider next a group of three diverse creatures which are extinct as wild animals of the type they were in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, at which time they disappeared; but which still lived on in domesticated forms or crosses with other domesticated stocks. The wild boar would be found wherever there were oak woods and would impoverish the flora therein by its constant delving. Its domesticated descendants persisted in the West Highlands and Islands until the middle of the 19th century, at which time swine ceased to be kept as a general practice. The conversion of the people to an extreme type of Presbyterianism engendered a Judaic attitude to the pig, and numbers fell away rapidly after the 19th century conversions. Any fresh pigs to come in were of the improved type from England, where the quick-fattening Chinese pig was altering the form of the old “razorbacks.” The great wild ox or Urus, surely the most magnificent member of the northern fauna, also disappeared through hunting and the clearing of the forest, but its blood may be presumed still to run in the veins of the West Highland breed of cattle (Plate 9). The Highlands also had their wild ponies which were truly wild and not feral. Cossar Ewart has pointed out that these ponies lacked callosities on the hind legs. Hector Boece mentions the ponies in the same passage as that in which he records the beavers of Loch Ness. The Scottish wild horse received crosses of Norse blood, and later of Arab, so that the Highland pony of to-day (Plate IX) has at least some claims to represent the indigenous stock.
The white cattle with black hooves, muzzles, eyes and ears remain to us to-day in a few herds in large parks. They are rather poor creatures, having been greatly inbred through lack of numbers. None of them is in the Highlands. Cattle of this colouring arise from time to time, and I believe that it would not be difficult to build up a herd of strong-coated white cattle with black points from the existing cattle stocks of the Highlands and Islands. Similarly with the ponies, we could find a few Celtic ponies (Equus caballus celticus) cropping up as segregates from the Hebridean herds, and build up a stud of them. These two species would be an asset to a future wild-life reserve in the Highlands.
The story of the wolf in the Highlands is important because this animal was responsible for a good deal of the later history of the destruction of the forests. Clearance of the forest by burning was doubtless the easiest way of restricting the wolf’s range. The last wolf of Scotland was killed by one Macqueen on the lands of Mackintosh of Mackintosh, Inverness-shire, in 1743. Passage through the Northern and Central Highlands in the 16th century was hazardous enough for hospices or “spittals” to be set up where the benighted traveller could rest in safety. Wolves were plentiful and hungry enough to cause people in the Highland areas to bury their dead on islands offshore or in lochs. Examples of such islands for which this tradition exists are Handa, Sutherland; Tanera, N.W. Ross; and Inishail, Loch Awe, Argyll. A detailed account of the wolf in Scotland may be found in Harting’s British Animals Extinct within Historic Times (1880).
Only one mammal has become extinct in the Highlands in the 20th century, though several have come near extinction in our day and have then rallied. The polecat has gone from Scotland though it still exists in moderate numbers in mid-Wales. The intensity of game preservation and the skill of Scottish gamekeepers in trapping are doubtless responsible. Even as I write, Highland fox-hunting organizations have expressed “satisfaction” at kills not only of foxes but badgers, otters, weasels and stoats. These same men will soon be yapping their dissatisfaction at plagues of voles and rabbits and calling on that universal Aunt Sally of Scotland, the Department of Agriculture, “to do something.”
From the animals and dates mentioned so far in this chapter, we gather that several mammals disappeared between the years A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1743. Birds were more fortunate, but their turn was to come with the improvement and lightening of the fowling-piece, the rise of game preservation and the spread of land reclamation. Almost as the last wolf howled in the Highlands, extermination of certain birds began. The first were the crane and the bittern which went in the 18th century, partly by direct hunting for feathers and food, but mainly through draining the marshes for land reclamation. It may be said, incidentally, that this characteristic 18th-century movement for draining was also responsible for the extirpation of malaria from Scotland.
The absolute extinction of the great auk is a story so well known that there is no need to recount more of it than the gradual diminution on St. Kilda as a breeding species during the 17th and 18th centuries. By 1840, when the last great auk was caught and killed on St. Kilda, the captors were unaware of its identity, and the bird was actually killed because of their fear of it. Where there is no written word current, tradition is unsure in its action.
All the other extinctions are of the raptorial tribe. The decline and disappearance of the osprey in the 19th and 20th centuries is recorded elsewhere in this book. The least-known extinction is of the goshawk, which was still present as a breeding species in the 19th century, having its eyries in great pine trees of the remnant of the Caledonian Forest. The kite was finished but a few years afterwards. The Harvie-Brown Vertebrate Fauna Series are good sources of information on the last haunts of all these raptors. The white-tailed or sea eagle has been the last to go. Shetland has the last breeding record in the present century. The West Highland and Hebridean coasts, being nearer to extensive sheep-farming interests, lost their sea eagles rather earlier. By 1879 they had gone from Mull, Jura and Eigg. The species finally ceased to breed in Skye, the Shiant Isles and the north-west mainland about 1890. It is all a dismal story; and it is a matter for doubt whether, should these species try again to colonize this country, they would be allowed to breed in security. The vested interests of game preservation (by no means dead in a Socialist Britain), of a decrepit hill sheep-farming industry in the West Highlands and Islands, the pressure of egg collectors and irresponsible gunners, are heavy odds.
