In Glenlyon is shewn the kennel for Fingal’s dogs, and the house for the principle hunters.
David Stewart (1822, 20).
The link between hunting and warfare, both in organisation and in terminology, has been lost in Britain for some reason but is still current in Europe. Thus Ger. Jäger ‘hunter’ is also ‘rifleman, fusilier, fighter pilot’. In the Belgian and French armies Fr. chasseur ‘hunter’ is a general word for ‘soldier’. Les chasseurs à pied, literally ‘foot-hunters’, are light infantry and les chasseurs à cheval ‘mounted hunters’ are light cavalry. It. cacciatore ‘hunter’ is used in exactly the same way. This allows us to equate G. saighdear ‘soldier, brave man’ with ‘hunter’.
In the nineteenth century in Scotland, they told a story about the Feinne, a legendary company of deer-hunters. It is perhaps the oldest story in Europe. The Feinne were at Creagan a’ Bhalguim, at Loch Snizort in Skye, and the chase was lost. The swift-footed Caoilte was sent out to look for game while the others chewed limpets to stave off hunger. Caoilte sighted deer and gave a ‘shrill hard cry’ which was heard by his companions, whereupon one of them spat out the unsavoury shell-fish, exclaiming, ‘Now we shall have men’s food!'1 The same anecdote is used to introduce the story of the Feinne and the Sluagh de Dana2
The age of the story can be determined by the fact that the Feinne were not waiting for red deer. Red deer do not migrate at a predicable date along a predictable route but stay within the same range through the year. Red deer were hunted by stalking, running down by dogs, driving into pitfalls or driving into an ambush but never, as far as I know, by lurking until they came within reach. The deer of this tale are migrating reindeer. The wild caribou which still live in Canada, Alaska and Siberia go north in spring to calve on tundra and return south along the same route in autumn to winter in forest. They may travel as much as 800 km (500 miles) between their winter and summer quarters.3 Hunters have been lying in wait for them at their regular river crossings and other bottlenecks for thousands of years. Since reindeer became extinct in Scotland eight thousand years ago, this story is at least as old as that.4
The tale told in the Gaelic world in the nineteenth century recalls a recurring annual event in Ice-Age Europe, as hunters waited in precarious circumstances for the return of the wild herds. The long survival of this story within a hunting community points to a continuity of experience and relevance which can be readily explained, for it falls into a familiar category which begins: ‘You young people don’t know how lucky you are!’ and goes on to tell of the incredibly hard times faced by earlier generations. As for the despised limpets, shell-fish were eaten without enthusiasm by generations of coastal communities in Scotland when other food failed, and this detail was no doubt introduced to give verisimilitude.
The Gaels had other memories which go back to a colder world. One poem ‘tells of a wild winter night when a group of cave-dwellers crouched together in the cold and darkness. Snow and sleet fell so thickly that they were unable to hear the sound of the waves5:
The face of the elements is to the east,
White snow and black deluge:
What makes the field so cold
Is the hard-drifting and falling snow.’
Mesolithic resources
The Mesolithic provides the background to the human occupancy of Scotland but signs of the earliest occupation are elusive, no doubt because most of the land settled then is now under the sea.6 Sea levels have risen steadily. Two neolithic tombs are now below the level of high tide. Since the Iron Age the sea appears to have risen by a further 2 metres (6 feet). This would place the former shore line at roughly low-water mark and would imply that large areas around North Uist and Benbecula would be dry land.’7 A good impression of the original settlement level is now given by the 100 metre (300 feet) undersea contour. If this is correct, the Long Island is an actual a memory of the single island which once stretched from the Butt of Lewis to well beyond Barra Head. The loss was, to say the least, catastrophic and put a premium on ingenuity.
At an earlier date, during the glacial maximum, Britain was not yet an island but a great northern extension of the European mainland. Vast plains revealed by low sea levels and covered with a lush southern tundra capable of supporting woolly elephants and great herds of reindeer linked Spain and northern France with southern England and another great expanse of tundra reached across most of what is now the North Sea to Denmark and as far north as Shetland.8 A remarkable sign of this lost territory is a worked flint which was found in a core taken in 143m (470ft) of water, 150km (90 miles) east of Shetland.9 An antler point dated to c.11,500 BP was found further south, near the east coast of England,10 while the Dogger Bank, once a ridge overlooking the North Sea plain, is covered with peat in which the bones of elk, reindeer, red deer, wild ox, wolf and bear have been found. Hunters equipped with tough barbed harpoons made of reindeer antler and flints as sharp as steel followed their prey across these productive if chilly expanses. Sources of food (and clothing) in Mesolithic Britain included reindeer, giant elk, the aurochs or wild ox, red deer, blue hares and seals. As a predator, man competed with brown bears and wolves.
The remoteness of this period is shown by the fact that now migratory geese and swans spend their winters in Scotland and fly north to their breeding grounds in the Arctic in the spring. In the early Mesolithic they spent their winters in Europe and few north to breed in Scotland.11 The Apollo myth must have originated in Britain, in this old north, since nowhere else has the return of the wild swans heralded the return of the sun.
