Since its publication, we have received a letter in reply from member Richard White.
We are pleased to print Richard's thoughtful response which adds to the debate on this important and interesting subject.
Richard is keen for others to comment, too, (on social media) whilst also praising Dr Fenton's work in this area.
Please see Richard's letter, in full, below the original article
Richard's response to Dr Fenton
I read James Fenton's summary of his book 'Landscape Change in the Scottish Highlands' with great interest and he makes important points.
In particular his assertion that the vegetation of the Highlands was never 'wall to wall' closed canopy forest at plantation densities is true and correct and that more open landscapes are an important and 'natural' component is valid.
The notion that the Highlands were, at any time since the end of the last ice-age, a pristine wilderness of closed canopy high forest, packed with wildlife and devoid of humanity, is false. The Highland landscape evolved with the input of the people who shaped and managed it to maximise the productivity of hunting and, later, pastoralism.
Where I may differ with him is over the origin of this landscape.
As the ice sheets retreated at the end of the last ice age around 15,000 years ago, people together with deer, hares and other wildlife recolonised the land as soon as it started to revegetate.
The people of the time were hunter-gatherers and they would have used fire, which is a powerful herbivore, to retard tree and shrub growth and promote herbaceous vegetation in order to attract game to favourable hunting areas.
Traditional hunting societies in Africa (where I spend most of my time) do exactly this to this day. Consequently, human activity was a major ecological component and driver of the natural vegetation from the outset. People are part of nature.
Even after the advent of iron tools and domestic livestock, as the people moved down into the straths and glens and coastal lowlands, they would have continued to use and manage the uplands for grazing domestic livestock and for hunting. Hunting would have remained an important secondary source of food - as it still is for most rural people in Africa to this day.
Prior to the introduction of domestic livestock, I am sure that the natural vegetation would have been a mosaic of open moorland, an open moorland/tree savanna (like that which persists in Glen Falloch and Strath Oykell) and closed canopy woodland. Above the treeline, around 1,500 feet in much of the Highlands but getting lower as you go north, only open moorland occurred.
With the introduction of domestic livestock, most notably sheep, some 6,000 years ago, grazing pressure was significantly increased and the use of fire as a vegetation management tool intensified. The trees of the savanna type habitats would have been most vulnerable to the increased use of fire and that habitat type has been almost completely eliminated in the Scottish uplands.
However, where a seed source persists, trees will attempt to recolonise open moorland, particularly in the eastern part of the Highlands. I own an area of woodland south of Inverness and, as part of the management plan, I left the remaining area of heather moorland in the wood as a 'natural reserve' with no intervention.
This area is being steadily colonised by trees and if I want to keep it as open moorland I will shortly need to intervene and remove the trees. I have been observing the same process in an area near Slochd (visible from the A9) for over 50 years and I am confident that most grouse moors would slowly revert to some sort of savanna if we stopped muirburn and removed the sheep.
Reducing herbivory through fire or grazing inexorably leads to an increase in the tree population, particularly in the drier eastern part of the Highlands. The situation is different in the west, where the leaching due to the very high rainfall allied with herbivory is depleting the soil nutrients and leading to the degradation of the soil to the point where it won't support trees, as described by James.
As an aside, the Environmental Science Department of the University of Botswana enclosed an area of fairly open savanna and completely excluded all burning and grazing. In the following 35 years the area became closed canopy woodland. The process is much slower in Scotland but the same driver is at work here.
The issue on which I most strongly differ with James is his description of the uplands as unused, unpopulated and unmanaged. I am sure this is not correct.
Prior to the advent of iron tools, the ancients were compelled to settle above the dense forests of the straths and glens and those middle slopes are littered with ancient field systems, hut circles and burial cysts. With the advent of iron tools and the coming of domestic livestock, the ancients were enabled to clear the low ground forests and settle and farm the land but they continued to use the higher ground for grazing and hunting and managed it for those purposes.
I would argue that wherever there is an established human community, the people will use all the accessible land for some purpose or another, albeit sometimes quite lightly.
To illustrate this point, some 50 years ago, the Government of Botswana introduced a Tribal Grazing Land Policy whose aim was to take up unused tribal land and lease it out as fenced ranches. To the government's embarrassment, the investigations and consultations which followed showed conclusively that all the tribal land was being used by someone for something and in fact almost all was being used for more than one purpose by some number of people.
Having criticised James, I would like to conclude by saying that people like him, who challenge the established orthodoxy or scientific consensus play a vital role.
The established orthodoxy or scientific consensus can be wrong, and quite often is. As Karl Popper put it in 'On the Philosophy of Science', scepticism is the great weapon of science. Viva James Fenton!
*If you would like to read more on this subject, Dr James Fenton's book, Landscape Change in the Scottish Highlands is available on the link, below
https://www.whittlespublishing.com/Landscape_Change_in_the_Scottish_Highlands
