The Afterlives of the Caledonian Forest

Thomas Frost on the legacy of the Highland Clearances and Scotland's new lairds

It was cold and clear out on the moors. The crisp white ground crunched under their feet. They were looking for wood. The few ancient birch trees that straggled up the hillsides above the river were no good for building, though some people used them as couples in the roof, selecting them so that the natural twist could be laid to the ridge, following the curve of the thatch. But beneath the ground, perfectly preserved in the peat, lay the fallen remains of the great old Caledonian Forest. Where the pines lay close to the surface the frost did not lie, either because of the oil or the warmth in the wood. Alan Temperley, Tales of the North Coast.

Caledonian Pines (ii), Lindy Furby

The ancient Caledonian Forest reached its greatest extent around 6000 years ago, after the end of the last ice age and the melting of the glaciers which had carved out the broad valleys of the Highlands of Scotland. Subsequent periods of colder, wetter weather promoted the growth of peat bogs, which swallowed much of the old forest. Human deforestation began about 5000 years ago, when neolithic people started to clear away trees to make way for agriculture. From the late medieval period, these factors combined to reduce the ancient forest to scattered patches. The Gaelic-speaking people of Sutherland, in the far north, were driven by the shortage of timber to build their roofs from “bog fir”, ancient trees preserved in the oxygenless peat.

The proportion of land used for agriculture increased very gradually over the subsequent millennia, along with the slow growth of the population, until by the late 1700s almost every scrap of potentially arable land was being cultivated. Consequently the Highlands became prone to famine in years of poor harvests, so that not only was it difficult for landowners to collect rents, but they were also obliged to fund relief to prevent widespread starvation. For the Duchess of Sutherland, in the first decades of the 19th century, the solution to this humanitarian and financial problem was to apply the same formula of “improvement”, of rural enclosure and the replacement of small-scale tenant farmers with large-scale commercial agriculture, which had already been applied to most of the island of Britain. She decided that her vast estate would be used for commercial sheep farming, to make way for which almost the entire rural population would be evicted and resettled.

In the vast majority of cases her tenants refused to leave the villages which had been home to their families for centuries or millennia. Where this happened, they were removed by force, and in several instances the army was sent in to put down riots. To prevent them from returning, the roofs of all their houses were burned; the bog fir was irreplaceable, and being highly resinous burned very quickly. In at least a few cases, houses were burned down while occupants who were either unable or unwilling to leave were still inside, and many more people, especially infants and the elderly, died from starvation or exposure on the way to the bleak coasts to which they were resettled and expected to learn how to fish. Similar evictions happened across the Highlands, in the process now known as the Highland Clearances.

However, the price of wool fell over the course of the 19th century, reducing the profitability of the new sheep farms, so the handful of aristocrats who owned the Highlands were obliged to turn to other sources of revenue. In the second half of the 19th century, bloodsport tourism became very profitable. The owners of the Highlands advertised the land their parents and grandparents had depopulated as a pristine, untouched wilderness, and the wealthy flocked there to catch salmon and to shoot deer and grouse.

In many respects the situation remains unchanged. Scotland continues to have the most concentrated land ownership in Europe, with roughly 400 landowners owning more than half of its rural land, the vast majority of which is managed to sustain artificially high populations of deer and grouse for shooting. The population of deer has tripled since the 1960s. This has been achieved through overgrazing, doing long-term damage both to peatland and to Scotland’s remaining forests; only about 1% of the ancient Caledonian Forest now remains. The shooting estates have devastated biodiversity and contributed significantly to climate change, as forests and peatbogs are significant carbon sinks.

Recently, however, the potential for large-scale reforestation in the Highlands has made them a goldmine for “carbon credits”, an attempt to commodify ecology. A company can plant some trees and be awarded credits by an agency according to the quantity of carbon dioxide theoretically removed from the environment, and then sell the credits to a polluting company which can then claim to be “carbon neutral”. The credits remain good even if, as happened in the Canadian wildfires a couple of years ago, the trees they are based on go up in flames. They are a form of “greenwashing”, or, in the words of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’, an apparently “quick and easy solution” to the climate crisis “which permits maintaining excessive consumption.”

The smokescreen carbon credits provide for the destruction of the planet is nonetheless very valuable, and investors have swept in. Even while the population of the coastal communities to which people were cleared shrinks, due to an absence of decent work, housing, and infrastructure, the price of land in the Highlands has risen considerably over the last decade, exacerbating the housing crisis. A new generation of “green lairds” has bought up much of the land, and even the shooting estates are now presenting themselves as “rewilding” projects. Rewilding has become a new way of commodifying the depopulated land.

Some of the rewilding projects have been well-managed, which is at least an improvement on the deer monoculture of the past. But the problem remains that as long as the ownership of the land is concentrated in a handful of huge private estates, it will continue to serve narrow private interests which run contrary to the common good – the good of the communities living there as well as the good of the whole planet. For as long as humans have been living in the Highlands, the land has been shaped by their presence. Humans are part of their environment, and consequently a conception of “rewilding” which does not incorporate human communities is incoherent. We are mutually interdependent with the land we live upon, and the collective interest of the environment of which humans form a part will only be served if the land is collectively owned and managed. The need for collective ownership is as urgent for us now as it was for the men and women who built the burnt out houses of the broad valleys of the Highlands, the walls of which still stand, and will stand there for a very long time.

Thomas Frost