The Sun.
London, England, 1861-09-14 00:00:00

SCOTLAND'S ANCIENT FORESTS.

In an initiatory article on" Old and Remarkable
Trees in Scotland" Mr. Cosmo Innes makes the fol-
lowing intei esting observations in regard to the
ancient " forests" of Scotland :

"It is the common—it may be said the universal
—opinion among our country men, that of old, but
still within the period of history, Scotland was a
wooded country. The sylva Caledonia vastissima,
with its population of bears and cattle, may now be
considered a myth, as old, to be sure, as Pliny, who
liked to place his marvels in inaccessible situations.
With later authors the difficulty has been where to
find map room for this boundless forest. Tradition
points to vestiges of it in the Torwood, near Stir-
ling, and to the fine oaks remaining on the heights
' of Cadyow, but nobody had ever seen it in actual
growth and vigour. Not even Boece and his band
of ready authorities pretend that in their day there
was any great breadth of wood in Scotland.
" All evidence of record is against the myth.
Several things incidentally concur to prove the
scarcity of wood—e. g., the extraordinary care, in
the earliest charters, in giving and reserving right
to a small use of timber for fuel ; tbe use of foreign
timber when required for any great building
(Arbroath Abbey was built of Norway wood) ; both
bow-staves and spear-shafts were always imported,
the long straight timber not being procurable at
home. It may be doubted whether even the geolo-
gist, who despises the little period of humab history,
finds evidence of continuous wood in any
district of Scotland. Tne trees found in peat
mosses, for the most part few and small, and
confined to a narrow space are surely very far
from proving that large tracts of country were
covered with close forests.
" One source of the common error is the change
of meaning of our word forest.' This could be
proved by innumerable records. loresta, signifying
in early charter language chase or range for game,
with peculiar privileges, did not imply a wooded
district at all ; and an old bunting baron or jolly
abbot who loved a fat deer and got his green pas-
tures and hills erected into a tree forest, which gave
him the right to punish the slayers of deer with the
utmost penalties of the old Norman law, would have
been much disgusted if it had been proposed to
plant his chase from side to side. Now, however,
the occurrence of the word forest' in charters of
land all over Scotland—in the wilds of Rannoch
and the bare hills of the Ettric border—is held to
prove that the heather and gray lichen—nay, the
very granite tops of Breadalbane, as well as the
green braes of Yarrow, were once a close dark wood.
It seems that the result of a full examination of
written evidence, with the proof afforded by the
appearance of the ground, would be that our coun-
try, as to natural wood, was never very different
from its present state. There are, and always have
been, districts more or less willing to send up a
native growth of timber. We have now, as we always
had, in the glens of Mar—in the great valley of
Glenmore, Abernethy, Rothiemurchus, and that
part of Speyside—a very interesting and, I believe,
aboriginal pine forest of pinus sylvestris (Scotch
fir), no matter whether living to its natural term
or meeting with a violent death, still repro-
ducing itself if not impeded, and, indeed, sur-
mounting many impediments, and stretching up—
not, d's vainly imagined, to the tops of the moun-
tains, but as high up the glen as wood can ever have
grown—as high as soil and climate will allow. In
that beautiful valley, where the Chisholms and the
Frasers divide the land, it is quite within memory
that a pine forest existed, so extensive and so dif-
ficult of access that the poor cottars of the glen
were allowed and encouraged to pay their rents
by cutting down as much as they could carry on
horseback, End selling it in the market of Inver-
ness. Similar fir forests existed within memory
in Glenmoriston and on one side of Loch Arkeg,
in Lochiel. To a passenger, a sportsman, a natu-
ralist, or a mere idler or tourist, trying to steer his
way through those firforests of Spey, and Dee, and
Beauly, they seem interminable—they fill up the
idea of the sylva Caledonia vastissima ; but when
the bewildered wanderer gets 'out of the wood,'
and studies the geography of his day's ramble, he
is surprised to find so small a bit of the map de-
voted to them.

" We shall not be far from the truth, then, in
taking old historical Scotland—Scotland of the
14th and to the beginning of the 18th century—
in respect of wood, to have been very much as
at present; making allowance, however, for the
effect of cultivation, which has curtailed it a little,
and of plantation, which has immensely increased
its quality, especially of the last century. Speak-
ing generally, of old the levels were either cul-
tivated, or bare moorland, or swamp ; the upland
pastures, whether green or heathery, were bare
of wood, except where the steep and rough glens,
ravines, and water courses, sheltered and protected
from cattle, a fringe of native wood—hazel, birch,
and oak, the latter of small size."