After 10,000 B.P. juniper and birch were replaced by birch, pine and oak in the southern Highlands. A warmer period lasted three thousand years and caused the extinction of the reindeer and the giant elk, which required the rich, open pasture of the sunny tundra. Other mammals such as roe deer, wildcat, squirrel, beaver and pine marten moved north in the spreading forests, together with ospreys, capercailzies, crossbills, and nearly all the small song birds. From 9500 B.P. peat began to form on the moors, as deposits of withered vegetation failed to decay on cold, wet, acid ground. Some people see human agency at work here. The opening of the Dover Strait and the flooding of the North Sea around 8000 B.P. halted the movement into Britain of plants and mammals, including man. By then tundra had almost gone from Britain, drowned by salt water or overgrown by forest in which wild cattle, wild pigs and red deer now lived. The great herds of reindeer were dwindling and would soon disappear. The Highland forest, mainly pine and birch, regained the ground lost to bog in a drier spell and grew to a record height of 1000 metres (3000 feet). Woodland species became so well established that they survived the later loss of forest. Around 2450 B.P. began a cool and wet climate and the tree line fell back to 610 metres (2000 feet)12
People also left their mark. ‘By 3500 B.C. pasture had replaced woodland around many settlements, but mountains, mires and the wild wood still separated communities’.13. This wild land was devoted to hunting. Several typical animals survived until quite recently in the Highlands: brown bear into the 10th century, aurochs probably into the 14th, beaver into the 16th, boar into the 17th and wolf into the 18t.h14 In England aurochs became extinct in the 4th century AD and elk 11,000 BC.15
The origins and cultural links of those who settled in Scotland are uncertain but from their varied tools it is evident that they did not arrive in a single movement but from a variety of places. The evidence and geographical logic point to a North Sea route linking eastern Britain with Flanders, Germany, and Denmark, and an Atlantic route linking southern Britain (and Ireland) more briefly with France and Spain. Rare tanged points associated with reindeer herders show a link with Germany. Native evolution produced the hybrid tools found at Star Carr, Yorkshire, in the Tweed valley, Fife, Ayrshire, Deeside, and Jura and suggest that reindeer herders joined forces with forest hunters.16 On the West Coast, hunters whose ancestors may have lived in France or Spain reached Argyll and camped in the MacArthur Cave at Oban. They used hammer stones, flint tools, bones, red deer antler, and barbed harpoons which have been seen to resemble the fish-spears found in the Mas d’Azil cave in the Pyrenees.17 The Druimvargie rock shelter, also near Oban, was occupied by a people whose culture is thought to owe more to the Baltic.18 But these heirs of the Palaeolithic all had a great deal in common.
During the Palaeolithic, people and information had moved freely in western Europe, producing a uniform culture with many common features. After the formation of the English Channel and the flooding of the North Sea, the British were left to their own devices. The ancestral Gaels found themselves particularly isolated, cut off at the northern end of a long island, far from European influences. It became difficult to get to Scotland and there was relatively little later settlement there. A sign of this isolation is the prevalence of the ‘empty’ blood group O, which increases in incidence as one moves north and west through the British Isles. Its incidence in the Highlands is the highest in Europe.19 Despite historical theories, there has been no significant Scandinavian settlement in Scotland at any time.
Despite its rocky terrain and wet climate, Scotland has much to offer hunters. Its climate is softened by the Gulf Stream, it has excellent pasture, it once had splendid forests, its cliffs, bogs and rivers make excellent ambush sites, and its forest, lochs, rivers and sea-shores were once full of edible life-forms. Those who had depended on reindeer had to adapt to the very different business of hunting red deer and other wild animals in forest but they were surrounded by related people who had been doing this for a very long time.
The Mesolithic is increasingly recognised as being directly relevant to our own origins. The main archaeological finds are still the worked flints which are found virtually everywhere in Scotland. In R.B.K. Stevenson's memorable phrase: ‘The whole of Scotland is one big Mesolithic site.’ Interesting things regularly turn up. Whether it shows us native continuity or pure coincidence, a hilltop Mesolithic hunting camp dated to 9000 BP (7200-6700 BC) was recently found by accident underneath a bothy at more than 600m (2,150ft) on Ben Lawers, Perthshire. The site, as we would expect, 'affords commanding views over Loch Tay and the surrounding area'. Large numbers of worked tools and weapon points were found. Some had been knapped, retouched or repaired on site. The camp stands on a route between Loch Tay and Glen Lyon to the north which is still used today by herds of deer.20 This is a fine example of nine thousand years of continuity.
At the Chest of Dee, Upper Deeside, an equally evocative site in Aberdeenshire, a scatter of worked flints, some of them burnt, was also found by accident. This time it shows us Mesolithic hunters camping 7,000 years ago where three major routes meet in 'what even today are considered challenging highland landscapes.'21 A single blade is enough to show us a tribe of Mesolithic hunters who have adapted to the possibilities of that particular landscape - possibilities that did not change through the aeons. In Scotland we can reconstruct these possibilities since the landscape and its names have not changed. Hunters still camped at the Chest of Dee in the seventeenth century; they may still do so today. This penetration of the Grampians suggests they were already quite numerous seven thousand years ago, for successful deer-hunting in the Grampians above all depends on having sufficient manpower.
Native attitudes
Cha bu diubhail gin de 'n tachdar
'twere no loss to supply deer to anyone (Duanaire p.13).
