Our Assistant Editor in the Field

Ella Leith meets Sam Harrison

Ella Leith

Welly-deep in muck, Sam Harrison is pointing out various wildflowers to a rapt audience of adults and children; behind him, the brae stretches up to dissolve into woodland; below, a glittering river weaves through the wide glen floor. This is Glen Strathfarrar, just outside of Beauly, near Inverness. It’s the kind of spot where you don’t have phone signal, let alone data, and you really don’t miss it. Here, Sam and his family live and run The Shieling Project— a place-based learning centre exploring the natural and cultural heritage of shieling life and traditional outdoor living. The shieling (an àirigh, in Gaelic) is a Scottish example of transhumance— a practice common to pastoral societies across the world —in which livestock are moved up into the hills, or inland from the coast, to graze on the summer grasses.

But today, I’m in Malta and speaking to Sam involves a complicated technological wrangling of handsfree Skype calls across two thousand miles. As we speak, Sam is driving south from Helmsdale, Sutherland, and the roar of the A9 is the backing track to our chat. And yet Sam is still in his element. He’s on his way back from setting up a new Shieling Project site, and his enthusiasm is just as compelling and contagious, despite the screech of passing lorries.

The Shieling Project, Sam tells me, draws on a particular tradition of land-use in the Highlands: “a tradition of how people used to live and work with the landscape, in the landscape.” At Beltane, the May Day festival marking the beginning of summer, cattle would be driven up from the main settlement, the ‘wintertown’, to the shieling. There, a portion of the community— typically women, young people, and children —would live alongside the cattle for several weeks in temporary or semi-permanent homes, herding them between the best pastures, and making butter and cheese for the winter. Practised in Scotland for at least two thousand years, this way of life declined from the eighteenth century onwards, when the Highlands were aggressively depopulated in the era known as The Clearances. By the twenty-first century, few people— including Sam —had ever heard of shielings.

The project was born of Sam’s longstanding passion for place-based learning. About a decade ago, he was working in Argyll: "Just me and my backpack, working with schools, going on day trips exploring the places around where the kids lived, and introducing them to the stories, or the place-names, or the Gaelic history, or the plants. And then whilst I was doing that, I was introduced to the idea of the shieling."

For Sam, the discovery was a revelation. "It was like this little jewel of an idea that reflected all the issues that I wanted to get into— about sense of place, about connection to the landscape, about understanding your history, about sustainable lives…It made sense for education, because kids were central to the shieling— that was the time when they would be quite autonomous, often up at the shielings on their own...I just got excited about it."

That much is obvious, but there’s a long road between getting excited about an idea and putting it into practice. “I did a lot of procrastinating,” Sam says blithely. This included a PhD in place-based learning at Moray House School of Education in Edinburgh. “And then once I finished my PhD, I thought, right, I can’t really procrastinate any more, and finally...I just started.”

The first step was finding a suitable site. This was no easy task. Living out of the back of his car, Sam visited eighty-five different estates near Inverness to try to find the perfect spot— and then to persuade the landowner to lease it to him. Eventually the estate in Glen Strathfarrar leased him ten acres. After another year of legal and bureaucratic wrangling to set up the project formally, in 2015 he and his family moved into a derelict cottage, just up the track from the village of Struy. The Shieling Project took root down in the glen floor. The site itself is not a former shieling; it’s where the wintertown would have been. But in the hills above, about an hour’s walk away, is a shieling site— recognisable from the patches of particularly lush growth.

"Sometimes you won’t find anything apart from a really big patch of green, and that’s because the people and the cows stayed there at night-time and were trampling up the earth and pooing everywhere, so that kind of fertility is left there in the hills even now— a hundred and fifty years on, you can still see that green imprint. Initially, I knew it was a shieling because I just saw the vegetation change completely in that area; when the bracken died away, I went up and found thirty-odd different structures. They’re everywhere; I think there’s about 6,000 of them recorded in the Highlands, but in my wandering around the hills, I’ve found at least fifteen or twenty unrecorded ones. There’s probably ten times more than that."

Back down in the glen, Sam got to work setting up the outdoor education centre, assisted by his family, a team of volunteers, and visiting school groups: From a site with nothing on it, we worked to slowly build all the infrastructure. The first thing we did was to build some compost toilets, and then worked our way up from there. I think we’ve built about fifteen different structures— some small things, like wood stores; some really big things, like our classroom, which is twelve metres by nine metres squared. We wanted to be fully involved in the whole construction. Early visitors slept in borrowed Scout tents, but there are now six accommodation bothies, the only structures built by professionals. The site is off-grid too, making use of solar panels and a biomass boiler that runs on wood from the community woodland.

But the land itself is nutrient poor, a degraded ecosystem that hadn’t been farmed since the 1820s: "We have an 1822 map that shows some of the crops and field boundaries, and we can still see the piles of stones that they cleared, so we kind of know where the fields were. But a lot were completely overgrown. We started off getting our pigs working over some of the fields, and we brought our Shetland cattle on, so they’ve been doing some really positive, beneficial grazing. We fenced the deer out— just by doing that, we got a lot of natural regeneration. Then, after a couple of years of the pigs working through the land, and us removing the stones that the pigs dug up, we started growing crops. The crops are mostly traditional grains, Bere Barley (Hordeum vulgare) and Black Oats (Avena strigosa), which are suitable for the rocky soil and Highland climate. But their resilience makes hand-harvesting and processing the crops labour intensive (Black Oats are very difficult to get out of their husks), and farming in the depleted soil is still hit and miss: We are getting better at it now— we’re getting our skills together at the same time as working with the land to bring it up to health, but it’s going to take a lot of work. But we produce some really fantastic manure on-site, so we’re trying to do it in a regenerative way."

