By Col Gordon (Follow Col’s work on Instagram HERE)
The Highland uplands are likely to face a number of challenges over the coming years. Subsidies are likely to start disappearing post-Brexit, the average age of Scottish farmers approaching 60, and land prices and capital costs making it very hard for new entrants not born into farming families. At the same time, with converging environmental crises and scrutiny of existing farming practices, there is an increased demand for approaches which deliver ecosystem services as well as producing better food.
In this blog post, I’ll explore some of the possibilities of using the indigenous Highland practice of using the hills in the summer to graze livestock, a practice known as transhumance or the Shieling System. We’ll take a look at the historic context of this system and how it worked in balance with the local ecosystem, and how a re-invented version of this could produce high value cheese and meats for new discerning markets. Finally, I’ll explore how Shielings could work with growing interest in re-wilding and how new entrant farmers might be drawn to working with the hills in this way.
Scottish Shielings: A historic and ecological context
According to the Hutton Institute, 51% of land in Scotland is classed as “capable of supporting only Rough Grazing,” whilst only 8% is “capable of supporting arable agriculture.” In the context of the Highlands, the first category will make up the vast majority of both the Western and Central parts of the region, with the tiny fraction of land “capable of supporting arable” confined almost exclusively to coastal areas on the tips of Easter Ross, the Black Isle, and Nairn. Frank Fraser Darling notes that “Not only is the land surface too rugged, but the environmental pressures are too great and have been too great for some thousands of years.”
But despite such a harsh environment, historically the native Highlanders carved out indigenous systems of subsistence that were perfectly balanced with their surroundings. Broadly speaking, these were very elegant, efficient and productive and operated within the means of the local ecologies.
At the heart of this were the Shielings, a system of transhumance, where livestock were herded from the low-lying glens and woodlands up into the hill in late spring to graze in the lush mountain pastures through the long summer months and then brought back down in the Autumn. The significance of this seasonal pattern to Highland culture was enormous, as the volume of songs and stories in the archives about the shielings and summer milking can attest to. Indeed, the primary Highland Festivals of old, Beltane and Samhain, were the marker dates for when the livestock would be moved up and down from the hills.
Whilst goats and sheep were kept, it was the hundreds of thousands of thrifty, hardy cattle that made up the bulk of the system. As Katharine Stewart puts it, “As the reindeer to the Lapps (sic), so the cattle were to the Highlander.” In high summer pastures these animals were milked daily in order to make butter and cheeses, which, along with cereal crops of barley, oats, peas and beans grown “infield” in the glens, made up the bulk of the Highland diet. Roy Dennis points out that by 1850, 150,000 cattle would be droved down to the meat markets in Falkirk each year from the Highlands, to meet increased demand from the rapidly growing towns for beef. “The number of cattle in the hills were incredible by today’s standards and their effect on the hill land was dramatic.” It is also worth noting that prior to the eighteenth century, cattle were not reared specifically for their meat. Kept as either dairy cattle or draught animals, the meat from these dual or tri-purpose animals was very much a by-product.
This annual movement up into the shielings allowed the land in lower glens and their woodland to be freed up to be rested or worked for subsistence cereal production throughout the growing season and for the hill pastures to be virtually undisturbed from the autumn until late spring (at this point deer numbers were drastically lower than they currently are). This maintained what was likely to have been much more of a mosaic of wild woodland, cultivated land and hill pasture than we find today. According to Darling, “The cattle husbandry and persistence of the forests were reasonably compatible and even complementary, for the cattle received shelter from the forest and the trees benefited from light cropping of the herbage floor, from the browsing and the manuring.”
Indeed, despite the harsh geological conditions, when there was still widespread woodland coverage in the Highlands when the livestock made their annual migration into the hills, “..the regenerative power of the forests represented a state of natural wealth far ahead of what the geological formations would indicate.”
With the end of the clan system, the beginning of the clearances and the coming of the sheep, the shieling system began to come to an end as did ecological balance that had been maintained. While there had been a gradual deterioration in the native woodland over a period of a thousand years, this deterioration was greatly accelerated by predominant livestock switching from cattle to sheep and then subsequently to red deer. Much of the fertility that had been built up in the uplands has now been removed leaving a generally degraded landscape.
Reay Clarke writes that, “The hardships suffered by the natives have been well recognised both in oral tradition and in literature but the land suffered too. The damage done to the environment by the abandonment of the transhumant system has not been widely recorded.”
Although the Highland shieling system has died out over the past couple hundred years, I’d suggest that this historic way of interacting with the landscape offers us ideas for a possible new vision of how the Highland landscape could be productively used to both address pressing environmental issues, and also to open us to new market opportunities.
Summer in the hills: Transhumance Cheesemaking
Across many of the mountainous regions of Western Europe these traditions of summer transhumance are still very much alive. Indeed many of the world’s greatest cheeses hail from these regions: Switzerland; the French Alps; the Pyrenees; the Auvergne; the mountainous regions of Northern Italy; Picos De Europa; these are all mountainous areas renowned for their world class cheeses made throughout the summer months. They do so in a way that maintains the highly diverse mountain pastures which in turn contribute to the flavours and quality of the milk and subsequent cheeses.
The demand for British regional cheeses has exploded in the past two decades, with a resurgence of small, farmstead cheeses being made across the UK. These cheeses tend to be of very high quality and value leading to the UK re-establishing itself as a world class cheese making country. As well as using traditional, regional recipes, these new cheesemakers are developing new recipes and creating new styles of cheese.
