The Cairngorms Talking Landscapes

I set out to understand some of the great landscapes of Britain,

to piece together the history that shaped them. And this seems one of the most untamed. The Cairngorms.

It's the biggest area of really high ground in Britain,

a landscape of heather moors, high glens, of streams and bare mountainsides, of red deer and pine.

The question is whether this landscape is truly untouched -

a prehistoric survivor still living in our time?

I've come to the Cairngorms.

It's the heart of the Scottish highlands.

The tops of those mountains are sub-arctic tundra. Very little can survive there.

But if you look at the hillsides and the valley bottoms, it's very wild, probably more deer than people.

We know that almost all the landscape of Britain is man-made,

but the question is, is this really a wild landscape - a survivor of wild Britain?

We know that this was once the heart of the Caledonian Forest,

a massive prehistoric woodland stretching across the glens

and up on to the lower slopes.

There are still thousands of acres of conifer - forestry plantations, mostly imported species.

But do they stand where pine forest has stood for thousands of years?

I asked Christopher Smout, an expert in the history of woodland.

He took to me Rothiemurchus estate, to a pine forest quite unlike the dense forestry plantations.

And this, he said, was what the original woodland was like.

Lovely open clearing here.

How far do you think this would have been typical of the original Caledonian Forest?

I think this is probably VERY typical. They do seem to have been open places, full of sunlight...

They really "turn up" in Scotland, if you like, about 7,000 years ago when the Caledonian pine invade.

There's a wonderful clump of pines with birch beyond. Typical...

-It's the mixture of pine and birch which is...

-Typical of that habitat.

-Absolutely.

-Old habitat.

And you see they're big open pines which indicates that they grew up in an open bit of wood, you see?

And they're what people think about when you talk about the old Caledonian Forest.

-What age are we talking about?

-When you talk about an original wood,

you don't mean the trees themselves, but that there have BEEN trees on this site for thousands of years.

And they form glades of various tree species and this wonderful ground flora.

What is typical about the ground flora here?

I don't think there's any single plant that you can call Caledonian pine wood.

It's the combination of all these things.

Here we've got bilberry, wood sedge and heather...

And this kind of tussocky ground in which it all grows is very characteristic.

-A moss of some sort here.

-Lots of different sorts of mosses. Best of all, we've got a wood ants nest.

They create them out of these pine needles.

There's been a lot of human interference here,

but the ecosystem has basically remained, and the natural process has remained.

And that's what's original about it.

According to Chris, this open and diverse woodland originally covered most of the Cairngorms.

But modern conifer plantations have been dark, dense timber factories,

and 90% of the land has no trees at all.

The wild original Caledonian Forest has utterly vanished.

It's obvious to me now that in no way is this a survivor of an ancient landscape.

What trees there are don't form the majestic open forest that would have once covered this area.

What we have is a few remnants and miles of open moorland.

This is a landscape that's been transformed, and the question is, when? And by whom?

I asked Richard Tipping, who's an expert in analysing ancient soil.

He took me to Carn Dubh, near the edge of the Cairngorms.

What can you see on the land here?

What we're walking on here is a hut circle - one of hundreds that you can pick up in upland Scotland -

which may go back... 3,000 years, really.

And it's a really very substantial structure indeed.

A very busy man-made cultural landscape.

'A man-made landscape 3,000 years ago? Is it possible that changes to this land began in the Bronze Age?

'Was this when the original woodland came down?

'Richard reckoned that the answer lay deep under our feet.

'Hidden in the layers of peat are clues that reveal what was growing here thousands of years ago.'

You know there's good peat under here?

Yeah, there's about five metres of peat here that we established from probing when we were here last.

OK... Going up... And up again.

One, two, three...

That's fine. That's excellent.

So in theory, this sample should be taking us back to cover the period of hut circles.

-GURGLING

-Wonderful noise.

-It's a lovely noise.

Peat which has been undisturbed for 3,000 years.

-What goes down must come up.

-Can I lend a hand?

-You may! One, two, three...

There we go. Just drop it down.

And up she comes. Lovely.

Oh, hey! That's...!

Signs of wood and plant material. The peat has lost much of the structure of the plants that formed it.

They are breaking down slowly over time and turning into this rather amorphous-looking peat here.

