Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 33

In the uplands of the north of England and Scotland, birch and sessile oak were by far the most common species, dominating both the underwood and canopy of the coppiced woodland. Where the uplands turn into hills, and growing conditions become more difficult, standards grew too slowly and erratically to be worth fostering, so ‘scrub oak’ coppice without standards developed. Much of this was used for tanbark or charcoal and thousands of acres of scrub oak used to grow across the hills of the Scottish Borders, before it was cleared and the sheep inhibited further regrowth. In 1804, during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a belief that the French might attempt an invasion at Berwick-upon-Tweed, and a system of beacons was built across southern Scotland, to be fired in the event of a landing. On the night of 31 January a sergeant in the Berwickshire Volunteers on duty in Hume Castle at Greenlaw, which commands a spectacular view across the Tweed valley, mistook the twinkling of charcoal burners’ fires on the distant Cheviots for the vanguard of the enemy. He promptly lit his beacon and the result was the inglorious incident known as the ‘Great Alarm’, in which beacons were mistakenly lit in turn right across the Borders, and several thousand volunteers rushed to repel a French army that didn’t exist.