Twenty-six years reminiscences of Scotch grouse moors

by W. A. Adams

The remainder of the ground is broken, knotty peat bog, with short stunty heather, and stretches of deer grass, with wet flows on the upper flats. All good shooting ground in fine weather, and birds like it then.

Birds rely on the deep heather for shelter and food in the winter. Burn that out, and they go where they can find it, and don't return. It is just the same as if you burn down a crofter's house and his crops, he must move on to somewhere else.

Some of the best moors in Caithness have been ruined, and cannot be recovered for very many years, to the very serious loss of the proprietors, from incessant burning and shooting down breeding stock after disease, both attributable to the almost culpable negligence, certainly ignorance, of those in charge of the regulation of the burning and the letting of the moors.

The burning is a far more serious business than the shooting down of stock.

One fool of a factor did say to me (he is dead and gone, or I would not name it), "Perish every grouse, before a blade of grass shall suffer."

The sheep rent on the moor to which the above referred is gone because sheep do not now pay on that ground, and the grouse rent—the best rent of the two—is also gone, because the heather is burned off clean as the back of your hand.

In Dalnawillan, heather burning has been with me a constant wrangle with the proprietor or his representatives, or the sheep farmers, no matter the clear agreements to the contrary, protecting the heather. If I was fighting anybody's battle, it was in the interest of the proprietor; the question was one far more important to him than to me.

Burning, to do it properly, is a very expensive process on such extensive ranges as the Caithness moors.

In Dalnawillan and Rumsdale, it needed four parties during the early part of April, to do it properly, four men in each party. One man to kindle, and keep on kindling; the other three men armed with birch brooms, watching and regulating the course of the fire, beating it out where it unduly spreads, or beating it out altogether to rekindle in case of a change of wind in a wrong direction.

Unless the weather is quite dry for a week or more, the rough ground and deer grass, both of which it is most desirable to burn in the interest of grouse and sheep, will not burn, and when your staff of men are collected and got together, a sudden storm of rain or snow comes on, and you are delayed for a week, and perhaps put off altogether for that season.