The historian Isobel Grant noted that certain archaic attitudes regarding wild food were peculiar to the Gaels: ‘There are two widely held beliefs in the Highlands that lack foundations within the historical period and may throw back to more primitive times. In spite of laws preserving game dating at least from feudal times and the possession of deer forests by many of the Highland chiefs, the old idea that a Highlander has a right to take a stag from the hill or a salmon from the pool is far from being dead in the Highlands.’22 The saying also claims the right to cut wood:
Breac a linne, slat a coille
Is fiadh a fireach
Meirle anns nach do ghabh
Gaidheal riamh nàire.
The speckled one from the pool, a pole from the wood,
A deer from the forest,
In the taking of which there is nothing
Ever to give the Gael shame.
For a long time Scots law upheld these traditions. In 1711 a proprietor tried to prosecute a man who had killed deer on his land but the court held that a wild animal which was free to roam from one property to another and was not individually recognisable could not become the property of an individual, and so killing deer on unfenced ground could not be counted as theft.23 This was still the state of affairs in 1785. The natives had of course got into trouble when they applied the same logic to cattle, but they could have argued that cattle (unlike sheep) also had once been wild animals which roamed freely in the forests and which could be captured by anyone who cared to do so. The habit of helping oneself in times of need died hard – it is not entirely dead yet.
Hunting in Circles
In the early 19th century, John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson if the practice of hunting in circles had ever been known among native Americans. Jefferson replied: ‘It has been practised by them all; and is to this day, by those still remote from the settlements of whites. But their numbers not enabling them, like Genghis Khan’s seven hundred thousand, to form themselves into circles of an hundred miles diameter, they make their circle by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which gradually forcing the animals to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other missiles. This is called fire hunting, and has been practised within this State, within my time, by the white inhabitants.’24
The Gaels also hunted in circles. ‘When hunting was necessarily pursued for the supply of food, or in accordance with a Gaelic practice, to honour the visits of strangers, it was on a scale which gave it the aspect of a military campaign… This ancient mode of hunting was performed by surrounding a large extent of country by numbers of men, who, at a signal, advanced slowly with loud shouting, and by these means roused the game, and drove the whole towards a certain point, where the animals were shot or cut down by the broadsword. This extensive battue is not in exact accordance with the modern rules; but it had formerly necessity in its favour, and it is so agreeable to a Highlander’s habits that it is not yet abandoned when such a circumstance occurs as a royal visit. It is called Timchioll na Sealg, or the Circuit of Hunting. Curious accounts are preserved by older chroniclers of several of these magnificent huntings.’25
This was confirmed by Edward Burt, an English army officer who lived in Inverness in 1725-6: ‘When a solemn hunting is resolved on, for the entertainment of relations and friends, the haunt of the deer being known, a number of vassals are summoned, who readily obey by inclination; and are besides obliged by the tenure of their lands, of which one article is, that they shall attend the master at his huntings. This, I think, was part of the ancient vassalage in England. The chief convenes what numbers he thinks fit, according to the strength of his clan: perhaps three or four hundred. With these he surrounds the hill; and as they advance upwards, the deer flies the sight of them, first of one side, then of another; and they still, as they mount, get into closer order, till in the end he is enclosed in a small circle, and there they hack him down with their broadswords. And they generally do it so dextrously, as to preserve the hide entire. If the chase be in a wood, which is mostly upon the declivity of a rocky hill, the tenants spread themselves as much as they can, in a rank extending upwards; and march, or rather crawl forward, with a hideous yell. Thus they drive every thing before them, while the laird and his friends are waiting at the farther end with their guns to shoot the deer… What I have been saying on this head is only to give you some taste of the Highland hunting; for the hills, as they are various in their form, require different dispositions of the men that compose the pack.'26
The same method was used until recently in the Siberian taiga: ‘One of the driving modes of hunting the deer consisted of a number of hunters who surrounded a woody hill along its perimeter and moved in line towards the top. As the circle gradually narrowed, the animals bunched at the top became a perfect target for men armed with bows and arrows.’27 These far-flung correspondences point to another Palaeolithic survival which reached North America.
In Highland Scotland the scale and difficulty of the terrain made it necessary to gather hunters from several settled areas. The story Na Sithichean ag Connsachadh, ‘The Fairy Wrangling’, is based on an old memory of the Sithichean, ‘fairies’ or hunters, 'who gathered now and again from every corner of the surrounding district to hold a meeting in an appointed place, such as the Knock in Morven'28 The old memories are exact enough to allow us to identify the landing sites, beacon marks, and campsites that they used. The hunters of Morvern would shelter and feed these ‘strangers’ for the duration of the hunt and took the opportunity to play various competitive sports and games. In due course, the beacon on Mull would blaze out and the hospitality would be reciprocated. Gangs of hunters seem to have spent much of the year either hunting on a small scale near home or travelling to communal hunts in remote areas, which were organised according to a regular annual calendar.
