Economic History of Scotland - Earliest Times

Earliest Times

Scotland is roughly half the size of England and Wales, but has only between a fifth and a sixth of the amount of the arable or good pastoral land, which made marginal pastoral farming and, with its extensive coastline (roughly the same amount of coastline as all of the rest of Great Britain at 4,000 miles), fishing, the key factors in the pre-modern economy. Only a fifth of Scotland's land is under 60 metres above sea level. Its east Atlantic position means that it has very heavy rainfall: today about 700 cm per year in the east and over 1,000 cm in the west. This encouraged the spread of blanket peat bog, the acidity of which, combined with high level of wind and salt spray, made most of the islands treeless. The existence of hills, mountains, quicksands and marshes made internal communication and conquest extremely difficult.

Mesolithic hunter-gatherer encampments are the first known settlements in the country, and archaeologists have dated an encampment near Biggar to around 8500 BC. Neolithic farming brought permanent settlements, and the wonderfully well preserved stone house at Knap of Howar on Papa Westray dating from 3500 BC predates by about 500 years the village of similar houses at Skara Brae on West Mainland, Orkney. From the commencement of the Bronze Age to about 2000 BC the archaeological record shows a decline in the number of large new stone buildings constructed. Pollen analyses suggest that at this time woodland increased at the expense of the area under cultivation. Bronze and Iron Age metalworking was slowly introduced to Scotland from Europe over a lengthy period. Scotland's population grew to perhaps 300,000 in the second millennium BC.

Following a series of military successes in the south, forces led by Gnaeus Julius Agricola entered Scotland in 79 and later sent a fleet of galleys around the coast as far as the Orkney Islands. The geographer Ptolemy's identified 19 "towns" from intelligence gathered during the Agricolan campaigns. No archaeological evidence of any truly urban places has been found from this time and the names may have indicated hill forts or temporary market and meeting places and most of the names are obscure. Archaeology and dendrochronology suggests that the occupation of southern Scotland started before the arrival of Agricola. Whatever the exact dating, for the next 300 years Rome had some presence along the southern border.