Obviously the image of Scotland’s barren landscapes were popularised in the Victorian era but it still seems that despite much greater awareness today, many don’t realise that Scotland shouldn’t look like it does.
Controversial, and obviously it has a certain beauty to it, but I don’t think we should be celebrating much of Scotland’s landscape.
It is the result of highland clearances, rich landowners, ecological damage, etc.
Caledonia literally means ‘wooded heights’ because that’s what Scotland used to be. Even until relatively recently.
Instead we have barren fields with economically unproductive sheep and grouse shooting, even in our supposed ‘national parks’.
Many of the forests people enjoy are actually conifer plantations, basically a crop.
I’m posting this to understand people’s views on this and hopefully raise awareness. There are fledgling rewilding movements and if there was more public support then we could get Scotland back to how it should be. This is even more urgent given the rate of climate change and ecological collapse the entire planet is facing. Scotland could really be a role model here but not enough people seem to be aware of the issue.
I feel like we’ve been successfully PR’d by rich landowners, including the royal family, to accept and actually cherish our destroyed country. Which is crazier to me when I consider Scot’s supposed national pride and sense of civic rights.
Some links to back up what I’m saying:
https://treesforlife.org.uk/into-the-forest/habitats-and-ecology/human-impacts/deforestation/
https://www.thenational.scot/news/17286836.grouse-shooting-least-effective-use-scotlands-land/
by Exotic-Radio-6499
49 comments
I think people conflate the fact that we have ample unspoiled, green space with biodiversity
The thing I always notice when I’m walking the dog through areas of commercial timber plantation is how *quiet* they are, compared to a more natural / native forest. It’s pretty shocking how ecologically inert they are.
Same as many things in Scotland, propaganda is a hell of a drug. Rich landowners like shooting shit. Tell the plebs that that’s how it’s supposed to be. Placated plebs. Nothing changes.
Same reason when I talk about Gaelic, I always get told by some smart arse that it was “never spoken in lowland Scotland” and they will unironically live somewhere like Kilmarnock.
grouse moor landowners killing native birds of prey with poison and glue always pissed me off.
It pains me greatly.
it’s the same here in North Yorkshire-this is not the beautiful natural landscape people think it is, it a been worn away and destroyed by landowners. It just looks bleak to me.
Where I live has improved 10 fold over the last few years, marine life is stunning just now but yes the highlands are very barren for the most part.
I am fully with you on this. Restoring natural forests in the highlands should be a much higher priority for the country than it is.
Yeah, since learning what it’s meant to look like the bare barren hillsides I used to think were beautiful now just look a bit sad. Good ecological work is being done in small pockets around the country, but we really need sea change.
Sitka spruce plantations are slowly taking over native species and pushing out the wildlife.
You think it’s bad now, just wait until people become dependent on AI to tell them how the world should be. Many things we’re told to believe are a lie already, and with physical copies of books becoming a thing of the past, and the internet in the hands of the super wealthy, it’s only going to get worse.
I’m currently reading a book called “The secret history of the world” and it’s a real eye opener.
I get your point, but weren’t a lot of them cleared 4-6,000 years ago? And partially due to the weather not people I believe.
That’s probably a big part of, Scots pines are ecologically unique they’ve been in Scotland so long.
It is quite alarming isn’t it? I come from the Northwest Highlands, which is quite obviously beautiful in it’s barren and vast landscapes. However, it is absolutely not unspoiled and for a large part shouldn’t look like that. It is a bit of an ecological wasteland – just endless heather and bog.
If you look at places like Glen Affric and more recently Glen Feshie, that is how it’s supposed to look. There are a lot of regen areas starting to crop up, hopefully that will expand.
I bring this up to people and it’s mad how often I get the response that more trees will ruin the view?!
And our peat marshes and bogs are massively important to the environment and should not be messed with.
One of the core problems is:
1. People created a big, artificial population of deer, with no natural predators
2. Deer love eating tree saplings, which stops the barren moorland progressing into woodland
3. A lot of people who *think* they care about the ecosystem will get very angry if you try to remove the deer problem
But also a lot of “environmental” subsidies are about preserving the landscape the same way it looked 50 or 100 years ago, so we’re paying people to keep the same old barren man-made landscape rather than actually making it more natural. Which goes hand-in-hand with farm subsidies that focus on keeping the crappy marginal upland farms in business, instead of encouraging more productivity on big lowland farms where you could actually raise much more food.
If you fancy a wee look at how things could be, go visit Carrifran Wildwood. That’s what we need all over these sheep shagged/grouse moor barren waste lands.
We do!
To be pedantic, “some” Scot’s don’t realise this. Plenty do.
I’m all for more unfarmed land, less dairy and meat consumption. I’d love to see the hills get their native range of trees back. It’s all possible.