It is for this reason that using modern grain varieties is a non-starter, as these typically need to be planted with a nugget of oil fertiliser to have a chance; moreover, they’ve been bred to have short stalks, as there’s less need for straw these days: "The old varieties have this massive long stalk, which can be used for thatch and weaving things like baskets and chair backs. So, we get more resource from the old varieties."

In its first year, The Shieling Project participated in a trial by The Gaia Foundation and The James Hutton Institute, looking at how deliberately mixing crops like Peas (Pisum sativum) and Oats in the same field allowed them to mutually support each other. “We’ve kept that going,” Sam says, “and we’re looking also at under-sowing Clover (Trifolium spp.), so that once you’ve harvested the crops, the Clover comes up. We’re looking at those kinds of combinations, because monocropping is just not healthy, and it requires a big input of fertiliser to maintain. It’s just not what we want to do.”

Visitors to The Shieling Project get involved in all aspects of the site’s development and continuing life— building and fixing structures, clearing stones from the fields, sowing and harvesting, foraging for supplies, and, of course, milking and herding the cows. Cattle were central to the lives of Highland communities for centuries, but once they stopped being lucrative for big landowners, they and the communities became expendable. By the late eighteenth century, the high demand for mutton and wool meant sheep had become the most valuable livestock. And caring for an immense flock of sheep needed far fewer humans than tending cattle did. For this reason, among others, huge numbers of Highlanders were evicted— often forcibly. Some were moved to the coast, others to the cities, and yet more abroad. The Clearances caused a great deal of human suffering —commemorated in folk songs and stories still told today —but, Sam tells me, “the land also suffered”.

"The way that cows graze is non-specific, and the combination of this and their manure actually increases biodiversity in the hills. It wasn’t just an extractive relationship with the landscape— it was that the cows were suited to our hills, and so the hills gave back. It was a really well-balanced system. But sheep graze selectively. If you have too many of them on a piece of ground, they’ll eat the best things first, and then the second best things, and then the third best things, and all that biodiversity is destroyed. The sheep boom didn’t last, and soon many estates began to turn to deer as a source of income, catering to the sporting interests of wealthy industrialists. The problem was, there weren’t actually that many deer in the Highlands at the time... There were so few deer in Glen Strathfarrar that the head stalker, who was setting up the first deer shooting run, actually brought in loads to try to boost up the numbers. And they’re like sheep— they’re selective grazers, they strip down a lot of the richness that the cattle system put into the landscape. Most hunting estates actually feed their deer through the winter, so they’re artificially maintaining a number of deer that is higher than the current capacity of the ecosystem. It does a massive amount of damage. There always should be, and will be, deer in the Highlands, but the number that we have at the moment is way outside what the ecosystem can support."

The image that most people have of the Scottish Highlands as a naturally lonely and heathery wilderness is, in fact, the product of these changes in land use. The very desolation that sets hearts fluttering was described by ecologist Frank Fraser Darling (1903-1979) as a ‘wet desert.’ But this depleted biodiversity is a comparatively recent phenomenon: Before the nineteenth century, the landscape would have looked completely different. It wasn’t quiet or peaceful— it would have been full of noise. You would have had hordes of people and cows up in the hills; Drumochter, one of the main passes into the Highlands, had six thousand cows in it every summer. So there would be people moving up and down from the hills, people from the wintertown bringing supplies up and taking the butter down, and much more woodland and greenery. The whole romantic idea of the Highlands as desolate hills full of deer is a product of the Victorian era.

Sam continues: "The shieling system certainly wasn’t perfect, and we don’t want to romanticise it or trivialise it— and I think that people who come to the project realise very quickly that it’s not that romantic, when they’ve got to get up early and look after the cows. It was a hard life. But it was also a system that was mutually beneficial, a really sustainable way of utilising that summer growth up in the hills."

At the time of its demise in Scotland, agriculturalists were “very derogatory” about the “primitiveness” of seasonal transhumance, “but recently there’s been a sense of looking back to some of our old practices and re-evaluating them, and realising that actually this isn’t as primitive as we thought it was”.

There’s an interesting dynamic between continuity and change at play, Sam concludes: "With The Shieling Project, we’re trying to straddle that. We’re not trying to re-live the past— we’re not all dressing up in period costume or kilts, and we’ve got lots of modern technology that is appropriate for what we need. But that’s what’s interesting about what we’re trying to do— and about what’s happening more broadly in the Highlands at the moment, that we’re just a part of. People are interested in looking at what regenerative agriculture means, at how community ownership and different traditions of land use can be transformative. It certainly doesn’t mean a completely fresh take. I think it means keeping one foot in the past— looking to the past to find new systems for the future…We run courses, day sessions, residential trips...We’re just trying to inspire folk about the skills that people used to have, and then look at the future with those skills. Because all those issues are still really present— how we produce our food, how we look after the land, what we know about the natural world. They’re all really pressing concerns."

Images: Reproduced with the kind permission of Sam Harrison and The Shieling Project.

To find out more about The Shieling Project, visit www.theshielingproject.org