Deer could also killed by trapping, netting, stalking, and running down with hounds. When the son of an Irish king visited Scotland with fifty warriors (in response to the invitation of a beacon?), he found that the Scottish king ‘had hounds for hares, hounds for boars, hounds for deer’.29 But the favoured method was to use of a chain of men to drive them towards an ambush. This method is peculiarly suited to hunting in mountainous terrain and in forest. A linear battue where a line of men and dogs beat their way through a wood towards a line of men armed with guns is still common in rural France and the battue may explain certain of the linear ditches and dykes which survive from prehistory. In the Highlands, deer might be driven to the top of a hill, over a cliff, into a bog or river or the sea, or into a narrow gully, sometimes man-made, all situations where they could be stunned at short range with stones or hammers and killed with arrows or spears or swords. Many elite centres in Scotland are close to such places as they began as hunting lodges, located to be convenient to the ambush sites that provided their owners with meat. For added convenience the royal residences at Stirling, Holyrood and Kincardine were equipped with private hunting parks stocked with deer and boar. Part of Holyrood Park is still known as Hunters’ Bog. At the other extreme is the tiny tower under the crags at one end of Glenlockhart in southern Edinburgh which commands a great prospect over the Firth of Forth to Fife. G. luncart is another name for a deer trap.
Despite their aristocratic links and entertainment value, the primary purpose of such large deer drives was to provide winter provisions for the community as a whole. ‘As in later times, the nobles mobilised each autumn large numbers of their tenants and retainers to engage in deer drives, bird shooting and river fishing. Abundant supplies of salted flesh and fish were stored in fortresses and cottages for the winter season. These hunting expeditions were conducted on a much larger scale in Scotland than in Ireland, and they continued for long an outstanding feature of Highland life'.30 One of the many names for a hunter who has travelled from a distance in response to a beaconl is deòradh which has come to mean not only ‘alien, stranger, guest, exile, vagabond, pilgrim’ but also ‘helpless afflicted forlorn being’. A single word to depict the decline and extinction of the Highland way of life.
The Tinchell
Possibly the earliest reference to a deer drive in the Highlands comes from the Treasurer’s Accounts for 1508, when 306 men were paid for assisting James IV at a hunt in the forest of Glenartney, organised by Malcolm Drummond. Treasurer’s Accounts IV, 137. Two years earlier this energetic monarch had hunted in Balquhidder and Strathfillan as the guest (or feudal superior) of the local MacGregor chief.31 These hunts were probably deer-drives or tinchells, though the records do not say so.
The Earls of Atholl organised an annual deer-drive in the Forest of Benchrombeg, on the slopes of Carn na Goibhre. There are many accounts of this event. In 1528 or 1529, James V, his Queen, and the Papal Nuncio were entertained by John Stewart, Earl of Atholl, over three days. There was killed ‘thirty score hart and hynd, with other small beasts, as roe, wolf, fox and wild cats’. The royal visitors were still taking their leave when the Earl set fire to the buildings put up for the occasion.32 ‘Then the ambassadors said to the King, “I marvel, Sir, that you should thole your fair palace to be burnt, that your grace has been so well lodged in.” Then the King answered: “It is the use of our Highlandmen, though they be never so well lodged, to burn the lodgings when they depart.”.’33 This ensured that nothing was left to attract wolves.
In 1618 John Taylor, the Water Poet, was invited to go with Lord Erskine, Earl of Mar, to the deer hunt in Mar, ‘for once in the yeere, which is the whole moneth of August, and sometimes part of September, many of the nobility and gentry of the kingdome (for their pleasure) doe come into these Highland countries to hunt, where they doe conforme themselves to the habite of the Highland men, who, for the moste part, speake nothing but Irish; and in former time were those people which were called the Red-shanks.’ The Earl of Mar’s party left from Kindrochit, now known as the Castleton of Braemar,34 where there were the ruins of an old castle ‘built by King Malcolm Canmore for a hunting house.’ They went west into the Forest of Mar by the route used 7000 years earlier: ‘I was the space of twelve dayes after, before I saw either house, corne-field, or habitation for any creature, but deere, wild horses, wolves and such like creatures, which made me doubt that I should never have scene a house againe.’ He soon found that the Highlander could make himself comfortable in the wilderness for the food included venison, hare, fish, salmon, partridge, moorcoots, heathcocks, capercaillies and ‘termagents’ or ptarmigans caught locally as well as beef, mutton, goats, hens, capons and chickens contributed by the tenants and a great variety of alcoholic beverages.35
As in Atholl, game was collected from the remote hinterland of the Forest of Mar and driven down into prearranged ambushes manned by the nobility. ‘The manner of the hunting is this: five or six hundred men doe rise early in the morning, and they doe disperse themselves divers wayes, and seven, eight or ten miles compass they doe bring or chase in the deer in many heards (two, three or four hundred in a heard) to such or such a place as the noblemen shall appoint them; then when the day is come, the lords and gentlemen of their companies doe ride or go to the said places, sometimes wading up to the middles through bournes and rivers; and then they being come to the place, doe lye down on the ground till those foresaid scouts, which are called the Tinckell, do bring down the deer… Then after we had stayed three houres or thereabouts, we might perceived the deer appeare on the hills round about us (their heads making a shew like a wood), which being followed close by the Tinckell, are chased down into the valley where wee lay; then all the valley on each side being waylaid with a hundred couple of strong Irish greyhounds, they are let loose as occasion serves upon the hearde of deere, that with dogs, gunnes, arrowes, durks and daggers, in the space of two houres, fourscore fat deere were slain, which after are disposed of, some one way and some another, twenty or thirty miles; and more than enough left for us to make merrey withall at our rendevouse.’36
On the first day they went eight miles, to where there were purpose-built huts which Taylor called Longquhards (luncarts). They probably camped at the Chest of Dee (NO0188), 14km (9m) west of Kindrochit, where Mesolithic hunters also camped. In this desolate corner the Ordnance Survey map still shows six ruined houses, whose names reflect a landscape named for other purposes. Dalvorar (NO040893) is ‘camp-site of the moraire or hunt-master’, Dubrach (NO030888), in old Gaelic, is ‘deer bank’, Tomnamoine (NO034895) is ‘knoll of the moss’, and Tomnagaoithe (NO029891) ‘knoll of the darts or spears’, a spot which locals knew in jest as Tonnagaoithe ‘windy back-side’.37 The Ciste is now understood to be a pool in the river Dee, where the rocks form a kind of stone box but a ciste is a deer trap.
