Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with the land, waters, forests and wildlife.

This volume spans 450 years that saw profound transformation in Scotland’s environment. It begins in the fifteenth century, when the ‘Golden Age’ of the early 1200s was but a fading folk memory in a land gripped by the gathering grimness of a ‘little ice age’. Colder, wetter, stormier weather became the new normal, interspersed with brief episodes of warmer but still moist conditions, all of which brought huge challenges to a society on the knife-edge of subsistence. Viewing the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the cycles of disease and dearth that were ever-present into the later 1700s, the book explores the slow adoption and application of the ideas of ‘Improvement’ and the radical disruption of Scotland’s environment that ensued. Reformation, revolution and rebellion were the background noise to efforts to subsist and succeed through a hostile age, in which Scotland’s environment was an adversary to be tamed, mastered and made ‘polite’. As the last, bitter decades of the ‘little ice age’ were ground out in foreign wars, forced clearances and potato famines, Scotland prepared itself to embrace the Industrial Age.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A New Normal? Subsisting at the Margins in the Early ‘Little Ice Age’
• 2 Turning up the Heat: Fuel, Wood and Food Supply in the Fifteenth Century
• 3 An Age of Shocks and Transitions c.1500–1700
• 4 Beasts and Birds, Trees and Peat in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• 5 Dawning Reason and Improving Practice: Alternative Visions 1700–1790
• 6 Changeable Times: Climate and Weather in the Eighteenth Century
• 7 Improvement’s First and Greatest Child: Woodland and Plantation 1700–1790
• 8 Fuel: Improvement Fashion versus Practicality and Access 1700–1790
• 9 Achieving Improvement amid a ‘Sea of Waste’: Agricultural Change to 1790
• 10 The Sting in the Tail: Rain, Snow, Frost and Drought at the End of the ‘Little Ice Age’ 1790–1850
• 11 Improvement Applied: Agricultural Transformation 1790–1850
• 12 Fuelling Scarcity, Gathering Abundance and Netting Loss: Peat, Coal, Kelp and Fish
• 13 Trees: For Beauty, Effect or Profit
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index