Have you ever wondered whether or not there was some truth in the stories of monsters in Loch Ness? Here are all of the answers.
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Coming back to understanding the loch and the Great Glen, we need to return to the period after the ice shrank away, around twelve thousand years ago. The land had been scoured clear of all vegetation, flat areas were waterlogged, hilltops were boulder strewn and hillsides scraped and scarred by the ice.
Gradually the spores of lichens and fungi arrived, followed by the seeds of grasses and wild flowers. A carpet of green began to appear.
Soon the very lightest of the tree seeds arrived and took root. Colonising trees like Silver Birch struggled to survive in rocky crevices, but survive some of them did.
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Once you have some grasses and trees in the landscape, the birds and animals begin to migrate inwards. Animals carry seeds in their fur, bring nuts northwards and the birds carry seeds in their guts, particularly berries. The forest begins to develop with Rowan trees, Holly, Hazel, Alder plus large numbers of shrubs. All the time the wind is blowing the heavier windblown seeds northwards and among these were the Scots Pine.
[Rowan Tree - sometimes called Mountain Ash owing to the similarity of their leaf structure with that of the Ash, to which they are not actually related at all.]
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Eventually the forests covered most of Scotland, from the glens to the highest hills. All of those bare hills in the aerial view of Loch Ness shown in the previous chapter were once covered in forest. So where did it go?
To answer that question we need to introduce the Scottish people and this means taking a trip back in time to the end of the ice age.
With the bulk of the world's water tied up in ice, sea levels towards the end of the ice age were much lower than they are today. There was a land bridge linking England with France and Belgium. Over this land bridge came many of our animals, trees and people.
It took up to ten thousand years for these Mesolithic beings to find their way to Scotland, arriving around 6,000 BC. These early people left very little evidence of their existence as they lived in makeshift shelters and caves. Their effect on the environment was minimal when we consider what was still to come, but they did cut down some trees for fuel or shelters. Three thousand years later, though, they began to farm.