The tradition continued into the eighteenth century. On 18 August 1713, the Duke of Atholl wrote to his agents in Glenalmond, Balquhidder, Fortingall, Strathtummel and Bunrannoch, Blair Atholl, Moulin, Logierait, Kirkmichael, Kilmorish, Guay and Laighwood to give notice of the annual event to his tenants:38
These are ordering you to advertise all our Vassals, Wadsetters, and a fencible man out of every merk Land belonging to us, either in property or superiority, within the Parish of –, to be at Blair Atholl on Tuesday the 25th instant in the evening, with their arms and best apparrell as is usuall, and eight dayes of provision, in order to attend us at a deer hunting in our Forrests of Atholl. You are to advertise them to bring as many dogs as they can provide.
This was probably the last tinchell held in Atholl.39 After the gathering in Braemar in 1715, which launched the 1715 Rising, the practice was discontinued there also. In 1925 Watson noted that the great hunts passed with the passing of the Stuarts and at the present day ‘there are not enough men in the Highlands to make it possible to revive them.’40 But the Stewarts had not invented tham and Logan confirms that driving deer was still done in the nineteenth century: ‘In wooded districts the deer are frequently driven from their coverts, as they cannot in such a situation be stalked, and lads from ten to sixteen years of age are generally the most efficient for this purpose, as they make their way both bare-legged and bare-footed through heather, whins and underwood, where grown-up men could not very easily follow, and numbers are sometimes so employed.’41
The ambush site or trap might be a natural feature, a modified natural feature, or entirely man-made. In Jura deer were driven by a body of men and dogs called the tainchess (tinchells) to the isthmus or tairbeart which separates the two halves of the island.42 A tairbeart is not simply an isthmus but a narrow neck of land used as a deer trap. The first element is cognate with G. tòir ‘pursuit, chase’, E. deer and Lat. taurus ‘bull’. G. tairbeart also means ‘superabundant’, a common association of ideas. The people of Rum converted a glen into a deer trap by building two stone dykes which began high on the opposite slopes of the mountains and sloped down towards each other so that when they came together in the valley bottom they were only a metre (three or four feet) apart. The deer were drive through this narrow exit into a substantial circular structure to be killed. Pennant noted a deer trap of this type in Skye in 1772.43
Such dykes match Dwelly’s description of an iolairig or elrig as a ‘V-shaped structure, not necessarily artificial, wide at one end and narrow at the other, into which deer were driven and shot with arrows as they came out.’ Elrig is found as a place-name in every part of Scotland from Galloway and Lothian to Loch Affric. and was probably invented in the Mesolithic, if not earler.44 Dr Robertson of Callander recorded a local method of hunting deer by building ‘large enclosures of such a height as the deer could not overleap, fenced with stakes and intertwined with brushwood. Vast multitudes of men were collected on hunting days, who, forming a ring round the deer, drove them into these enclosures, which were open on one side.’45
The deer-trap, natural or otherwise, inspired a great deal of poetic and even religious awe. It was a fearful, blood-stained gateway to the realm of death, guarded by fire, by dogs and by devils armed with Palaeolithic harpoons, but it was also a paradise of plenty. Its sexual connotations were not lost on the Gaels.
The success of a deer-drive did not depend on individual marksmanship of any high order, and painstaking practice at the butts is not a feature of Highland life. But it required experienced leaders with a detailed knowledge of the country, considerable agility and reserves of stamina on the part of the beaters, and courage and strength on the part of those who faced the stampede of deer at the ambush. The key to success, as many accounts confirm, was to have sufficient beaters, not only to cover the ground and gather up the deer but to ensure that there were never any gaps in the chain. Conversely, a deer drive was an easy way of feeding a small army. The various accounts make it clear that of the deer rounded up, only a small proportion was killed, no doubt young stags.
The importance of the tinchell in every area from Mull to Mar explains why a Gaelic chief measured his standing in terms of the number of men he commanded, for that dictated the size of territory he could exploit.
