My grandfather must have had a vision: to transform the bleak spit of rock and heather into a dense woodland. He never saw it realized, because the trees that he planted years ago by the stone cottage, tens of downy birches and Scotch pines and wych elms, were still barely saplings when he died. They stood evenly spaced out so that they wouldn’t compete for resources. They were fenced-off to prevent deer from destroying their delicate branches. They were fertilized to make up for the nutrient-poor soil. It was a careful procedure that offered unsubstantial results: the trees remained defiantly small, as if they thought this dream of a lush forest in northern Scotland was unnatural, which—for the past century and a half—it has been.

This is the first mystery of the island. Little Colonsay in the inner Hebrides of Scotland, where my grandfather resided, is utterly devoid of trees. Plant life consists of dense bristles of heather and thorns, with the exception of a thin line of lawn grass trailing from the cabin to the sea. Off-yellow moorland blankets the island. The soil is acidic and infertile—some plant species, like the sundew, must consume insects for nutrients to survive. Harsh winds sear your face and you can taste the salt that is flung from crashing waves—though only when you can venture outside the cabin, because perpetual, brooding storm clouds hang heavy above the land and soak the island every few days. It is an isolated place. It is a fierce place. But for all of its ruggedness, the absence of trees—the very representation of authentic “wilderness”—clashes with the idea of unspoiled land. 

A few summers ago, I made the mile-long trek from the cottage to the South-West side of the island, clambering over the grassy hill in the center. I peered down from atop a ridge. Here, resting on cliffs of Lewisian Gneiss jutting over the ocean, are the lone reminders of a past civilization: scattered foundations of stone houses, crumbled walls of animal pens, and flattened sectors for crop farming. Markings of a thriving, self-sustaining population—one that, at some point, seemingly vanished. 

This is the second mystery. My grandfather used to tell me stories about the last person to own the island: a man named Johnny “Colonsay” MacColum—who lived alone, tending to the herds of sheep scattered around the fields of heather, before being exiled by a plague of rats. The timeline is disconcerting. At one point there was a flourishing community of people, but by the early 20th century, one solitudinarian remained. 

The truth is, there are few certitudes as to what happened to Little Colonsay. There is almost no published writing about the island, no accounts of where the seemingly thriving community ended up. But through an analysis of the surrounding islands, and historical knowledge of the social changes sweeping through the Highlands at the time, we can attempt to piece together fragments of the truth. It becomes clear that the two mysteries are linked. There are no trees because of the forceful removal of people. The ecology of the Hebrides has been permanently altered by agricultural and social changes in the 18th-19th century—despite the facade of purity, the land has been churned and desolated, both directly and as a side effect of these farming practices that transformed the economy and evicted thousands of people from their homes.

Much of the forests of Scotland had already been cleared during the beginning of the industrial revolution. Oak was used for making charcoal and smelting iron, and pinewood had been regularly used for construction even earlier. But another catalyst for the decline of wooded areas was the introduction of a new economic keystone. The breed of sheep that was regularly farmed prior to the 18th century, now known as the British Soay, arrived during the Neolithic era and played a small role in the Highland economy. Soay were small, producing little meat and wool, and their lack of the flocking instinct seen in other breeds made herding them difficult. Instead, cattle were the agricultural flagship: a reliable supply of food and milk that was relatively easy to farm in large quantities. In the mid 18th century, however, the introduction of Blackface and Cheviot sheep caused an upheaval in the Highland economic structure. These breeds were hardier, yielded more meat, and had thicker coats. Not only did they render the British Soay obsolete—they competed with cattle, and, due to their survivability and yields, slowly replaced the cow as the economic anchor of the Highlands.

In 1841, the national census of Scotland reported 664 inhabitants residing on Little Colonsay, and its neighboring islands of Gometra and Ulva. In the census of 1861, only 267 remained, then 119 in 1861—including the family of Francis William Clark, the owner of Ulva. The residents had been subject to a pivotal event of the history of the Highlands: clearances that rocked Scotland during the 19th century, when landlords forced tenants off of their land to accommodate newly profitable sheep to increase their revenue. The residents had been torn from their livelihoods, forced out of their homes. Clark had bought Ulva in 1835, and after a famine due to failures of the potato crop, evicted the majority of the population—often brutally, reportedly setting fire to the houses of tenants and gaining notoriety for intense cruelty. In a report to the Napier Commission, created in response to the distress in the Highlands at the time, it was said that Clark moved tenants first to a small piece of land, then “nothing at all, and when they would not clear off altogether, some of them had the roofs taken off their huts”. The location of the new homes of the residents, whose communities were shattered and sources of income destroyed, were of no concern to the landlords. With vast swaths of newly cleared land at their disposal, they had the opportunity to take advantage of the new center of the Highland economy: converting the land into large-scale Blackface and Cheviot sheep farms.

