Thomas Pennant and Scotland’s Ancient Trees

Alex Deans

Monochrome illustration of a huge, split yew tree, with two leafy outgrowths on each side of a rent and serrated trunk. Subtitled "Yew tree at Fortingal".
Paul  Sandby, ‘Yew tree at Fortingal’ from Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland 1769. Digitised by The National Library of Wales.

The first illustration that a reader would find on opening the original edition of Thomas Pennant’s Tour of Scotland in 1769, is a tiny picture of the ancient Yew Tree at Fortingall, near Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands. When he visited Fortingall, Pennant measured the Yew’s trunk at 56 feet in circumference. Still alive today—though much reduced in size­—the Fortingall Yew is thought to be between 3000 and 9000 years old. Along with descriptions of preserved tree trunks discovered in bogs, and relict woodlands of Scots Pine in the Highlands, the Fortingall Yew links Pennant’s Tour to a landscape far older than its author could have imagined.  

For Pennant, Scots Pine woods in particular offered a tantalising glimpse of a very different environment to that which existed in eighteenth-century Scotland: one populated by wolves, bears, beavers, and the giant, lion-maned cattle described by the sixteenth-century chronicler Hector Boece, whose writing inspired William Shakespeare’s ‘Tragedy of Macbeth’. The play famously ends with Macbeth’s enemies felling Birnam Wood and using the branches to screen their march upon his stronghold. Passing Birnam in 1769, Pennant dryly remarks that the wood ‘seems never to have recovered the march its ancestors made to Dunsinane’ (p. 74). A similar note of scepticism occurs when Pennant mentions the legendary Caledonian Forest, or Sylva Caledonia, again citing Boece: ‘It is very slightly mentioned by the antients; but the supposed extent is given by the Scottish historian.’ (p. 209)

It is now generally agreed that a warmer, wetter climate had begun reduce the extent of the Scotland’s boreal forests by 2000 BCE. Making his way through the south-west Highlands, Pennant writes that ‘the pine-forests are become very rare’, describing this leg of his tour as ‘truly melancholy, almost one continued scene of dusky moors, without arable land, trees, houses, or living creature, for numbers of miles.’ (p.183). But earlier in his journey, Pennant had visited thriving woods of Scots Pine in Deeside, Aberdeenshire, where he writes of ‘a distant view of hills over a surface of verdant pyramids of pines.’ (p.108)

Such passages seem to raise questions about the natural and human history of the landscape. Did the whole country look like this in the distant past? Hints of ancient woods contrasted with the mostly treeless landscape that Pennant observed on his travels in Scotland, suggesting the ways in which human activity had shaped the environment in centuries past, and the ways it could do so in the future. Indeed, many of the woodlands that most impressed Pennant during his Tour in Scotland 1769 were not natural at all, but the plantations and designed landscapes surrounding stately homes such as Taymouth Castle.

Painting from above of a wooded river valley with the gleaming walls of Taymouth castle highlighted in a large bend in the river, with softly-lit mountains beyond under a bright cloudy sky, and a prominent tree in the left foreground.
James Norie, ‘Taymouth Castle’ (1733). National Galleries of Scotland collection.

Scotland’s lack of mature trees became a traveller’s cliché in the eighteenth-century, thanks partly to Dr Samuel Johnson, who made his own tour of Scotland after Pennant in 1773, and memorably quipped that ‘A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice’.[1] It’s worth noting that Johnson here refers largely to Scotland’s east coast: ‘From the bank of the Tweed to St Andrews’—not that the Hebrides would do much to alter his opinion. Pennant had made a similar observation in his Tour in Scotland 1769 when he wrote of ‘a vast nakedness from the Humber, as far as the extremity of Caithness’ (p.14). Significantly, Pennant identifies this issue with a vast stretch of Britain’s coastal geography, rather than Scotland in particular.

It sometimes feels as if Pennant’s writing on Scotland’s trees (or lack thereof) brings together two competing eighteenth-century urges: a gentlemanly desire for a rational, productive landscape, and a naturalist’s curiosity for a wilder past, when ‘great part of our island was a meer waste, a tract of woods and fen’.[2] Pennant’s tours of Scotland show that he was deeply aware of what the absence of woodland meant for the wellbeing of both animals and people, and that he saw potential afforestation as a way of improving the landscape, regardless of what its ancient state might have been.

[1] Ronald Black (ed.), To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson’s Tour of the Western Isles of Scotland and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011), p.7.

[2] British Zoology (London: 1768),II, p.513