Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with the land, waters, forests and wildlife.

This volume spans 450 years that saw profound transformation in Scotlands environment. It begins in the fifteenth century, when the Golden Age of the early 1200s was but a fading folk memory in a land gripped by the gathering grimness of a little ice age. Colder, wetter, stormier weather became the new normal, interspersed with brief episodes of warmer but still moist conditions, all of which brought huge challenges to a society on the knife-edge of subsistence. Viewing the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the cycles of disease and dearth that were ever-present into the later 1700s, the book explores the slow adoption and application of the ideas of Improvement and the radical disruption of Scotlands environment that ensued. Reformation, revolution and rebellion were the background noise to efforts to subsist and succeed through a hostile age, in which Scotlands environment was an adversary to be tamed, mastered and made polite. As the last, bitter decades of the little ice age were ground out in foreign wars, forced clearances and potato famines, Scotland prepared itself to embrace the Industrial Age.