This was another explanation for the decline of woodland in the area. The sheep had wider variety in their diet than the cattle, which mostly ate straw and grass on the fertile hills. Saplings were extensively grazed on by the herds—while they left the established trees alone, the already dwindling wooded areas struggled to regenerate with the economic sheep boom. But this upsurge was drastic and unsustainable. In the county of Sutherland, the sheep population increased from 168,000 to 240,000 from 1853 to 1875. In Ross-shire, sheep stocks increased by over 50 percent in a similar timeframe. Such sudden development was not supported by the limits of the Highland landscape: as the sheep population increased, the grazing habits of the Cheviot and Blackface breeds—eating seedlings as well as low growing field vegetation—caused the fertility of the pastures to deteriorate as the plants were unable to re-establish themselves to supply the needs of the herds. John Walker, author of Economical History of the Hebrides and Highlands of Scotland, wrote in 1808 that “were sheep farming to become universal in the Highlands and fail, as from many causes it probably would, the country, being depopulated, could never again return to its present state”. And while his language is hyperbolic, he offers an accurate prediction of what later happened to the Highland economy: a sheep boom, a crash, and reminiscent of the clearances of the late 18th to early 19th century, a new surplus of hundreds of acres of empty, deforested land.

To continue to profit in the face of the sheep recession, Highland landlords turned their focus to maintaining the open pastures as “deer forests”. Despite the name, the plots of land that were partitioned off were not wooded areas at all—they were open, barren private estates used solely for deer stalking, or hunting for sport. They were falsified, a faux-recreation of an utterly “wild” undertaking that was in fact carefully managed to maximize yield. Deer populations were encouraged to grow and obstacles were removed to deliver the promise that any particular hunt would end the same way—a corpse for the customer to bring home and a hefty charge in the landlord’s pocket. To that end, deer stalking became a marker of opulence, a way for the affluent to indulge in ultimate control over the environment with the assurance that their money would be well spent. The occasional shot was not enough to control the deer population that was expanding rapidly due to these efforts—and their excess was, just as the sheep boom decades earlier, a detriment to struggling seedlings on the hills which were grazed on by an overabundance of deer. With the intentional clearing of forest and the destructive side effects of a deer population boom, the wealthy facilitated ecological depredation: in the search for a “wild” hunt, they forwent a venture into truly untamed forested land and instead settled with an artificial activity that was, ironically, destroying the true “wilderness” that so many of them sought. Areas once populated by thriving communities of farmers and fisherman, living off the land, had been stripped of people and biodiversity, becoming desolate scrublands inhabited only by deer for the accommodation of ones willing to pay.

Little Colonsay remains shrouded in fog and uncertainty.  It is entirely possible that the hundreds of deer that run free on the island were never bred for shooting. It is possible that the residents were not driven out by Francis William Clark, to be replaced by sheep. It is possible that the absence of trees and the harsh, acidic soil is merely the result of severe winds and its isolation that discourages biodiversity. The agricultural history of the nearby islands is only a piece of the truth, one that may not apply to Little Colonsay. We have two certainties: there are no longer any people, and there are no longer any trees. This has been my attempt to fill in the gaps.

The last time I traveled to the island, I stopped at my grandfather’s tree farm. Or, what was left of it. The fencing had deteriorated, rotting wooden posts lying toppled on the ground and covered in moss. But the trees were growing. They were not feeble shrubs, but had strong trunks and a canopy stretching above my head. The plot no longer resembled rows: stalks were sprouting from ground spots in an undetermined manner. It was not a farm, it was a woodland. A small one, but a woodland nonetheless. I wonder if this was my grandfather’s goal, the one that he never got to see come to fruition—for the barriers he erected to eventually break and his forest to expand past his set constraints. For Little Colonsay to redefine its relationship with “wilderness” and become a place that has entirely forgotten, or moved on, from the systematic damage inflicted on its people and land. And I’m not sure if, were it to become forested again, it would be a lie—to tell ourselves that “this is the way it has always been”—or just like the artificial hunting grounds created by landlords, a feigned attempt to return the island to its “natural” state: if one such condition exists at all.