Half the country was basically forced at some point it’s insane how little natural forests we have now
432 people/corporation own over half scotlands land.
It’s because it’s been like this for hundreds of years now. No one has known any different.
It’s why I follow and support Mossy Earth and other rewilding channels/charities because we really do need to bring back the forests that Scotland used to have.
It’s really striking when you look at islands on lochs, which are often relative ecological havens untouched by sheep hill graving and deer browsing. Often they have a completely different biodiversity to the shores of the lochs they’re on. That tells you so much about the degradation of the surrounding landscape!
Oh course we realise this. It’s not a point of debate
Still nice to look at though.
Yeh it’s funny how people romanticise fields in agricultural areas. It’s actually industrial wasteland..
I used to live beside a woodland in Perth that was absolutely silent when you walked into it. No birdsong, no swishing of leaves in the breeze. Every tree was planted so close to its neighbour that no light penetrated the floor. It was a completely dead space except for the timber trees.
After doing some research, I found out that the dead woodland on my doorstep was actually one of the first planted monocultures in Scotland, a woodland pioneered by the Dukes during the Highland Clearances.
The reason Scotland has ecological issues is down to this deep and longstanding monoculture mentality everyone has i.e. This piece of land is for sheep. This piece of land is for trees. This piece of land is for houses. We need to change this exclusionary mindset before we can improve anything.
After spending time in Norway, you see what an ecological disaster zone Scotland is. It’s beautiful, but it’s a disaster.
Norway also cut down a lot of its ancient forest, but given they don’t have the same landowner problems we have, they’ve managed to reforest the country.
Mon the Forest
>It is the result of highland clearances, rich landowners, ecological damage, etc.
Is it bollocks. We have detailed maps of Scotland from the 1590s and again in the 1630s.
The Highland forests were already gone. The remaining lowland forests were cleared between the two.
The ‘damage’ to the hills was done in the medieval period or earlier.
If the Highland clearances didn’t occur there would be more villages. There would not be more trees. From the air you can see the old runrig villages and the lazy bed tack systems which predated them.
>Instead we have barren fields with economically unproductive sheep and grouse shooting, even in our supposed ‘national parks’.
Sheep farming is not maintained for economic purposes. It is maintained for national security purposes- a domestic source of textiles was vital in both wars. It is not something which can be scaled up quickly.
>Many of the forests people enjoy are actually conifer plantations, basically a crop.
They *are* a crop. Planted in the 70s-90s to meet a demand for paper that was unexpectedly disrupted by the rise of cheap computing in the 00s.
Scotland’s hill farmers are in a desperate economic position. If rewilding was economically viable they would be all over it.
It isn’t.
I think a lot do know this, you’ve given it a weird “I’m the only super genius who can see throught BS” framing
Natural forests are soooo nice! If you ever go to the Nordics, especially Finland, you can see how great they are. Their native forests are a bit different to ours but still, it’s amazing being able to walk through their native pine forests.
I love coming across native Scottish forests, they’re so diverse and full of life, as opposed to the almost deathly quiet timber forests or over grazed moorland
Look up the disaster of flow country in the 1980s after bogs were systematically destroyed by rich people (Rod Stewart, Phil Collins) planting trees for tax credits. It was mainly through the work of Richard Lindsay from the Uni of East London that the ecological terror was stopped. Scotland is still working to remediate 600,000 acres of destroyed peatlands by 2030. The RSPB purchased 50,000 acres at what is now Forsinard Flows and ripped out every last tree to bring the bog back to health.
We do notice. We just dont own the land, so can only do what we can do in our own patches.
Scot government dont give a toss no matter who you vote for
I totally agree, it is to our shame that we celebrate the denuded landscape for the benefit of the very rich and supports so few jobs.
It’s a huge problem that I don’t think most Scots really appreciate. 90% of our wooded land is just forestry trees that will get chopped down in the years to come and the rest is barren land that we let crofters torch every year for the sake of some deer and sheep.
The vast majority of our “majestic” landscape is actually human made and not at all helping the environment.
> Caledonia literally means ‘wooded heights’ because that’s what Scotland used to be.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I do want to note that the etymology of Caledonia is very unclear and the theory that it derives from the Brythonic *celydd* meaning woods is made problematic by the fact that we don’t have records of *câl* meaning wood in Welsh prior to the work of Iolo Morganwyg, who was a prolific 18th-century forger of medieval Welsh texts.
There’s been theories advanced that the name of the tribe Caledonii means “the hard-footed tribe” or “the tough tribe”, but neither quite fits with other examples of Celtic names and tribes, and it would be most accurate to say that we just don’t really know what the etymology of Caledonia is.
More info:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381930407_The_morphology_of_Pictish/fulltext/668550d6714e0b0315433b5a/The-morphology-of-Pictish.pdf?origin=scientificContributions
Good post. Totally agree!
