A Place for the Heathlands

The origins of the globally significant Atlantic heathlands of the Scottish Highlands date back to the early to mid-Holocene. But it was not until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that this landscape began to capture historical, ecological, and popular interest. During this period, a radical transformation of agricultural systems took place in these areas. The local human population was displaced in favour, primarily, of sheep and deer, as a consequence of capitalist ideals of economic profit. This period is named the Highland Clearances, a term that refers to events and processes that took place between 1720 and 1880. The removal of many farming townships to make way for extensive sheep grazing was part of a wider European process of rural and industrial reorganization. The abrupt and at times violent nature of change in the Scottish Highlands led to the loss of distinctive farming communities and systems.^{1 ( 1 )}
Richards 2000: 310-311. It also gave rise to the notion that heathlands were open and “empty” landscapes. Thereafter, heathlands became associated with a particular culture and land use characterized by land that was privately owned and dominated by extensive sheep farms, a culture in which elite sporting interests were prominent. These land uses have persisted, and it was in this context that conservation interest in heathlands emerged in the mid-twentieth century – recognizing heathlands as a special landscape that should be preserved.

The ecological impact of the Highland Clearances has been described by scholars as “[reducing] a rich resource to a state of desolation” and generating “an ecologically impoverished artificial wilderness.”^{2 ( 2 )}
Darling 1968: 38; MacKinnon & Mackillop 2020: 21. Thus, the Highland Clearances generated two themes that are central to this contribution: first, ecological concerns about upland degradation due to historical overgrazing, caused by the transition to sheep farming; and second, a political debate over land-ownership patterns and whether the landscape should be rewilded to address perceived ecological degradation, or re-peopled in recognition of the legacy of social injustice and enforced displacement.^{3 ( 3 )}
Warren & McKee 2011; Wightman 2015; Martin et al. 2021.

While the ecological impacts of these processes are of interest to palaeoecologists, who study long-term ecology, the social injustices within this period have not been given much consideration in palaeoecological writing, since they are, understandably, perceived as more distant from palaeoecological evidence. This contribution offers some preliminary reflections on how and why social aspects can be considered within a palaeoecological work charting landscape history. It comments on misplaced generalizations about (palaeo)ecological change through this transformative period, and considers how palaeoecological explorations of historical systems might acknowledge social perspectives. In addressing social and community perspectives, I argue that palaeoecology is among other things a repository of biocultural memory, which can exist in dialogue with past social events and aspects of cultural identity that are also memorialized in the Scottish landscape.^{4 ( 4 )}
Withers 1996; Lindholm & Ekblom 2019. To do so, I summarize the limited current connections between palaeoecology and sociocultural change, before presenting a case study examining palaeoecological records of heathland dynamics and diversity through this transformative period in Scotland.

The broad range of proxies used in palaeoecology allows it to provide independent evidence for ecosystem and land-use dynamics, and thus to form the basis for productive exchanges with fields such as archaeology, environmental history, and the environmental humanities.^{5 ( 5 )}
e.g. Szabo et al. 2017; Hussain & Riede 2020. The politics of changing land-use regimes and the systemic inequalities of global capitalism are questions with which palaeoecologists have engaged less frequently.^{6 ( 6 )}
Løvschal 2022. Rather, the field has focused primarily on direct drivers of ecosystem change and on landscape responses to these drivers. In a break with this convention, however, recent palaeoecological literature on the impacts of indigenous and colonial use of fire to manage landscapes has involved debate over how cultural knowledge and practices are relevant for conservation and managing fire risk.^{7 ( 7 )}
Oswald et al. 2020; Abrams & Nowacki 2020; Mariani et al. 2022. This extension of the field suggests a growing interest in multiple ways of understanding landscape history and the drivers of change – including evidence beyond palaeoecology, such as social history.

