The Forest That Vanished: What Happened to Ettrick Forest?

Before kings called it a forest

Thousands of years before anyone drew a boundary around Ettrick Forest, trees spread across southern Scotland as the climate warmed after the last Ice Age. Birch and hazel took hold, followed in suitable places by oak, ash and elm. Alder and willow favoured wetter ground and river margins. The result was not one endless, identical wood. A steep cleuch, a boggy hollow, a sheltered valley and an exposed hill could each support a different mixture of trees and open ground.

This matters because a picture of a single dark forest being felled in one generation is wonderfully dramatic and deeply misleading. The older Borders woods were a living mosaic. Trees grew and died; fire, storms, wet ground and grazing opened spaces; people gradually opened more. A wooded landscape could contain clearings and still be rich in woodland. An open hillside could have been wooded at one time without ever belonging to a continuous wall of trees.

Stories sometimes place Ettrick inside a vast Caledonian Forest reaching across Scotland. The name has its own long history, but the ecological picture is different. The native pinewoods now associated with that term are chiefly a Highland habitat. The southern woods around Ettrick were much more likely to be broadleaved, with oak, birch, hazel, ash, alder and willow varying from place to place. If you want to imagine the old Ettrick, picture the kinds of woods that still cling to Borders ravines and riverbanks, extended much farther through the valleys.

How can anyone know what grew there so long ago? Bogs keep a record. Layer after layer of peat traps pollen from the plants living nearby and, sometimes, farther away. Read down through those layers and the changing mix of trees, grass, heather and crops begins to emerge. Studies in the wider Borders, including Talla Moss and Dogden Moss, show woodland changing over thousands of years, with human clearance long before medieval kings arrived. Those records do not give us a photograph of every Ettrick hillside. They do tell us that the loss of southern woodland began much earlier than the written history of Ettrick Forest.

By the Bronze and Iron Ages, farming communities had their own reasons to clear and use land. Animals needed grazing; people needed fuel, building timber and places to grow food. Each clearing might have been small against the whole landscape. Over centuries, the balance shifted. The first stage of this disappearing forest took place before it was called a forest at all.

A forest with farms inside it

Move forward to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A medieval king's forest was a special territory in which rights to hunt and use the land were controlled. It could contain dense woods, scattered trees, rough pasture, farms and settlements. The word described power over a landscape as well as the vegetation growing on it.

That is the key to Ettrick. Its deer and cover mattered to royal hunting, but so did its pastures, woods, rents and people. A forester's job was bound up with rules about who could cut timber, hunt game or occupy land. To the Crown, protecting the king's interests and drawing income from a broad region went together. To a family who lived there, the same valley was home, workplace and source of survival. Those different claims did not always sit comfortably beside one another.

The outlines of that working forest survive at Old Redhead, a deserted settlement in the Ettrick landscape. Archaeologists identify it as a probable forest stead: a farm holding inside the royal forest. Think about what that means. Where a modern visitor might see only a romantic stretch of empty country, a family once kept animals, worked ground, stored food, repaired buildings and lived under the rules of a forest administration. Nearby Whytbank shows how a stead could later become part of a more substantial estate and tower-house landscape.

There were ordinary lives inside the king's forest. Children grew up there. Livestock strayed. Winter stores had to last. The forest was neither an untouched wilderness nor simply the monarch's hunting ground. Its human history was written into the tracks between steads, the cultivated patches and the shelters that no longer stand.

The river valleys made that life possible. Ettrick and Yarrow Waters run east towards Selkirk and the Tweed system, cutting passages through the uplands. Roads and tracks could follow the lower ground and cross where the terrain allowed. A shepherd, a tenant carrying produce, a royal officer and a visitor heading towards Melrose Abbey could all use these corridors. The rivers shaped movement, even though there is no need to imagine timber barges regularly navigating the upper Ettrick or Yarrow.