-But you'll still find pollen grains in here?

-Oh, yes. Well preserved and in perfect stratographic order.

Preserved in the peat are grains of pollen from plants that flowered thousands of years ago.

You can count them and discover what was growing.

I wanted to know what was there 3,000 years ago, when those huts were built.

There aren't that many tree pollen types here

because effectively, by this time you've lost a lot of tree species.

-So, they were clearing the trees?

-They were, yes. We have evidence from the pollen sequence

that there was a perfectly good woodland -

birch, hazel, with some elm, some alder and some willow.

So really quite a nice mixed upland woodland.

And it was that that started to decline

initially, maybe 5,000 years ago - but really with gathering speed maybe about 3,500 years ago.

So it seems certain that these Bronze Age people were affecting the landscape

-and shaping it to... for their own cultivation.

-Yes.

I think we can see two different ways in which they were trying to get rid of the woodland -

first, with just grazing pressure,

and then they also started to use fire.

-I've got some charcoal there...

-Yes.

So they had at least two techniques to get rid of woodland

-which they don't necessarily need.

-Yes.

Their place is coming. Pasture, which we can recognise from particular pollen types,

and cereal cultivation.

So they started growing cereals?

-If you...

-Yeah.

-Have a look in there.

-OK...

Now, just in the middle there is a pollen type which is of the grass family,

but it's a much bigger grass grain than we normally see.

-It's really a member of the cereal type, maybe something like barley.

-So...this is a CROP, really.

Yes. And it's coming from a time period which is related to the hut circle.

Here we really are starting to find evidence that, yes, they were cultivating.

From the pollen evidence,

we can sketch in the landscape created here in the Bronze Age.

There were settlements with clearings for fields,

perhaps of barley, and pasture for cattle and goats.

And the trees were being felled.

It's an amazing thought that it was the Bronze Age people, 3,000 years ago, who first cleared the forests.

They began cultivating here and they effectively created an agricultural landscape.

There's little here now. Where have the communities gone?

Where have the fields gone? What's happened to that farming landscape?

I discovered that the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland

was doing a survey of the Cairngorms. I tracked down Rob Shaw in Glenbanchor.

He had a satellite tracking system to pinpoint every find they made.

-This is your mapping instrument?

-Yes, this is a GPS receiver

which we're setting up ready to start mapping this morning.

-So...it'll lock on to...?

-Yes. It picks up whatever satellites are available.

There are about 31 orbiting the Earth, and at the moment I think we're picking up seven.

And using the roving station with the reference station behind us,

we can get a positional fix to an accuracy of about 2 to 3cm, which is fantastic for our purposes.

Steve Boyle was charting a whole field of humps and bumps at the head of the glen.

Were there any clues here to the fate of the farming that had started 3,000 years ago in the Bronze Age?

-Steve, what have you found here on this site?

-What we have here are the remains of cultivation

of two completely different periods.

First, remains of prehistoric, probably Bronze Age cultivation, which we see in these heaps of stone.

-These little mounds, yes. That's Bronze Age stuff?

-These are probably Bronze Age.

These are heaps of stones cast aside to clear the ground for agriculture.

-Overlying that are the remains of a landscape dating from the 18th century.

-The 18th century?

A group of buildings are perched above the river, and down beside the water is the remains of a mill.

-There's just the stone foundations. That's all that's there now?

-Right.

Grassed-over foundations. You can see something of the wheel pit...

but very little left of the mill itself.

One's got this Bronze Age stuff and the 18th-century township...

and there's nothing more...? There's nothing visible on the ground between those two periods?

There isn't very much. This is a very typical picture in a highland glen.

We find hut circles and small cairns of prehistoric Bronze Age agriculture, and then...

we usually have a long gap, particularly for the thousand or so years before the 18th century.

There is a gap which field survey has not been terribly successful at filling so far.

Astonishingly, we seem to have nothing in this landscape for thousands of years

except a few piles of rubble almost impossible to interpret.

Was the land abandoned, or was it occupied in some way that left little trace?

We have remarkably little evidence about the landscape

between the time of the Bronze Age farmers and the flourishing townships of the 18th century.

But there's a way to get more clues.

Here at the Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore, they've taken these scattered fragments

and they're trying to reconstruct the buildings they might have come from - indeed, the whole community.