In a Scottish context, archaeological and cartographic evidence demonstrates the startling contraction of settlement distribution across the Highlands through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a consequence of land-use changes implemented during the age of “agricultural improvement,” which encompassed the Highland Clearances.^{8 ( 8 )}
RCAHMS 2002; Boyle 2009, Non-palaeoecological evidence of environmental degradation provides a human perspective on the ecological consequences of the enforced displacement of communities from Highland valleys and the imposition of profit-oriented farming and elite sporting pursuits. Concerns about environmental degradation, such as declining soil fertility and the spread of unpalatable grasses, were raised as early as the late nineteenth century.^{9 ( 9 )}
Latham 1883. However, analyses of historical agricultural records do not offer definitive evidence for environmental degradation. For example, declining soil fertility might have caused reduced ewe fertility, but declining prices for meat and wool could also have contributed to changes in stocking density and shepherding practices.^{10 ( 10 )}
Innes 1983; Mather 1993; Smout 2000. Thus, the evidences that heathland soils became exhausted as a direct result of the Highland Clearances is not definitive. This indeterminacy highlights the entanglements between the social (human) and the ecological (more-than-human) histories, and offers an opportunity to reflect on the relationships between history, ecology, and culture.

Three examples from historical palaeoecology illustrate the range of relationships between cultural and biological memory: that is, between the tangible practices and intangible knowledge and associations with place (cultural memory) and the biophysical properties of an ecosystem (biological memory).^{11 ( 11 )}
Lindholm & Ekblom 2019. The three locations considered here have been selected to illustrate ecological outcomes associated with differing forms of agricultural reorganization during the Highland Clearances. At Leadour farm (Loch Tay, Central Highlands), acid grassland forms the current land cover, surrounded by heather-dominated hills; Leadour shieling (used for summer grazing) and Dail na Feusaig (Strath Brora, Northern Highlands) are contrastingly located within extensive heather/grass mosaics (Fig. 2). The empirical evidence for these case studies derives from an interdisciplinary environmental history project which examined how agricultural changes have affected upland ecology over the last four hundred years.^{12 ( 12 )}
Hamilton et al 2009. The project produced ten new high-resolution historical palaeoecological sequences, new analyses of primary historical sources, and the collation of historical agricultural census data, as well as drawing on historical time series of market prices for livestock. To ensure that robust comparisons could be made between the palaeoecological and historical records, the pollen chronologies were based on AMS radiocarbon dates and contiguous lead-210 measurements; these were then checked using spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs) and pollen from conifer plantations and exotic trees as independent chronological markers for the last c.100–150 years.^{13 ( 13 )}
Oldfield et al. 1995; Yang et al. 2001.

The first site, Leadour farm, which remained occupied through the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century reorganization, shows intensified grazing around the farmstead and at the former summer grazing site or shieling. The fields around the farm, which was rebuilt to “improved” standards, retained much of their prior diversity, possibly due to a legacy of soil fertility through cultivation and manuring. By contrast, land cover surrounding the second site, the former shieling further up the Leadour valley, was transformed from a heath-grass mosaic to species-poor grassland between c.1820 and 1860 under extensive, year-round sheep grazing.^{14 ( 14 )}
Hamilton et al. 2009. This indicates the sensitivity of heather to intensified, year-round grazing impacts. The waning of the cultural tradition of shieling in this valley is thus mirrored in the ecology. By contrast, higher natural and accumulated fertility around the grassland-dominated farm rendered it more resilient to the regime shift, as diversity trends in the post-improvement period has remained predominantly above the diversity mean for the last thousand years.

The third site, Dail na Feusaig township, is located in the Dalfaoisay parish, site of one of the most infamous clearances on the Sutherland estate. In 1819, newspapers reported that a family was burned out of their home, leading to the death of the tenant William Matheson’s pregnant wife, who was inside when it was set alight.^{15 ( 15 )}
Richards 2000; National Library of Scotland Dep313/1016. Despite the site’s turbulent social history, the pollen record from peat adjacent to the archaeological remains shows no radical ecological changes around this time (Fig. 1). Instead, the record shows that mixed farming had intensified over the century preceding the tenant evictions, and that it was accompanied by burning to manage the grass-heath mosaic up to about 1840. A sustained decline in pollen richness is subsequently recorded, but only after c.1860, when types of pollen indicative of more fertile grassland become scarce. This suggests a deterioration in soil quality likely preceding the cessation of land-use around this site in the first half of the twentieth century due to reduced labour and declining market returns.^{16 ( 16 )}
cf. Mather 1993. Similar variability in the timing, extent, and types of ecological change are recorded at several other sites in this study.^{17 ( 17 )}
e.g. Davies & Watson 2007.