Communications
A deer forest was always well-equipped with beacon sites. The activities of an army of beaters, who might be spread out over several miles of rough country, had to be carefully co-ordinated. There are many ways of communicating at long distance which include shouting, singing, whistling, rattling wooden clappers, displaying flags, banging on a shield or a drum, and blowing a pipe or a horn, and there is evidence for all of these in Scotland. Campbell mentions a ‘booming shield’.46 Hunters may also have hammered on certain rocks to send a signal, for when the archetypal hunter, Fionn, left for Lochlann he agreed to strike the Ord Fiannt ‘hammer of the Fian’ if he needed the assistance of his friends.47 But the most effective way to communicate over a long distance is by flares and smoke signals. Place-names show that Scottish deer forests were comprehensively equipped with beacon sites and outlook stations and a little field research would reveal something of their workings. From the names on the modern map it is also possible to identify muster stations, ambush sites, deer drops, and butchery sites. Open-air kitchens marked by mounds of burnt stones also belong to this landscape if not to its earliest period of use. [Add place-names]
The hunting forest
The idea of a primeval Caledonian forest clothing the Scottish mountains in stately pines and surviving until recently dies hard, but the picture is likely to have been much affected by the human presence. The numbers of trees buried in Scottish bogs witness to the extent of prehistoric forest in places where no trees now grow. Such devastation might have been due to a volcanic blast but there is no doubt that the arrival of Mesolithic hunters is everywhere announced by a scatter of charcoal, marking episodes of burning which began at least nine thousand years ago.48 ADD: Also charcoal ref from Scotland After the Ice? It is said to be impossible to distinguish between human and natural agency in the form of lightning, but woodland management by burning was and remains a universal technique.49 A balance between deer forest and the conflicting demands of pasture, clearance for arable, and the cutting of wood for domestic fuel and for building work was evidently created and sustained over many millennia. The main destruction of woodland in Scotland was in the Neolithic and was followed by considerable erosion50
Forest grew back but was again destroyed in the feudal period to drive out wolves and outlaws, generally listed in that order of importance. The outlaws were principally native deer-hunters. The first Letters of Fire and Sword against Clan Gregor were issued by the Earl of Argyll in June 1565 and ordered his followers to ‘persew thaim with bayth sword and fyre to ther destructioun’. In other words, these wild hunters were to be hunted themselves by firing the forests and killed like wild beasts. This destruction of their source of food was probably the reason for the great outburst of raiding along the Highland Border, in Menteith, Strathearn, Lennox, Glenalmond, and Breadalbane, later in the same year, as the hill people sought to avoid starvation one way or another.51 That woodland was repeated burned to expel outlaws is accepted as a commonplace by Burt who thought that the Highland mosses ‘were formerly made when woods were common in the hills; but since, by several repeated laws, destroyed to take away that shelter which assisted the Highlanders in their depredations’.52 Was he the first to identify peat as a man-made disaster?
Much damage was also done by feudal attitudes. ‘In historical times the deer became royal game, to be hunted only by the king or by those to whom he had granted the right of forestry; and occasional scraps of information show that during the Middle Ages royal hunting forays took place in many areas from which the deer have long disappeared.’53 These areas included Fife, Renfrewshire, and Midlothian. Selkirk Forest was appropriated in the twelfth century to provide private hunting for the king54 and much of Perthshire was royal forest already in the twelfth century when Alexander I renovated the crannogs on Loch Tay and when his Queen Sybilla died 12 June 1122 on the Isle of Loch Tay.55 This little beacon island was probably built in the Late Bronze Age and originally served to coordinate local hunts. The feudal expropriation of huge areas still occupied by a native population of hunters and herders, the burning of forest to control wolves and outlaws, and the Disarming Acts of 1607, 1725 and 1746 had a devastating effect on much more than the native way of life. We need only look at the sour boggy pasture which covers the Highlands today. Of Rum it was said: ‘While the wood throve, the deer also throve; now that the wood is totally destroyed, the deer are extirpated.’56 When the deer vanished, so did the hunters.
For a very long time the native population had managed things very well. Adequate stocks of red deer were conserved in Scotland from the Mesolithic up to the feudal period. The need for conservation is evident in the little story of the encounter between Domhnull Mor Og, Big Donald of the Hunt, and the Glastig or deer goddess, a beautiful maiden. Donald, a famous deer-hunter in the Braes of Lochaber, was always pursuing the deer. One morning at dawn the deer as usual came down from the summit but this time a Glastig was driving them. She attacked Big Donald, crying, ‘Thou art too heavy on my hinds, Donald of the Hunt.’ But Donald defended himself, saying: ‘I never killed a hind where I could find a stag’, and she gave him no further trouble.57 This is a moral tale for young hunters. The Glastig would bring her deer to them, provided they followed the example of Domhnull Mor Og.
We find the same ethos in the Arctic. ‘The Eskimos regard the land and the game as belonging to everyone, inasmuch as they are all at the mercy of “the great woman who lies at the bottom of the sea and who sends out the game”. Consequently no hunter is ever spoken of as being good or bad, merely as being “successful” or “unsuccessful”, and the unsuccessful hunter and his family have as much right to live as everybody else. The practical advantage of hunting in a group is that each man gets part of the proceeds, even if he does not actually fell any animal.'58
M.R. Jarman put it in different words. ‘It is no surprise … to find that the red deer, an important constituent of the European fauna in so many areas for tens of millenia, seems to have been exploited in a controlled and rational fashion.’ The long dependence on red deer as a principal source of food in Europe shows that ‘the nature of the economic surplus extracted is such as to favour the successful continuance of the relationship, removing from the population individuals which biologically speaking can be spared. In many cases this comes down in practice to the preferential slaughter of young and early-mature males, a majority of the females being conserved for future breeding purposes.'59
Nevertheless only to become extinct over much of Scotland as soon as they became feudal property. Only in very remote areas, such as Rannoch, in the north of Perthshire, where royal decrees, letters of fire and sword, and repeated hornings and court edicts had little effect, deer stocks and small-scale native hunting carried on as before. In 1618, 89 members of Clan Gregor in Rannoch – a number which suggests a small deer drive – were fined for carrying hagbuts and pistols and killing wildfowl and venison.60 Similar charges of illegal hunting and fowling in Rannoch continue through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. As noted above, it appears that the natives turned to stealing domestic cattle after their forests had been destroyed to prevent their breaking the law by hunting. Burt reported that ‘the clans that had among them the most of villains addicted to these robberies, are said, by the people bordering on the Highlands, to be the Camerons, Mackenzies, the Broadalbin-men, the McGregors, and the McDonalds of Keppoch and Glenco. The chieftain of these last is said, by his near neighbours, to have little besides these depredations for his support; and the chief of the first, whose clan has been particularly stigmatised for those violences, has, as I am very well informed, strictly forbid any such vile practices, which has not at all recommended him to some of his followers.'61 It is not at all clear how these clans were to live, if both hunting and raiding were banned. In the case of the MacGregors, at least, the explicit intention was genocide: to extirpate them ‘root and branch’. (Far from succeeding, this ban imprinted the clan identity indelibly on every family affected.)