The monks and the king's woods

In the 1230s Alexander II gave Melrose Abbey land in upper Ettrick. The monks also received rights to hold their property as a free forest: others could not cut its timber or hunt there without permission. The charter puts a different face on the forest. Trees and game were valuable enough for their control to be written down, defended and backed by penalties.

Melrose was a religious house, but it was also a landholder with farms, workers and a need to manage resources. The abbey's Ettrick land could support flocks, supply materials and produce income. Forest rights gave its officers a say over who used timber and game. They did not turn the whole valley into a nature reserve. The monks had to make the land productive while protecting what they held.

This connects Ettrick to the wider story of the Borders economy. Wool from monastic estates and other producers helped feed markets far beyond the hills. If you have read how Borders wool, Roxburgh and Berwick were linked to European trade, Ettrick shows one part of that story on the ground: the grazing, land rights and labour behind the sale. What was profitable for an abbey or a landowner could also put pressure on young trees trying to establish among sheep and cattle.

Centuries later, a charter associated with Margaret Tudor's marriage to James IV listed Ettrick Forest and Newark among the resources granted to her for life in 1503. Its lands came with rents, woods, pastures, mills, fishing, peat and more. The detail feels less like a description of a fairy-tale forest than an inventory of an estate. Hunting remained part of its royal identity, but every part of the place could have a use and a value.

Newark Castle belonged to this world of authority over land. Its presence reminds us that the king did not merely visit for a day's sport. A royal forest had officers, revenue, property and a place in the machinery of government. The term forest carried political weight even where the tree cover was already changing.

What did the trees have to provide?

Picture the demands on one oak as it grows above a Borders valley. Left alone, it may live for centuries and eventually give shelter and seed to another generation. But a builder sees a beam. A farmer needs gateposts and fencing. A household needs fuel. Someone making leather needs tannin-rich bark. The tree has several possible futures, and people making a living in the valley have reasons to choose among them.

Wood was essential to houses, barns, carts, tools and fires. Hazel and other smaller stems could be cut and regrown for useful poles. A large straight oak was particularly valuable for major structures. Bark had its own value in preparing hides for leather. Much of this work would have been local and continuous, the sort that leaves few dramatic records. It is easier to remember a castle roof than all the fires that warmed families through hundreds of winters.

Animals were another source of pressure. Sheep and cattle could graze in and around woodland; deer browsed too. Mature trees might remain standing while hungry animals repeatedly ate the young shoots below. For a time it would still look like a wood. Once the old trees died, there would be fewer young ones ready to replace them. Woodland can disappear by failing to renew itself as well as by being cut down.

This is why the sheep hills matter so much to the story, though sheep alone cannot explain the entire change. Farmers and landlords wanted pasture; kings wanted revenue and deer; abbeys needed agricultural output; tenants needed to survive. Clearance, timber use and grazing could all make sense to the people taking each decision. The cumulative effect across generations was a landscape with less native woodland.

The valley routes carried that economy. Wool, hides, bark, animals and smaller loads could move along the corridors towards Selkirk and the wider Tweed country. Large timber was expensive to haul, so good trees close to a building site were especially precious. The Ettrick and Yarrow rivers were a map of where people could travel and trade; their valleys were the dependable routes.

When a castle roof came from Norway

There is a moment in this long story when the missing trees become almost tangible. At Neidpath Castle near Peebles, the timber itself preserves dates that written descriptions cannot match.

Tree-ring analysis shows that oak used in part of the castle was felled in the winters of 1412–13 and 1414–15 and was probably native. It was still possible to build with large local oak in the early fifteenth century. Yet the roof timbers, felled in 1551–52, came from Norway. A builder in the Borders had looked beyond Scotland for the wood needed above his head.

That does not mean every tree in Ettrick had gone by 1552, nor can one building tell us the exact route of each beam. It does show how scarce suitable large native oak had become for an important building in the region. A forest can still have hazel along a burn and birch in a cleuch while no longer supplying the great structural timbers it once did. The distance from local oak to Norwegian oak is a striking measure of change.