You can compare even a few foundation stones with primitive buildings around the world,

and then you can experiment with rebuilding, as the museum director, Ross Noble, has done.

This is all the archaeologists see but they don't always know why the foundations are different.

So our experiment is actually looking at what would be above there

and what effect it would have when it does decay. Archaeologists learn from us what to look for.

So you've got practical experience of what it must have taken to build the house

-and that feeds back to the archaeology.

-And not only that.

The skills which our team are developing in working the wood

often raises new questions which the archaeologists hadn't thought of.

Ross discovered that, for centuries, buildings left little trace because they were mostly made of turf.

But once you know how to read the signs, you can reconstruct a whole lost way of life.

-What sort of building was this?

-This is a fail house.

Fail is this very thick turf which you can see here. The layers are actually very thick.

Divots, on the roof, are thin.

-And "divots" survives in our language as part of golfing lore.

-Yes, indeed!

-So this was the general highland house?

-An architecture for humans and animals in the one house.

So the Iron Age round house had its place for the cows, as did the 18th-century long house.

It's extraordinary that so little changed over 3,000 years.

Perhaps it was because this was a self-sufficient way of agricultural life.

Ross has reconstructed a weaver's house and a pigman's house,

and has evidence that they were growing corn.

So this is the grain storage area. The whole structure is designed to keep it as fresh as possible.

But the drying process begins in the fire-box down here.

That's a tidy way down, that fire, isn't it?

Well, this is a corn-drying kiln. It functions to dry wet grain and also to prepare barley for whisky-making.

-And the flue's going horizontally.

-Yes, horizontally into the bowl, which you can climb up and visit.

-Don't fall in.

-Right.

-I see the framework... Would they have dried this grain before threshing it?

-Right.

What sort of period were they using kilns like this?

This would have been in use from about the 6th or 7th century, through until the 18th century,

-and virtually didn't change in the technology in that time.

-A thousand years...

-Yes.

I thought that grain drying was a modern thing, but you're saying...

-From the earliest times...

-Man has had to dry his grain. Yes.

Everybody needed drying facilities because the weather here is so unpredictable in the autumn.

-And at harvest time, everybody would need them at once.

-Indeed. They were great social places as well.

It was a warm place for the men to get away from their wives and sit and drink whisky and tell stories.

For many centuries, these hillsides were dotted with little townships,

their houses built of turf and heather, their fields stretched around them.

Their animals grazed the valley in spring and the hilltops in summer.

I found myself looking at the deserted moorlands with new eyes.

Once there'd been open woodland,

but then they were home to bustling communities, their turf houses gathered on the river banks.

All that's left, if you can find them, is a scatter of stones.

I imagine this village at evening, people around a fire, talking, drinking, cattle asleep up here...

And outside, their fields.

This was a self-sufficient community, a way of life that had existed for centuries.

I began by asking the question whether the Cairngorms had always been a wild landscape.

I now realise here that the question is, what catastrophe overtook this way of life

and replaced it with the empty landscape we have today?

SHEPHERD WHISTLES

Donald MacKenzie farms sheep. He comes from a long line of Cairngorms crofters -

the small tenant farmers who once lived in those villages.

He and his wife researched what happened to that way of life.

They took me to Westerton, high on Glenbanchor,

to the ruins of their own family's house.

The landlord tried to put it over as an improvement to the farms,

but the tenants felt they were losing the land they had worked for most of their lives,

and they had no choice in the matter.

And five families were moved out - or had to move out from this area.

And you can clearly see the fields marked out down near Easterton township,

-and these fields here for Westerton township.

-Yes.

So, Donald, the land of your great-great-great grandfather,

-would have been out the back here, you think?

-Yeah. On this area here.

-How would they have cultivated it?

-What sort of cultivation would they have been practising here?

-Some barley, some oats...

tatties and some turnips, all in wee strips, right down through.

-They'd be ploughing in strips.

-Ploughing in strips.

-Is it good land?

-Yes. I think it was.

It was fairly deep soil here. But they were kicked out, pushed down, because of the sheep.

Ironically, it was sheep, like Donald keeps,

that caused the eviction of his family and thousands of others.

From the 16th century, agricultural revolutions swept Britain.

They were about profit. And medieval subsistence farming died out.