This brief illustration of the pollen records contradicts any notion of uniform loss of diversity or depletion of soil fertility after the displacement of many Highland communities in favour of sheep (fig. 2). This is as true of sites dominated by acid grassland (e.g. Leadour farm) as it is of sites with a more extensive heath component (e.g. Leadour shieling, Dail na Feusaig). However, econometric analysis over the last four hundred years demonstrates that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between market prices (a proxy for grazing intensity) and the richness of the pollen records on farm infield and seasonal grazing sites across the Highlands and Southern Uplands on the border between Scotland and England.^{18 ( 18 )}
Hanley et al. 2008. This finding emphasizes the significance of markets as a driver of ecological change, a market system that also supported the livelihoods of these farming communities. It is paradoxical that, once the values of landowners converged on narrow economic measures of productivity, the same market system was later used to displace the communities. The key point here is that the ecological impacts of market demand were not necessarily more severe during the Highland Clearances than formerly. Market prices have a far longer history of exerting influence on farming decisions and, as a result, on upland biodiversity.

From an ecological perspective, this spatially and temporally variable relationship between the ecological and the societal/agricultural transitions is not unexpected, since ecological responses will reflect a combination of species exposure and sensitivity to changing conditions. Some farmers were able to take advantage of trade opportunities with England, particularly in cattle, from the mid-seventeenth century. This illustrates that farming communities were not immune to market incentives prior to the transformations generated by the Highland Clearances, and that the ecological consequences of earlier change also need to be recognized.^{19 ( 19 )}
Hamilton et al. 2009. Over the longue durée, farmer responses to market stimuli, the eviction of communities, and the associated transition from a patchwork of fields – permanent and seasonal – to extensive sheep “ranching” have all contributed to the homogenization of the cultural landscape and vegetation mosaics.^{20 ( 20 )}
Smart et al. 2006; Ross et al. 2012.

Some historical commentators have observed that references during the 1870s and 1880s to deterioration of pastures pertain specifically to areas of former arable and permanent fields, where the fertility of the soil, built up through manuring over many generations, was becoming exhausted.^{21 ( 21 )}
Smout 2000. While the pollen evidence shows that some sites, such as Leadour, were resilient, several farms and outlying fields enriched through sustained grazing and occasional cultivation show a rather different trend following the replacement of farming townships by shepherds. At three sites in the northwest Highlands, woodland expansion is recorded around 1880–1900. This may reflect the benefits of past soil improvement, combined with reduced sheep stocking owing to market competition from the new world, including Australia and North America.^{22 ( 22 )}
Davies 2011. Today, this change in land-cover may be considered an asset for current woodland restoration and expansion, which has strong policy and conservation support in Scotland. On the other hand, it could also be framed negatively, since it involved the loss of open communities, including heaths, and the erosion of cultural heritage.^{23 ( 23 )}
This has been commented on in a Norwegian context following the abandonment of summer farming traditions (Olsson et al. 2004; Speed et al. 2012). However, contemporary concern over the vulnerability of Scotland’s native woodlands means that the loss of open cultural landscapes near to some former farm sites is seldom mentioned in current debates over landscape and heritage.

This farm-scale view of the spatially and temporally heterogeneous relationship between enforced social upheaval and ecological memory is echoed by a broader perspective on heathlands. Widespread reductions in the abundance of Calluna or heather have occurred at sites across the British Isles over the last 150–200 years, although several sites also show expansions until the mid-1800s.^{24 ( 24 )}
Stevenson & Birks 1995. No single cause for the decline of heather can be identified at a national level, but grazing practices are strongly implicated. However, the cultural context is not particularly well established: nineteenth-century declines in northwest Scotland can be tentatively associated with the Highland Clearances, but without more detailed information on regional histories, the original authors of this work concluded that any firmer commentary would be inappropriate.^{25 ( 25 )}
Stevenson & Thompson 1993. This emphasizes the need for careful and considered reference to social history in palaeoecology.