The possibility of the Highlands becoming a world class cheese region is not impossible to imagine. With its hardy native livestock breeds and long summer days, by taking cues from the methods and techniques of these regions that still practice transhumance cheesemaking, it could be possible to open up our hills again to this emerging market place.
In Nidderdale in the remote Yorkshire Dales, Andrew and Sally Hattan are starting to revive this approach, milking their 14 very rare Northern Dairy Shorthorn through the summer months to produce their traditional Wensleydale cheese, Stonebecks, which retails in specialist cheesemongers. Near Beauly, “The Shieling Project,” are exploring the possibilities of this kind of approach and making cheese (at a home scale) from their two Shetland cows. Jane Isaacson from Highland Fold Dairy, near Oban, is pioneering using milk from her herd of Highland cattle to create her amazing ice creams.
Quality Upland Meat
With regards meat, the native breeds that are suitable for making use of these marginal lands tend to be much smaller, slower growing and less productive than the commercial european breeds that have come to dominate over the past fifty years. But again, there is a growing demand for high welfare, grass fed meat that has been given the time to grow slowly, put down intramuscular marbling and develop deeper, richer flavours. High end butchers shops across the UK and restaurants have begun to favour these slow growing native breeds. For instance, the highly successful London butchery chain “Ginger Pig,” have built their business around using traditional, English Longhorn cattle, which need at least three years to come to maturity and which many chefs and restaurants regard as producing some of the finest beef around. Indeed “old meat” from retired dairy cows is a trend that is very much growing, with many food critics regarding well-aged steaks from mature dairy cows in Northern Spain to be some of the best in the world.
It is very possible to envision scenarios where our native breeds are able to be slowly reared by allowing them to have access to the Highland hills in summer, and collecting a “rent” each year for their long keep in the form of milk and cheese.
Rewilding with shielings
Another aspect worth noting is how well a reinvented shieling system could work within the growing interest in the “rewilding” narrative. In 1998 Roy Dennis wrote that “there is increasing interest in understanding the effects of mega-herbivores on forest ecosystems in Europe and a growing scepticism that the primeval forests were dark woodlands of densely growing trees. Instead, it is believed that fire and the large herbivores created mosaics on both large and small scales, and that in some places there were open “savannah-like” wooded grasslands.”
Since then, this approach has gained a lot of traction and interest, as typified by the highly successful “wilding” project at Knepp Estate in Sussex, which drew heavily on the work of one of the main proponents of this approach, the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera. According to Knepp’s website, “the battle between these two opposing forces of nature – animal disturbance and vegetation succession – generates habitat complexity and biodiversity. Reintroducing some of these animals to the landscape – using domestic descendants as proxies for some of the extinct species – can have a hugely positive impact on nature.”
New generation of herder-cheesemakers
But who are the people who actually take to the livestock to work with them in these midge filled hills I hear you asking? Where are we going to find these herders-cheesemakers from? A very valid question, with no easy answers. But again we can look to Europe and the transhumance systems there for clues:
In France, according to Michel Meuret and Fred Provenza, the skills of transhumant herding and shepherding were traditionally past down through the generations within families, but now there is an increased number of young, urban people with no agricultural backgrounds, who are being drawn to the profession and are learning their skills through modern “Herding Schools” which have popped up throughout the country. “For rural young people in the mid-twentieth century, the image of a herder condemned to tend a flock of sheep had only negative connotations: it was associated with boredom, hardship, isolation, and unsociability. The situation is quite different today: the image of the shepherd has become a source of fantasy as well as profit.”
Importantly, it would appear that recently these professions have gained new found recognition as respectful occupations which has in part fuel the increased interest in this work.
Whilst far from being conclusive, this example suggests that the situation could be somewhat similar in the Highlands, if a similar approach to using the hills was seen as a viable option and a respectful profession. Given that the University of the Highlands and Islands are now offering postgraduate courses in “Sustainable Mountain Development,” it would indicate that there are plenty of people already interested in making the sustainable development of the Highland’s hills their career.
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Although it wouldn’t appear to be either realistic or desirable to try to wholesale recreate the shieling system, it could point us in a direction of how we might make better use of our upland landscape and in doing so restore a part of our cultural heritage. As Frans Vera says, “the intention is not to try to recreate the past. That will always be impossible. Our world is irrevocably changed. But we can try and create something interesting and valuable with nature, using the components that are left to us.”
References –
https://www.hutton.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/soils/lca_leaflet_hutton.pdf
https://knepp.co.uk/the-inspiration
https://www.roydennis.org/o/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CATTLE4.pdf
https://www.stonebeckcheese.co.uk/
https://www.theshielingproject.org/
https://www.highland-fold.co.uk/
https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/courses/msc-sustainable-mountain-development/
Clarke, Reay D.G. – Reay Country: The story of a Sutherland Farming Family
Darling, F. Fraser – West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology
Grant, I.F. – Highland Folk Ways
Meuret, Michel & Provenza, Fred – The Art and Science of Shepherding
Stewart, Katharine – Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Farming culture in the Highlands of Scotland
Very informative! Thank you
Yes we found this subject really exciting too! So many benefits to reviving the shielings.
Great! Thanks Wojciech.
Really interesting blog post, the prospect of reviving shieling culture is a welcome one!