Eventually, during the 18th and 19th centuries,

even the remote Cairngorms tenants, with their ancient and uneconomic way of life, were herded away.

Sheep are still the backbone of Cairngorms farming, and they have created this stark landscape -

few people, and few trees because the young saplings are grazed to nothing.

But not all the land was given over to sheep.

Something else was happening, to do with ideas.

There's a clue in the castles around the Cairngorms.

-I had an invitation to one. Blair Castle.

-SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCE MUSIC

I'm going to a dance.

Highland dancing, a bit like wearing tartan kilts, is very much a national stereotype now,

but it's an early 19th-century invention which was picked up enthusiastically by the Victorians.

It's a bit like their castles.

Blair Castle is a really old building, but it's the Victorians who put on the medieval battlements.

They loved this idea of Scotland as a wild, romantic, medieval place.

And the interesting question is whether this extended to the landscape.

Did the Victorians change the Scottish landscape

to fit in with this picture of a wild, medieval land?

MUSIC CONTINUES

The dance was in the baronial ballroom, a fine old Victorian addition

for well-to-do visitors who started coming to Scotland in numbers.

I met an expert in 19th-century Scotland,

Chris Watley.

Was there an element of this romantic image of Scotland that really involved the landscape itself

-and affected the landscape?

-Oh, indeed. That's hugely important.

In one sense, the image of the land which developed -

the middle- and upper-class visitor was looking for a wild landscape -

in order to be satisfied, has to have a landscape cleared of people.

The IMAGE of the landscape, in effect, becomes the REALITY of the landscape.

One cruel paradox, I think, of the early 19th century

is the sense in which there is an image of the highlands as bare and bleak and so forth,

and at the same time people are cleared off that land and, of course, ultimately are forced to emigrate.

Did they also hark back to the time of, you know, great hunting?

From the early to mid-19th century,

these estates become places of sport and leisure rather than work and living.

So the land usage changes quite dramatically over a period of 50 years or so.

Many of the people had already gone, driven off by the sheep.

But the wealthy Victorians' love affair with hunting meant the rest had to go too.

Popular romantic images now became a reality.

So is the landscape we have today a landscape fabricated by the Victorians?

I asked Jimmy Gordon, who's a ghillie, a stalker, like his father and grandfather before him,

on the Rothiemurchus Estate.

There's hinds and calves. A young stag amongst them. A stag at the top.

-A big old black switch.

-What did you call him?

-Rolling in the peat makes him look like a...

-I see.

By a switch, I mean he doesn't have many points.

What sort of a landscape were these Victorians trying to make? What did they want for deer stalking?

The ideal landscape had no people about, little or no trees,

and plenty cover to stalk behind - not for the deer, for the stalkers.

No trees, then. Deer don't want trees.

Oh, yes, the deer want trees, but WE don't. It's much easier to stalk. You can spy them from a distance...

and you can plan your approach much easier without trees involved.

Would this part of the estate look much the same now as it did in your father or grandfather's day?

I imagine it's virtually unchanged. In Victorian times, there wasn't the paying guests that we have now.

-Someone would take a forest for a year, 10 years, 20 years...

-They'd rent it?

-And build lodges.

And bring their friends up. Nowadays, we rely more on foreign visitors.

But the pattern of... It's... The landscape is unchanged.

As the railway ran into the Highlands, the Cairngorms were finally within reach of London,

a wild theme park for wealthy Victorian huntspeople.

What looks like an ancient landscape turns out to be amongst the most modern in Britain.

Before I left, I went back to the pine woods where I'd first gone

in search of that ancient, open, rich Caledonian Forest.

The Victorian visitors have been replaced by tourists and walkers.

And here in the woods,

there are signs that the landscape of the Cairngorms is therefore changing once more.

It looks like a wild and ancient landscape, and indeed it IS, on the mountaintops,

but for the most part it's a Victorian creation.

This used to be a farming landscape. There's a Bronze Age hut circle up there, and there were fields here.

And now it's becoming a leisure landscape. Foreign trees are being stripped out.

Sheep and deer are being reduced and the natives are coming back - birch and juniper and Scots pine.

It's amazing to think that although it will remain a man-made landscape,

it will reflect something of its real history. The Caledonian Forest will come back.

Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 2000

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