A Red Deer History of the Scottish Highlands, c. 1850-2020

Is ged a thuirt mi beagan riu
Mun ìnnsinn uil’ an dleasdnas orr’,
Chuireadh iad am bhreislich mi
Le deisimireachd chòmhraidh.

The little that I’ve sung of them
is not enough to tell of them
O you’d need a tongue for them
of a most complex kind.

Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir, “Moladh Beinn Dobhrain”, trans. Iain Crichton Smith
The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots & English 1380–1980, ed. Roderick Watson.

The aim of this thesis project was to tell a history of the Scottish Highlands through what happened and mattered to red deer.

I dug into the archives, carried out fieldwork with deer hunters and scientists, and studied deer biology and ecology to paint a picture of their lives over the past two centuries.

I found that changing hunting methods, land uses, management strategies, and ideas about what Highland nature should look like all affected the way red deer lived, shaping their social lives and changing their histories.

Though I finished and defended my dissertation in August 2023, I’m not done with deer yet. As well as working on turning my PhD into a book, I am developing a new research project that aims to track a single herd over time. The idea is to follow a group of deer and their changing way of life from the establishment of the deer forest system in the early 1800s all the way through into the present push for the rewilding and reforestation of the Highlands.

Full text of the PhD thesis available on request from webbhm@tcd.ie.