3 o8 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST 



But such conditions too eventually gave way, and for a 

 second time a drier climate ushered in a new forest growth, 

 the greatest forest that Scotland, as we know it, has ever 

 seen. Yet the new forest was different from the old. It 

 spread from the lowlands of Wigtownshire to the north of 

 Sutherland, but nowhere does it appear to have extended to 

 the islands of the Hebrides or to Shetland. On the mainland, 

 however, it reached far beyond the limits of the woodland 

 of to-day, clothing the mountains with its verdure to a height 

 of over 3000 feet, a good thousand feet above our highest 

 present day birch woods. Of equal interest is the fact that 

 the Upper Forest of the Peat was in the main composed of 

 a tree which has come to be particularly associated with 

 Scotland, the Scots Fir (Pinus sylvestris], which now for the 

 first time invaded northern Britain. 



It is no simple matter to compare forests of some eight 

 thousand years ago with those of to-day, but a rough cal- 

 culation, checked by reference to the conditions of a land so 

 little influenced by cultivation as Scandinavia, indicates that 

 the Upper Forest covered an area at least ten times as great 

 as that of our modern woods, that where they cover a 

 meagre twenty-fifth to twentieth of the land surface, it 

 overspread half the country (see Fig. 86, p. 484). 



In this great forest, the settlers of the New Stone Age 

 hunted the Reindeer and the Elk, the Red Deer, the 

 Roe, and the great Urus; in it they defended their flocks 

 from the ravages of the Brown Bear, the Wolf and the 

 Northern Lynx, and captured for the sake of their Mesh and 

 skins the Badger, the Otter and the Beaver. 



NATURE OR MAN 



Great as has been the destruction wrought by man in 

 our woodlands, the series of natural changes revealed in the 

 layers of our peat mosses should warn us lest we lay too 

 much to the charge of human interference. Man was well 

 established in Scotland at the period of the greatest develop- 

 ment of forest growth, and from that time till now has been 

 in continuous occupation, yet it would be a mistake to 

 imagine that the reduction of wooded area was entirely due 

 to his efforts. The peat mosses have another revelation to 

 make. 



