by Jim Crumley
CHAPTER 4
The Rabid Droves
It is related that William the Conqueror left the dead bodies of the English upon the battlefield to be devoured by worms, wolves, birds and dogs. When Waltheof, the son of Siward, with an invading Danish army arrived in the Humber in September 1069, and reinforced by the men of Northumbria, made an attack on York, it is related that 3,000 Normans fell. A hundred of the chiefest rank were said to have fallen amongst the flames by the hand of Waltheof himself, and the Scalds of the North sang how the son of Siward gave the corpses of the Frenchmen as a choice banquet for the Wolves of Northumberland.
– J.E. Harting, British Mammals Extinct Within Historic Times (1880)
PROFESSOR JAMES EDMUND HARTING, FLS., FZS, liked his bile undiluted when he dipped his pen in it. The commonest word used by the Victorian generations to describe the presence of wolves in the landscape is ‘infest’. Harting embraced it particularly eagerly. It even has an entry in his index: ‘Wolf . . . districts formerly infested’. It is used at its most potent in this:
In 1848 there were living in Lochaber old people who related from their predecessors, that when all the country from the Lochie to Loch Erroch [the River Lochy north of Fort William to Loch Ericht south-west of Dalwhinnie] was covered by a continuous pine forest, the eastern tracts upon the Blackwater and the wild wilderness stretching towards Rannach [Rannoch Moor] were so dense and infested by the rabid droves, that they were almost impassable.
You have to admit it is a powerful image. His Victorian audience would have nodded enthusiastic agreement, and it has gone unchallenged into the literature of wolves. But let’s see.
Suspending for the moment all rational thought and scrutiny of the evidence, and assuming for the sake of the argument that the last wolf really did die in 1743, the old people of Lochaber in 1848 were reaching back 105 years, so the oral testimony had lived long enough to have been mangled by three if not four generations, and as we have seen already, wolf stories do not survive the passage of time with their credibility enhanced. Then there is the bit about Rannoch Moor and tracts of pine forest so dense and infested by the rabid droves that they were almost impassable. Frank Fraser Darling, one of the best of the twentieth century’s scientist-naturalists, and a founder of the Nature Conservancy Council, wrote in The Highlands and Islands (1964), that Rannoch Moor ‘may have been extensively wooded as recently as Roman times’. Darling’s implication was that the most recent era of woodland cover on the Moor was earlier rather than later. It certainly was, at the very least, far beyond the recall of the old people of Lochaber in the mid-nineteenth century, and for that matter far beyond the reach of knowledge that might have been handed down to them. What was handed down was a storytelling tradition, and that tradition demonised the wolf the length and breadth of the land.
Then there is the phrase ‘infested by the rabid droves’. There are two things wrong there. One is that wolves do not move around in droves. They move in packs, or they move in twos and threes, or, as often as not, in summer, they move alone. A pack of European wolves is commonly anything between three and a dozen, exceptionally more than that, and, in summer, wolves rarely travel in packs at all. Packs defend their territories against neighbouring packs, and in a country the size of Scotland, territories would have covered several hundred square miles at least. So the possibility of droves of wolves does not exist, and it never did. Droves are simply not in the nature of wolves.
And then there is the implication that the only kind of droves you would encounter if you were foolish enough to attempt to force a passage through the impassable forest were rabid ones. Yes, there could well have been rabies in Highland Scotland three or four hundred years ago when Harting’s wolves were infesting, and a rabid wolf is a serious problem for any creature unfortunate enough to encounter one, including human creatures. But so for that matter is a rabid bunny, a rabid sheep-dog, or a rabid man. And there is no evidence to show that wolves were more susceptible to rabies than any other species. But there were always far fewer wolves than most other mammals in their landscape (for that is the nature of top predators – you can only have an abundance of predators when there is a superabundance of prey), so it becomes clear that Harting’s casual use of the word ‘rabid’ is but one more ill-informed insult routinely hurled at the wolf’s head. If, however, Harting used ‘rabid’, not to indicate rabies, but to characterise the wolf as ‘furious, raging, madly violent in nature or behaviour’ (alternative dictionary definition), the charge still sticks, for that too is unforgivable distortion of the reality of wolves. Harting waded knee-deep in the careless wolf prose of his contemporaries and his predecessors and represented it as more or less unquestionable fact.
Alas for the historical reputation of the wolf in Britain, much of the pigswill he brewed in the wolf chapters of his book (91 pages compared with 36 for wild boar, 18 for reindeer, 28 for beaver and 22 for bear – he enjoyed himself with wolves) has gone into the language. Worse, it is still quoted today, and not just by the gamekeeping fraternity where you might expect it, but also by elements within the conservation movement as casual with the truth as he was himself. His book is still widely available, thanks to a 1972 facsimile edition. The publishers would not have served the cause of wolves any worse by republishing Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs.