At the same time, the old forest's social order was shifting. The Crown increasingly turned forest steads into more permanent hereditary holdings in return for payment. At Tushielaw in 1507, James IV granted Adam Scott a stead and land in feu, with permission to build a tower. A landscape organised around royal forest rules was becoming one of private estates and fortified local families. The story leads towards the tower country of the Border Reivers, though the roots of its landholding arrangements reach further back.

Then came more changes. Landowners sought rents and more productive grazing. Agricultural improvement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reshaped fields, hillsides and drainage across the Borders. Some woods survived where slopes were too steep or awkward to farm intensively. Elsewhere trees were cut, grazed out, replanted for estate purposes or replaced by open ground. There was no single day when someone could have announced that Ettrick Forest had vanished. Its native trees thinned over a very long time, and the landscape kept being remade.

The forest that returned was different

Walk into the Ettrick or Yarrow country today and you will see plenty of trees in places. Some are broadleaves along burns; others stand in dark, closely planted conifer blocks. The twentieth century brought forestry to upland Scotland on a vast scale, planting trees for timber on ground that had long been open pasture or moor.

That return of tree cover creates an odd sight. A hillside can be more thickly wooded now than it was in 1850 and still be less like the older native woodland. A commercial conifer plantation has its own purposes, but it differs from a mixed wood of oak, birch, hazel, alder and willow with varied ages, glades, wet ground and deadwood. A planted forest is another chapter in Ettrick's history, not simply the old one restored.

Look instead at the difficult corners. Ancient broadleaved woodland often survives on steep banks and in cleuchs, ground that resisted ploughing or heavy grazing. Farther south, Cragbank Wood near Hawick protects the largest remaining area of ancient ash, elm and hazel woodland in the Scottish Borders. It is not a preserved miniature of every prehistoric Ettrick hillside, but its shade, varied trees and stubborn hold on a gorge help us understand what can endure when land use leaves room for woodland.

The newest change is happening beside water. Tweed Forum and its partners have been planting and protecting native trees in the Ettrick and Yarrow catchments. At Whitehope Burn, for example, a project established about 8,500 native trees across seven hectares. Trees along streams can shade the water, steady banks, hold back runoff and join isolated habitat. Fencing and careful grazing management give seedlings a chance to become the next generation instead of disappearing in an animal's first bite.

No one can simply roll the valley back to a single date. The post-Ice-Age woods, medieval royal territory, eighteenth-century grazing land and twentieth-century plantations were all real Ettricks. Restoring native trees now means choosing a healthier future for the rivers and the land, while living and working in the present landscape.

How to read Ettrick Forest today

Begin in Selkirk and follow the Ettrick or Yarrow west. Notice first where the trees stand. Are they lining a burn, holding a steep cleuch, scattered along a field edge or planted in a uniform block? Those patterns are clues to ownership, grazing, farming and forestry as well as to soils and weather. A hillside that looks empty may have had several different histories of trees.

At Newark and Bowhill, think of the royal territory: hunting, officers, farms and rents all sharing a name. At the sites of old forest steads, remember the people who made homes inside that territory. By St Mary's Loch and the upper Yarrow, watch how open pasture and new riverbank woodland meet. Farther afield, Cragbank's surviving native wood and Neidpath's dated timbers tell two different ends of the same tale: what endured, and what became difficult to find.

The answer to the question in the title is therefore written across the valley. People began opening southern woodland long before Ettrick became a royal forest. Medieval landholders then managed an inhabited territory for hunting and income while woods supplied timber, fuel and shelter. Grazing and later agricultural change kept many trees from returning. Plantation forestry brought back a different kind of forest, and native woods are now regaining ground along the water.

Ettrick Forest did not disappear in one dramatic felling. It changed piece by piece, generation by generation. Its name survived in the landscape, and so did fragments of its woods. Follow a line of alder along the river or an old hazel into a cleuch and you can still see the story growing.