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Editors’ Preface

IN HIS EARLIER NEW NATURALIST VOLUME on the natural landscapes of Southern England, the author, Peter Friend, presented a new vision of landscape, providing a geological background for our understanding of the distribution and variation of flora and fauna in the lowland parts of Britain.

A division of Britain into lowland and highland regions has often been made in descriptions of our flora and fauna, for example by Arthur Tansley in his classic book on Types of British Vegetation (1911). Now Peter Friend has turned his attention to Scotland, the major highland part of Britain. In contrast to the sedimentary origin of the ‘soft’ rocks of the lowlands, the ‘hard’ rocks of Scotland arise from a series of events in the Earth’s crust dating back to the earliest years of the planet, which were far less understood in the days when Dudley Stamp’s New Naturalist volume on Britain’s Structure and Scenery was published in 1946. The resulting structures, now much better understood, underlie Scotland’s great variations in rock type and altitudes. Allied to this is the effect of the northern climate on the distribution of plants and animals, making the Highlands an area of particular interest from the biogeographical point of view, a mountainous region in the far west of Europe, adjacent to the Atlantic.

The illustrations featured in this book take full account of the possibilities of aerial and satellite photography in analysing topography, showing the relation between the geology, the soils, and the directions and angles of sloping features – all factors which must affect flora and fauna. The arrangement into areas, each with a similar treatment and analysis of the landscape, makes the subject very accessible to those interested in the geology or visiting the areas, and to those studying the fauna and flora and wishing to understand the physical background of the natural history. This book is a welcome addition to the New Naturalist Library, and will strengthen our understanding of the important and basic relationships between geology and natural history.