The various changes of the eighteenth century pacified the Highland population - but in the words given to Calgacus by Tacitus: 'To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire; they make a desolation and they call it peace.' From the feudal imposition onwards every imposed change prepared the way for the extinction of the Gaelic population. The period after 1746 and the third Disarming Act is marked everywhere by attempts to replace the calories once provided by fat venison by growing potatoes, increasing the area under cereal crops, dealing in store cattle, breaking out new crofts in marginal areas beyond the previous bounds of settlement, and earning cash by various means in order to buy oatmeal. The new diet was very unhealthy and these new enterprises placed an unsustainable burden on the fertility of the soil and on supplies of timber and fuel. In the second half of the eighteenth century the number of cattle grazed at the shealings in Strathavon was ‘quite out of proportion to the limited stocks which, because of the shortage of winter feed, were all that local tenants could maintain. It was, nevertheless, on the sale of their cattle that tenants relied for payment of their rent and the buying-in of meal, for at the best of times grain production was always inadequate.’ A tenant in a Highland parish could make money by taking in Lowland cattle for summer grazing at one merk per head, accommodating perhaps two or three times as many as he owned himself and far more than traditional land management allowed.62
The wealth that was
Few men have done more shooting in their lives than I have. Osgood Mackenzie (1842-1927).
An idea of what nature had once provided is given by Edward Burt, writing from Inverness in 1725. Strangely enough, he does not mention venison. For eight or nine months of the year ‘our principal diet consists of such things as you in London esteem to be the greatest rarities, viz. salmon and trout just taken out of the river, and both very good in their kind; partridge, grouse, hare, duck, and mallard, woodcocks, snipes, &c. each in its proper season. And yet for the greatest part of the year, like the Israelites who longed for the garlic and onions of Egypt, we are hankering after beef, mutton, veal, lamb, &c.’63 Some game abounded in a way that is now difficult to imagine. ‘Hares and the several kind of birds above-mentioned abound in the neighbouring country near the town, even to exuberance; rather too much, I think, for the sportsman’s diversion, who generally likes a little more expectation.’64
An even more exuberant picture is given by Osgood Mackenzie (1842-1927). It is unfair to stigmatise a single Victorian sportsman out of so many, but his career was a remarkable one and his account of it is remarkably detailed and vivid. Given his first gun by his mother at the age of nine, he went on through life to contribute vigorously to the extinction of wildlife on his various West Highland properties, supported by an unquestioning faith in the ability of Nature endlessly and copiously to provide. Nowhere in his memoirs does he link the disappearance of game, which he deplores, with his own sporting activities, though he does observe that things had changed. His father ‘never went out to kill a heavy bag. Such things were never boasted about in those times as now, when a man who shoots, say, one hundred brace in a day is looked up to as quite a hero. Except to vary the house diet and to give some game to a tenant, killing grouse was mere waste, there being no way to dispose of it, no steamers, no railways, no wheels to Gairloch to send the game broadcast all over the kingdom. There was then as much game as could be expected when the gamekeeper was merely a game-killer and never dreamed of trapping vermin.’65 In his grandfather’s day, early in the nineteenth century, grouse and deer were not very plentiful but there were lots of black game, ptarmigan, partridges, and ‘fine, fat, brown hares’ all round the crofting townships.66
He adhered to the belief that killing ‘vermin’ increased the supply of game. In the early nineteenth century, ‘vermin-trappers were only just then being started. In the old times all the lairds had in that line was a sealgair (hunter) who provided their big houses with venison and other game; for, until my father and uncles started stalking, not a Gairloch laird had ever troubled himself to kill deer either for sport or for the larder. The vermin consisted of all kinds of beasts and birds, a good many of which are now extinct. The fork-tailed kites swarmed, and I have heard that the first massacre of them that took place was when my father poisoned with strychnine the dead body of a young horse which had been killed by falling over a rock … The last kite had disappeared before my time. There were plenty of pine martens and polecats and some badgers even in my young days. My mother used to have an average of forty or fifty skins of martens brought to her by the keepers every year, of which she made the most lovely sable capes and coats for her sisters and lady friends. The pine martens, the polecats and the badgers are all quite extinct with us now, but they were all still in existence when I bought Inverewe’. ‘We still have in use a big rug of badgers’ skins in front of our smoking-room fire, all caught on this place, though, as in the case of the eagles, we had no wish to exterminate them like wildcats and foxes; in fact, we should have liked to preserve them, but they would not keep out of the vermin’s traps, and so they soon became extinct’.67