One of his sources for the ‘rabid droves’ extract above was an 1848 book, Lays of the Deer Forest, by the brothers Sobieski-Stuart, two Germans who claimed to be the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Victorians looked upon their claims of Jacobite aristocracy with a peculiar strain of romantic approval rather than as evidence that they might be complete fruitcakes, like most people who claim direct descent from the prince to this day, apparently secure in their belief that a Stuart will sit once again on the throne of Scotland. Aye, and hell will have frozen over. Harting lobs dollops of their grist into his mill without qualification or the mildest murmur of suspicion. But one of the most comprehensive and astute works on the history of Scotland’s forests and the notion of the Great Wood of Caledon in particular, places the Sobieski-Stuarts where they belong, which is firmly in the fruitcake category. The Native Woodlands of Scotland, 1500–2000, by T.C. Smout, Alan R. MacDonald, and Fiona Watson (2005) observes:
The Great Wood took on an altogether new lease of life in 1848 when the main ingredients of the modern myth were supplied by the Sobieski-Stuarts in their best-selling Lays of the Deer Forest . . . they claimed to be experts in the Gaelic past, and devised a compilation of poetry, aristocratic and romantic hunting stories, alleged clan histories, supposed folklore and natural history . . . They spoke of a Caledonia Silva, ‘the great primeval cloud which covered the hills and plains of Scotland before they were cleared’, and its ‘skirt’, a great forest filled with game and wolves that had occupied the Province of Moray, much of it surviving until recent times when ruthless and greedy modern man swept it away.
And after a passage that considered the climatic changes following the early Bronze Age and their consequences for the native forest, Smout, MacDonald and Watson write:
In these circumstances, we would have greatly to reduce any estimates of woodland cover 5,000 years ago, perhaps by one-half, to arrive at a figure for 2,000 years ago. For a quarter of the land surface to have been wooded then would seem a possible figure. The present woodland cover of Scotland stands at 17 per cent, most of it plantation, and it is frequently urged upon us that the percentage should become much higher. There are many good arguments for planting trees in Scotland – to maintain employment, to give pleasure, to help carbon sequestration and to assist nature conservation. But it seems there may be fewer arguments from history than usually assumed, and none for restoring the fantastical Great Wood of Caledon.
Even if the figure for 2000 years ago was as much as a third of the land surface – so twice the extent of today’s tree cover – it was quite unlike Harting’s much-quoted portrait. It was not jungle, it was an ai
ry northern forest flayed by Atlantic and Arctic winds. A restored national forest covering a third of the landscape is a sublime ambition for twenty-first-century Scotland, but only if it is a good forest with much-reduced commercial plantation, only if we recruit the wolf to manage the deer in the forest and beyond it.
But myths die hard once the folk mind has embraced them. Generations of writers regurgitated Harting (and therefore the Sobieski-Stuarts) and called it research. Only in the last few years has a more rigorous questioning of old sources begun. My own interest in such questioning is that a search for a new and more enlightened path through the impassable forests and the rabid droves will surely create a climate in which a fair hearing for the wolf is possible at last, and that as a result the wolf will be restored to its rightful place in the Scottish landscape.
It is also clear that Harting and many of his adherents wrote about the wolf and its Scottish habitat from a distance and in profound ignorance, a state of affairs that has contributed to myth-making and misunderstanding across almost every aspect of Scottish history. Harting quotes an earlier historian:
Camden, whose Britannia was published in 1586, asserts that wolves at that date were common in many parts of Scotland, and particularly refers to Strathnavern. ‘The county,’ he says, ‘hath little cause to brag of its fertility. By the reason of the sharpness of the air it is very thinly inhabited, and thereupon extremely infested with the fiercest of Wolves, which to the great damage of the county, not only furiously set upon cattle, but even upon the owners themselves, to the manifest danger of their lives.’
Thus Harting compounds the worst of felonies for a historian, or for that matter, a nature writer. Anyone who knows anything at all about the history of Strathnaver in Sutherland will realise at once that neither Harting nor Camden had ever set foot in the place. A writer like David Craig, on the other hand, knows Strathnaver intimately, and paints a very different kind of landscape in his book On the Crofters’ Trail (1990), the most powerful, vivid and compassionate reading of the Highland Clearances. The Clearances, to adapt Camden’s wildly misdirected fiction, set upon the owners of those cattle nowhere more furiously than in Strathnaver. David Craig found lists of the evictees from Strathnaver in 1819, and there were 1,288 people on those lists, and that was the second clearing of Strathnaver. He unearthed the testimony of Angus Mackay, who had been cleared ‘at the first burning in 1814’, to the Napier Commission 70 years later. He said they had been ‘reasonably comfortable’ in their old home.