We have the same thing in Ireland OP, a guy was speaking on it and called them ‘Green Deserts’ because there’s no life in them.
In the Middle Ages Irish monks wrote that Ireland was so forested that a squirrel could jump from tree to tree all the way from Cork to Antrim and not touch the ground.
I thought the same thing recently when I was in the Scottish highlands.
Having been born and lived in scotland for 65 years, and travelled the whole country in that time, I agree this country could/should be a much more diverse place. Traveling to the gairloch from Fife through Perth you pass through built up areas until your heading north on the A9 where the landscape opens up and becomes a rolling hilly sparsely populated place. You notice that the landscape becomes a tree less barran place this continues for 100’s of miles until you reach the lovely harbour at gairloch.
I the landed gentry had not pushed the people off the land, and stripped the trees to allow the better off to have a clear line of sight to shoot the bred and released animals for £1000’s, then filled the place with sheep which stops trees and other plants to get established this land would be a much better wildlife full country.
It drives me mad to think we have and never will any power to change this.
But it doesn’t change the fact that the nation of Scotland is the biggest little country in the world and I don’t want to live anywhere else.
At least some of the planning guidelines are moving in the right direction – when we applied for planning permission here in the Highlands to build our house, we had to supply a biodiversity plan as part of it, to include native plant species to provide habitats for wildlife. Our plan has a mix of native tree species which will be planted in a thicket rather than a hedge, and include trees and shrubs that have a food supply for birds, insects and small mammals. We also included a rain garden which not only helps with drainage on our clary clay soil but also provides a habitat for insects and amphibians while offering a place for other creatures to drink. Obviously this is only a very small part of what is needing done, but at least it’s something people can do on an individual basis.
We got our trees from the [Woodland Trust](https://shop.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees) who sell native trees at a very reasonable price and you can buy bundles which make it even cheaper. Obviously not every one wants or can have a massive tree in their garden, but most trees can be coppiced to keep them from growing so tall (which also means they produce more flowers, fruit and nuts so more food for wildlife and it produces a denser habitat for birds and small mammals) so they don’t overwhelm smaller gardens.
Yeah. I tried getting into doing munros a few years back. I got bored as the majority of them had absolutely nothing to look at. The views were pretty bare and boring. The hike themselves are so repetitive with no forest etc.
Not sure if thats exactly the same, but the landscapes were so bare and without life.
Economically unproductive sheep?
Are they on benefits? Should they be forced inti working for poundland or popeyes?
They’re sheered for wool & sold for meat. What else should we be expecting?
It’s already happening, perhaps not as fast as you would like but then we are talking about re-forestation, not exactly a quick process. The first step is culling red deer by the thousand, which again is already happening. Just a few days ago I spoke to a keeper, they have 15 red deer per square km now, the target is to get that down to 10 in the next two years. The neighbouring estate is aiming for 2! Reforestation costs an obscene amount of money due to the type of terrain and the huge area so it will obviously take decades to see some real improvement.
Here’s my controversial opinion.
People clearing, farming and changing the use of land is entirely equally valid form of what the land ‘*should*’ be as the wild – and framing the argument in this kind of appeal to nature way is probably quite a large reason why the arguments traditionally haven’t had as much traction as their proponents want them to have.
Also let’s be clear, rich landowners don’t need to try particularly hard to ‘PR’ their way out of people sitting in concrete boxes telling them *sheep* shouldn’t be there.
I’ve been very interested in the idea of volunteering for a rewinding project. Does anyone know any good places in the lothian that need volunteers? everywhere I look, it seems very complicated to apply! Im a Joiner to trade might be handy for any projects!
You’re dead right, two summers back we did a camping summer holiday around various bits of Scotland and I’d promised the kids it’d be ‘connecting with nature’ lol. How wrong was I!? The glens are dead, the islands dead other than midges, the forests in Perthshire and around Braemar are dead. No animals. Barely any birds. Few insects other than midges. Honestly it was shocking.
This was a well produced series, The Making of Scotland’s Landscape.
https://youtu.be/Vc0TIwMeRDM?si=C1MndADexjdzPWg9
The history of the Highlands makes me really sad honestly. As well as the ecological damage, things like the Highland clearances destroyed countless communities, many of whom had still spoken Gaelic, or retained Gaelic culture. And now what we’re left with is a mostly sheep-inhabited wasteland.
It is quite depressing but there is some good news. Charities like the RSPB do a lot of work in Scotland and there and there are other charities doing good work (that I’m not close to) eg :
https://www.nature.scot/funding-and-projects/scottish-government-nature-restoration-fund-nrf Scottish Government Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) | NatureScot
Well said mate. Love Scotland don’t love the Barron’s who own land that has been passed down and left to degrade.
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