As a measure of what a dedicated vermin-catcher could achieve, the Glengarry estates maintained a record. In the three years from 1837 to 1840, one man employed for the purpose killed 198 wildcats, 246 martins, 106 polecats, 301 stoats and weasels, 67 badgers, 48 otters, 27 white-tailed sea-eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 peregrine falcons, 11 hobby hawks, 275 kites, 5 marsh-harriers, 63 goshawks, 285 common buzzards, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlins, 83 hen-harriers, 6 ger-falcons and 9 ash-coloured hawks, as well as 1431 crows, 475 ravens, 109 assorted owls, 8 magpies, and 78 house cats ‘going wild’.68 The stock of game increased in the short term, but the balance of nature was, to say the least, disturbed. In 1898 the new owner of Glengarry, Edward Ellice, noted that many of these species were by then almost extinct but that the real pests - the foxes, stoats, weasels, feral house cats and hooded crows – had increased.69
Shooting birds and collecting eggs were popular hobbies in the nineteenth century and responsible for many heedless extinctions. ‘A few pairs of black-throated divers still float about on our lochs, and sometimes rear their young, but sad to say they are diminishing in numbers, and many lochs where they used never to fail to breed are now without these beautiful and most interesting summer tenants. The red-throated divers, which I can quite well remember nesting on a small loch near the Fionn Loch, and also on lochs in the Rudhe ‘Re Point, have been extinct for close on seventy years’.70 The great northern diver was also fair game, the first he shot weighing 7.7kg (17lbs).71 As for eggs, being a typical Victorian child, 'When I was seven or eight years old, I was already quite a keen collector of eggs, and greatly coveted a clutch of those of the sea-eagle, which were always rare in this district.’ (He got them.) ‘I flattered myself for some time that I was the first to find in Britain, or at any rate in Scotland, a goosander’s nest with eggs, and that was in an island in the Fionn Loch.’ (He got them too.)
‘On our side of the loch, though the ground consisted of only bog, rocks, and heather, it was just about the best for grouse in our big parish. Shooting over it with dogs pretty late in the season, a cousin and I got 53 brace one day and 50? brace another day. In the year when Lord Medway had our shooting, his total bag was 412 brace, and his lordship got 100 brace in two days on the shores of the Fionn Loch… These flat moors used also to have, besides grouse, a lot of golden plovers nesting on them, with their charming little satellites, the dunlins… Nowadays not a plover or a dunlin is to be seen, and the grouse are very few and far between.’72 ‘The Lews was a wonderfully sporting island in those days. A connection of mine, a Captain Frederick Trotter, used to get as many as twelve hundred brace at Soval, besides endless snipe and golden plover, while hundreds of woodcock used to be shot out on the open moors over dogs in the winter. And now, as on the opposite mainland, game is nearly extinct.’73 Once on Isle Ewe ‘we saw a flock of twenty grouse. We soon perceived that they were not natives, for instead of being in the heather they sat in a row on the tops of the stone dykes and crowed incessantly. They all appeared to be cocks. So I went at them, and did not stop until I had got nineteen of them, only one escaping. Extra old cocks they were, as most of them had white feathers about their heads and white whiskers! We often wondered where they had come from’.74
Blue hares were once so numerous on the high tops that ‘I thought I must have at least fifty, as my gun had got so hot I could hardly hold it. Well, he gathered forty-seven. Twice I killed a brace of hares with one shot, as two of them happened to cross each other. We got quite a big bag that day… This hilltop (Beinn a Chaisgean) was also famous for ptarmigan in days gone by. [One proprietor] soon made a big bag, not by firing at them on the wing, but by taking pot shots at them on the ground, thus often getting several with one discharge. I am told that now there is not a hare and hardly any ptarmigan to be seen on those forty or fifty thousand acres.'75
The enormous quantities of game which once shared their home with the human population in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland – and to this picture we should add red deer – go far to explain how the people once not only lived but thrived. Osgood was mystified by this. ‘There is no doubt that the people of the west coast went through periods of terrible hunger in what we now speak of as “the good old times”, especially before the introduction of the potato. How they lived in pre-potato days is a mystery. But even prior to the destruction caused by the potato blight (1846-48), when the potatoes usually grew so well, there was hardly a year in which my grandfather and my father did not import cargoes of oatmeal to keep the people alive… One has only to look at the sites of the shealings even some miles from the sea, where great heaps of shells tell their tale. Shell-fish boiled in milk was a great stand-by in those days. I sometimes wonder that they did not carry the milk downhill to the coast rather than carry the shell-fish up to the hills.’76
He and his well-intentioned relatives lived too close to the facts to see that before the gap was filled after a fashion by imported oatmeal and the foreign potato, neither of them satisfactory as staples, the people had lived very largely on wild game, frugally exploited and supplemented with milk and the detested shell-fish. Before things changed, the natives of the Gairloch, like those of other Highland districts, had been equal share-holders in the not inconsiderable resources of their native parish.