‘You would see a mile or half a mile between every town; there were four or five families in each of these towns, and bonnie haughs between the towns, and hill pasture for miles, as far as they could wish to go. The people had plenty of flocks of goats, sheep, horses and cattle, and they were living happy . . . with flesh and fish and butter and cheese and fowl and potatoes and kail and milk too. There was no want of anything with them; and they had the Gospel preached to them at both ends of the strath . . . and in several other towns the elders and those who were taking to themselves to be following the means of grace were keeping a meeting once a fortnight – a prayer meeting amongst themselves – and there were plenty gathering, so that the houses would be full.’
David Craig continues:
If anyone is inclined to dismiss this kind of thing as rose-tinted nostalgia, consider that the Sutherland estate itself reported that the ‘general level of welfare’ in Strathnaver was good.
What you realise as you walk all over the cleared lands of Scotland is that they were emptied because they were good places: that is, fit for the new large flocks of big southern sheep to feed on even in winter. Their greenness stands out today as though lit by some unfailing sunray among the brown heather moors. They are also picked out by pale blazes of the sheep, which still choose to browse there because ground that has once been cleared of stones, trenched for drainage, puddled by the hooves of animals, delved and fertilised over generations, maintains almost indefinitely its power to raise dense, juicy grass. If you stroke it, it feels tender. If you were blind, you would feel its resilience under your feet, as against the squelching or lumpy texture of the unimproved land round about – which also could have been improved by now, like the Yorkshire Dales or the Dolomite Alps, if crofting life had been allowed to go on evolving.
Strathnaver has been settled and made increasingly fertile at least since the broch builders, which is to say between 2,000 and 3,000 years.
So consider again Camden’s assessment: ‘The county hath little cause to brag of its fertility . . . it is very thinly inhabited and thereupon extremely infested with the fiercest of wolves, which to the great damage of the county not only furiously set upon cattle but even upon the owners themselves, to the manifest danger of their lives.’ Consider the willingness with which Harting seized on it because it so suited his purpose of demonising the wolf, but not one word of it was true. If Harting paused once to consider how true it might or might not be, he kept his thoughts to himself. They were, of course, neither the first nor the last to misrepresent the Highlands in print from the twin blind spots of ignorance and distance. Some of the others, you might think, should have known better. As David Craig points out, when the Duchess of Sutherland married the Marquis of Stafford in 1785, ‘at first they thought they had only 3,000 tenants – actually there were 15,000.’
The truth is that the Highland Clearances could never have happened if the land had not first been cleared of wolves. Flooding the glens with big, slow, dim-witted southern sheep would not have been such a realistic business proposition if the Highlands had still been infested with the rabid droves. So arguably the worst humanitarian disaster ever inflicted on the Highland people could never have been effected without first imposing unarguably its worst ecological disaster.
From the moment the last wolf died, nature in the Highlands – in all Scotland, all Britain – lurched out of control. It still is out of control, and it will remain out of control until the day the wild wolf is put back. In a northern hemisphere country like this, if the wolf is in place everything in nature makes sense, but in the absence of wolves nothing in nature makes sense. In Scotland, instead of a top predator with the power to influence ecosystems, there are only eagles and a critically dwindling population of wild cats.
In the rest of Britain even these are absent, and there is nothing more predatory on the face of the land than a badger boar and a stroppy roebuck. Instead, your species and mine has persuaded itself that it can do the wolf’s job, be the top predator and influence ecosystems. But we have added the un-wolf-like characteristic of trying to bully nature into submissive compliance. Nature resists, of course, but in an island country like ours, it has not yet invented a way to reintroduce the wolf. The next land-bridge to mainland Europe is still a few geological upheavals in the future, so it falls to us to put the wolf back, then be prepared to have it show us where we have gone wrong, how we might right those wrongs, and how to paint our mountains.
Meanwhile, Harting had been supping with the Sobieski-Stuarts again.
Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, large tracts of forests in the Highlands were purposely cut down or burned, as the only means of expelling the Wolves which there abounded.
If that was true, if large tracts of Highland forest were being cut down or burned, it is highly unlikely that the wolves which there abounded would have considered themselves expelled. Wolves don’t need forests. They exist everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, from Alaska to New Mexico, and in every conceivable habitat that such a geographical spread implies. Destroying a forest that held a wolf pack’s entire territory would probably have made no bigger impact than to persuade the pack to redraw the boundaries of its territory, possibly to challenge a neighbouring pack, or to move to an area where there were no wolves. Bearing in mind that in the early seventeenth century the wolf was less than 200 years from extinction and had already suffered at least 500 years of hef
ty persecution, there would be plenty of wolfless country available to a disturbed pack. If that was true . . .
The Sobieski-Stuarts, quoted by Harting, had written:
On the south side of Ben Nevis, a large pine forest, which extended from the western braes of Lochaber to the Black Water and the mosses of Rannach, was burned to expel the Wolves. In the neighbourhood of Loch Sloi, a tract of woods nearly twenty miles in extent was consumed for the same purpose.