Heathlands are an extensive and valued component of Scottish Highland landscapes – for conservation, for livelihoods, and for identity. Economic and management changes have influenced land-cover composition and diversity over a period of many centuries. However, the ecological history of these heathlands does not align neatly with social history. The results of this study emphasize the uneven relationship between social and ecological change, even where societal upheaval was extensive and has generated persistent cultural and political legacies. Thus, biocultural memory can provide a useful framework for considering disjunctions between historical, ecological, and social perspectives, as much as for tracing overlaps. As seen through the environmental histories of the three locations presented here, the biocultural memory approach involves challenges in bringing together tangible elements of landscape, such as land-use history and ecological legacies, and intangible perceptions of place and loss.

Unfortunately, this complex reality tends to end rather than stimulate conversations with nonspecialists, as for instance when media organizations ask for a palaeoecological angle on the ecological history of Scottish heathlands. Adopting a more participatory approach to palaeoecological investigation in these contested landscapes, for example by discussing the questions and the evidence with local communities, could help palaeoecologists to take a more pluralistic and integrative approach to landscape history and change.^{26 ( 26 )}
Davies 2011. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between palaeoecology, the humanities, and the social sciences could allow the development of more accessible and holistic stories about the connections between ecological change and the lived reality of past and present communities.^{27 ( 27 )}
See e.g. https://brightedgedeep.arts.gla.ac.uk/ In these cases, it is important that methodological caveats – such as chronological uncertainties in palaeoecology, and spatial ambiguity in the historical sources – are retained when correlations are made and causation is inferred, in order to ensure that we do not overstep the limits of our disciplinary sources in favour of telling a good story. Finding meaningful ways to reimagine landscapes in ways that recognize multiple, sometimes competing perspectives on how places change is important. The fact that palaeoecology is often used to question policy or management paradigms renders it inherently political. Drastic reductions in grazing pressure associated with agricultural reform or NetZero policy, for example, could have adverse biodiversity impacts in heathlands, because heathlands are adapted to disturbance, which helps to create and maintain a mosaic of heath composition and vegetation structure. I therefore suggest that palaeoecologists can use ecological (hi)stories to engage communities, managers, and visitors in discussions about how we approach future change in culturally valued landscapes caused by climate change and factors like rewilding.^{28 ( 28 )}
Bowman 2001.

Palaeoecologists seldom engage with other epistemologies to reflect on how environmental records from the past relate to the experience of the communities who lived in those landscapes. This is particularly so where human history is marked by injustices linked to enforced displacement. While there are broad associations between economic transitions, social hardship, and ecosystem dynamics in the Scottish Highlands relating to agricultural reorganization, there is no Highland Clearance “horizon” in the palaeoecological records – including in heathland sites. At some sites, there is evidence of long-term degradation in the decades following this traumatic social displacement; but loss of vegetation diversity and heterogeneity is not unique to this period, and similar ecological outcomes have emerged as a result of earlier as well as more recent changes in land management. This is unlikely to surprise palaeoecologists, for whom making specific reference to one sociopolitical injustice may seem inappropriate and tokenistic, or even an overstepping of the limits of our disciplinary knowledge – particularly if detailed information about historical settlement dynamics is not available. But while the lack of a simple alignment between social and ecological history for this transformative period may disappoint some parties, it serves to highlight the need to take a broader temporal and analytical approach: to recognize longer-term interactions between upland diversity, farming communities, market economics, and rural policy.

The extent to which heathlands require disturbance in order to persist, and the limits of their resilience to disturbance, are questions that have long challenged ecologists. The diverse geographical relationships between heathland dynamics and past social injustice lend additional complexity to this already complex question. Acknowledging the intricate ways in which capitalist ideals and social injustices play out in ecological history matters, because palaeoecological records are also human histories. However, whether and how palaeoecologists choose to “unsettle” disciplinary norms^{29 ( 29 )}
Richer & Gearey 2017. by engaging with the sociopolitical context of vegetation change may depend on whether connecting palaeoecological evidence to wider societal concerns can be done in a meaningful way, for instance through participatory and interdisciplinary working to understand differing perspectives and types of evidence. This could generate constructive discussions between the diverse stakeholders in these landscapes about how we anticipate and respond to ecological change in culturally valued landscapes. Such constructive discussions would offer palaeoecological work more traction in contemporary public discourse about the role of heritage in the future of valued landscapes.^{30 ( 30 )}
Jackson et al. 2017.