A local extinction is worth noting, namely, the ptarmigan in the Outer Isles. Their last haunt was on Clisham, Harris, the highest hill in the Hebrides. Seton Gordon in his recent book A Highland Year (1944) says that rabbits became very numerous on the drier slopes of the hill, and that ferrets were turned down to cope with them. He says the ferrets also preyed upon the ptarmigan and are in his opinion responsible for their extermination. This animal achieved what the related pine marten failed to do in its day in the Forest of Harris.
There is one invertebrate extinction to be recorded, the oyster. The northern oyster was common in many sheltered shallow bays up and down the West Highlands, but it has now gone, probably due to gross overfishing, with possibly a run of low-temperature summers which would hinder breeding. Experiments have been made in reintroduction, but the southern oyster from French waters has been used, and as might have been expected, has not been successful. The temperature of the water does not reach and remain at 60° F. for a long enough time.
The status of our two British seals, the Atlantic grey seal (Halichoerus gryphus) and the common or brown seal (Phoca vitulina), is interesting as an example of the influence of man on the species. The common seal is truly common though local: it occurs in large numbers in the Tay estuary where it is regularly hunted, but without complete success owing to the sanctuary given by the sand banks; it is common in Orkney, and the seas of Shetland hold very large numbers. The common seal is of much less frequent occurrence on the West Highland coast, though there are pockets of twenties and thirties in some of the sea lochs and among the groups of islands. The Atlantic seal is much commoner on this coast though it favours the more outlying places.
The common seal is immensely more damaging to nets than the Atlantic seal, but its habits are such that any attempts by man to lessen its numbers severely have little success. When the young are born they go to sea with the mothers immediately and the adults spend no more than a few hours at a time lying out on rocks and sand banks. The species does not flock to some traditional breeding place as does the Atlantic seal. We shall study the life history of this latter species in a later chapter; our concern with it here is in the habit of retreating to more or less remote islands to breed, and in spending some weeks out of the water. The Atlantic grey seal is at the mercy of man at such a time, for he finds gathered at these places the population of a great length of coastline, with the animals at a severe disadvantage.
The grey seals (Plate 28 and Plate XXX) were regularly hunted in the Hebrides during the autumn breeding season, without reference to age, sex or condition of the animals; for the visits to the nursery islands were governed by the state of the sea. The result was a diminution in numbers which did not become dangerous until the 19th century when the species was faced with the fact which I have mentioned and repeated elsewhere in this survey of Highland natural history—danger for the species comes when the toll taken is for export and not for the limited and constant needs of a resident human population. The skins of the Atlantic seals were being bought and resold by the Danish Consul in Stornoway. The fishery was wasteful in the extreme and quite unorganized. Then came a remarkable relief for the seals in cheap rubber boots for the fishermen, and synchronously, almost, the arrival of cheap and clean paraffin for lamps. Rubber boots were much less trouble in every way than those of seal skin, and only those who have tried the smoky flame of seal oil can fully appreciate the boon of paraffin. The seals got some respite except for the fact that the hunting had become a traditional social occasion which had to be gradually broken down. Happily, the Government made an Order prohibiting the slaughter of Atlantic grey seals during the whole of their breeding season. The species has increased and is now numerous again to an extent it cannot have known for centuries. It is spreading to islands and mainland coasts from which it had long disappeared, and is now a feature of the natural history of the West which anyone can hope to enjoy, and have the opportunity to see and watch in the course of a short holiday. This story of an animal’s survival is an example of the importance of human ecology in relation to that of the animal. No British mammal could be more easily exterminated, because of the nature of its breeding habits. Its future is entirely in man’s hands.
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- Жанр: Природа и животные
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 530 стр. 129 иллюстраций
- ISBN: 9780007406098
- Дата выхода книги: 11 мая 2019
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland are rugged moorland, alpine mountains and jagged coast with remarkable natural history. This edition is exclusive to newnaturalists.comThe Highlands and Islands of Scotland are rugged moorland, alpine mountains and jagged coast with remarkable natural history, including relict and specialised animals and plants. Here are animals in really large numbers: St. Kilda with its sea-birds, North Rona its seals, Islay its wintering geese, rivers and lochs with their spawning salmon and trout, the ubiquitous midges! This is big country with red deer, wildcat, pine marten, badger, otter, fox, ermine, golden eagle, osprey, raven, peregrine, grey lag, divers, phalaropes, capercaillie and ptarmigan. Off-shore are killer whales and basking sharks. Here too in large scale interaction is forestry, sheep farming, sport, tourism and wild life conservation.
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