A History of the Native Woodlands of Scotland, 1500 - 1920

by T.C. Smout, Alan R. MacDonald, Fiona Watson

The first modern history of Scottish woodlands explores the changing relationship between trees and people from the time of Scotland's first settlement, focusing on the period 1500 to 1920. Drawing on work in natural science, geography and history, as well as on the authors' own research, it presents an accessible and readable account that balances social, economic and environmental factors. Two opening chapters describe the early history of the woodlands. The book is then divided into chapters that consider traditional uses and management, the impact of outsiders on the pine woods and the oakwoods in the first phase of exploitation, and the effect of industrialisation. Separate chapters are devoted to case studies of management at Strathcarron, Glenorchy, Rothiemurchus and on Skye.

434 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2004

About the author

Thomas Christopher Smout CBE, FBA, FRSE, FSA Scot, FRSGS is a Scottish academic, historian, author and Historiographer Royal in Scotland.

He has written extensively on demographic history and many aspects of economic history. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed the new discipline of environmental history in Scotland, giving the Ford Lectures in Oxford in 1999, published under the title of Nature Contested, Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600. His most recent publications in this field have been in woodland history and an environmental history of the Firth of Forth.