Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 164

Scottish woodland history is a difficult field of study. First, it is difficult to know what is or is not a wood. Many Scots woods do not have the nice sharp edges that help the English woodland historian: they shade off into wood-pasture and grassland with trees. The written record begins late; this is why this book starts at 1500, the equivalent of beginning a play in Act IV. Detailed maps of woods are few. Many lines of evidence – ancient coppice stools and pollards, timber and underwood in ancient buildings, archaeology, woodbanks, woodland vegetation – either seldom survive or have not been investigated.

Happy the land that has a woodland historian as its Historiographer Royal! Professor Smout and his colleagues, with remarkable enterprise, have traced and interpreted the apparently meagre source material. They have used the now famous maps of Timothy Pont and the archives of noble highland families; unexpectedly, the lowlands and southern uplands seem to be less well documented. Unlike most documentary historians, they are not bound by the written record, but appreciate the critical importance of archaeological and botanical fieldwork and of understanding the properties of different trees. It is a pity that they have not made more use of pollen analysis.

The woods of Scotland have a peculiar character, driven first by the peculiar behaviour of the principal trees (especially pine and birch), second by the climate, and third by Scotland’s cultural, tenurial, and economic peculiarities.

The Great Caledonian Wood, once supposed to have covered much of the highlands well into historic times, is a myth. In reality, as the authors show, woodland covered at most ten per cent of Scotland in 1600 – and even this is a stretched figure, including even sparsely tree’d grassland. By 1900 native woodland was reduced to about three per cent. This was a lower survival rate than for England but higher than for Ireland. Much of the decline, they argue, was a purely natural phenomenon: the climate and soils of the Scottish highlands, especially during the little ice age, did not allow woodland to survive for ever. Aggravating factors were steadily increasing numbers of livestock, sheep replacing cattle, and the practice of burning grouse moors, all of which hindered new trees from arising. Late in the period natural woods began to be destroyed by modern forestry.

Scottish woods were used by local people for regular supplies of timber and wood; but these were less important in a land with abundant peat and coal for fuel and access to Scandinavian timber. Better documented, and forming much of the material of the book, are commercial and industrial uses of woodland. From 1600 onwards poor or greedy lairds invited Irish and English entrepreneurs to export pine timber for houses and ships’ masts, leather tanned with oak bark, iron made using oak charcoal, and that mysterious stuff of school chemistry lessons, pyroligneous acid. Time after time such people, beginning with ‘the eternal optimism of half-informed outsiders’, ran into unforeseen difficulties and went bankrupt after a few years – a lesson that was lost on those who, in recent times, have filled the Highlands with conifer plantations to little purpose.

Contrary to popular belief, these enterprises, during their tenure, conserved the woods and did not destroy them. Woods that were exploited are still on the map today; those not known to have been exploited are the ones that disappeared. As the authors remark of the longest-lived of the ironworks: ‘Despite the immense size of the charcoal store, there was at least as much land under oakwood in Argyll when they ceased operations in 1876 as when they commenced in 1753’.

Relations with grazing are less clear. The authors claim that banks and walls around woods are no earlier than the seventeenth century, but is this merely because earlier ones are not recorded in writing? However, in the period covered by this book most woods appear to have been used as pasture, which must mean that they were sparse enough to contain edible ground vegetation. Regular encoppicement of woods on the ancient English model, keeping out cattle and sheep to allow felled trees to regenerate, was (so far as written records reveal) a late and often short-lived practice.

The prevalence of pasturage in woods invites further investigation. How effectively did different trees grow again after each felling, as they must have done, despite the presence of browsing animals? Did the preferences of cattle, sheep, or goats encourage one tree species versus another, as they do in the Mediterranean? Did attrition by browsing animals subtract the woodland herbaceous plants? Did it prevent the emergence of a distinctive, coppicing-related ground flora, like the flora of English woods before the recent proliferation of deer? Does a history of browsing explain why Highland woods are so noted for inedible mosses and liverworts, rather than flowering-plants? Historical ecology should be an experimental science, and maybe the authors or their successors will one day answer these questions.

The book is written with clarity, style, and wit (though present technology, in quite an expensive book, should have produced better illustrations). It is full of curious information. I thoroughly recommend it to ecologists, historians, and anyone liking a good story.