Creating grasslands
The ancient tribes did not have the option of claiming the grassland – it simply did not exist on any scale in prehistoric Scotland. It was only by felling, burning and grazing the woodland and scrub they found around them that the early farmers created most of the grassland, clearing by clearing, field by field over the millenia. They wrought it from the forest and, in recent centuries, extended it by draining wetlands.
Grasses thrive on being regularly grazed or mown, and are quick to produce new shoots. Grazing by cattle and sheep encouraged the growth of grasses, where the forest had been cleared, and prevented the slower-growing saplings from reestablishing. Gradually the vast forests that once covered Scotland were cleared for pasture until, by the 17th century, as little as 4% of the original woodland cover remained. Scotland was described at that time as little more than a grazing field for England.
In the absence of human intervention, ‘natural’ grassland has always been extremely scarce in Scotland, being more or less confined to exposed coasts and mountains. The native species that comprise today’s grasslands were once restricted to these exposed areas and to forest clearings.
From the 14th until the middle of the 18th century, cattle were seized in raids and counter raids across the border between Scotland and England. In due course the droving trade emerged. Surplus cattle were gathered by drovers and drifted south through the summer months and into the autumn, feeding as they went. The routes from the north funnelled the streams of cattle into a major tryst at Falkirk. Some 30,000 head were sold there in 1777 and this figure rose to 150,000 a year by 1850. The cattle were shod so that they could withstand long journeys with some travelling on as far as Smithfield market in London.
Matthew Paris’s map of thirteenth-century Scotland shows the far north and west of the country as ‘fit for cattle and shepherds’. A century later John Fordoun found the upland districts and Highlands to be ‘full of pasturage grass for cattle and comely with verdure in the glens along the water courses.’
Haldane (1952).
In the wake of the Highland clearances, huge numbers of sheep pushed back still further the boundaries of remaining woodlands. Some of the grassland that grew in its place has, through crofting practices, been maintained to this day.
‘They formed great cavalcades that blocked the way for other travellers for hours at a time; and they were as noisy as they were spectacular, with the chief drovers riding alongside the beasts, the cattle dogs barking and the men shouting out one of the oldest and most universal of human cries, transcribed by Sir Walter Scott as hoo-hoo. This sound is still used wherever men drive cattle, and the drovers used it to warn farmers that they were coming, as well as to urge on their own loitering beasts. It was important that such a warning be given, and in good time, for if the farmers did not want their cattle to join the drove they had to make sure they were safely enclosed.’
Toulson (1980).