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machair, a thin strip of meadows and grassland which, so long as the sheep don’t get there first, is
full of wild flowers – purple orchids by the hundreds, blue harebells and the purple and yellow
flowers of heartsease, the wild pansy. A couple of miles further inland, beyond the reach of the
wind-blown shell sand, the moss and dark rushes are back, signalling the return of the acid lands.
The white beaches are also spread along the north coast, but there they are not needed to help
the soil. The older gneisses and schists of the Highlands, among the oldest rocks in the world, are
replaced by alkaline sandstone. Green grass grows far inland in Caithness at the extreme north-east
tip of the mainland, and is rich enough to support large herds of sleek black cattle. The fertility of
the sandstone soil is even more remarkable in the Orkneys, now a few miles from the Caithness
coast but joined to it until 7,000 years ago. On the east coast, there is good low-level farmland
around the Moray Firth near Inverness and inland of Aberdeen, at the eastern edge of the
Cairngorms. One deep geological fault divides the Highlands along the Great Glen, running
between Inverness and Fort William. Another fault line runs between Stonehaven, on the east coast
just below Aberdeen, and Loch Lomond to the north of Glasgow. This southern fault line separates
the Highlands from the rich farmland of the Central Lowlands, which is also the location of the
major cities of Dundee, Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Most of the 5.2 million Scots live in this
Central Belt, a great many having moved there from the Highlands. Further south the ground rises
again to form the hills of the Southern Uplands. Lower and less rugged than the Highlands, these
hills have been eroded by glaciers into smooth-topped plateaux separated by narrow, flat-bottomed
valleys. Beyond the hills, the valleys open out into the rolling farmland that surrounds the River
Tweed, which flows into the North Sea at Berwick on the east coast. On the west side of the
Southern Uplands, the hills give way to the Galloway peninsula and the flat lands bordering the
Solway Firth.
Since the whole of Scotland was under thick ice until the end of the Ice Age and again during
the cold snap of the Younger Dryas, it isn’t surprising that no evidence, yet, has been found in
Scotland of Palaeolithic settlements such as remain in the Cheddar Caves in south-west England.
The first signs of human occupation are not found until well after the cold snap and, as in Ireland,
these are Mesolithic settlements at or near the coast. The earliest dated site is at Cramond, on the
southern shore of the Firth of Forth, only 3 miles from the centre of Edinburgh. It is a picturesque
spot, with a small terrace of old houses on one bank of the River Almond, where it flows into the
Firth. Swans and ducks bob around in the quiet tree-lined bay and, when I visited on a crisp sunny
day in November, I could not have imagined a better spot for a bit of hunter-gathering. A seashore
for shellfish and wading birds, a medium-size freshwater river for salmon. All that would have
been missing was the cappuccino that was steaming on the table in front of me. The Cramond
remnants, a few microliths and the bony evidence of past meals, are dated to about 10,000 years
ago. There are no signs of permanent settlement at Cramond, no post-holes as at Mount Sandel in
Ireland, so it was probably just one of many places where the small bands of humans used to camp
for a while as they moved around the country in search of food.
The seasonal movements of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from one site to another are
nowhere better illustrated than on the island of Oronsay, off the opposite coast of Scotland from
Cramond. Oronsay is a small island, roughly triangular in shape and each side only 3 kilometres
long. Despite its small size, no less than five Mesolithic shell middens have been discovered, each
containing vast numbers of mollusc shells. Limpets, winkles, whelks, oysters and scallops were all