Field Walking
Date January 2018
Event ID 1087353
Category Recording
Type Field Walking
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1087353
NN 72854 01025 A walkover historic woodland assessment of
the PIC area around Doune Castle, and the wider landscape
including the Wood of Doune to the W, was undertaken in
January 2018, complemented by historic map research. The
study area is all within the historic ownership of the lands of
Doune by the Earls of Moray.
In the PIC area, there are diverse and attractive wooded
features, ranging from semi-natural riverbank alders, oaks
and ashes, through planted amenity or garden areas to
plantations with a probable economic driver, at least when
they were created. The trees in the PIC area are probably
largely of 18th- or 19th-century date, in the period when
the castle was no longer occupied. The planted features
demonstrate that care continued to be given to creating and
maintaining an impressive setting for the castle.
The Moray Estate land fans out to the W from the castle,
and encompasses a fascinating landscape which has evolved
from medieval hunting park to today’s mix of forestry,
agriculture and housing. The Wood of Doune is known to
have existed in the late medieval period, with a late 16thcentury
record of James VI’s instruction for the park dyke
to be repaired to protect the young growth. Despite being
a wood then, and on Roy’s map and the 1st Edition OS
map, the Wood of Doune is in tree-cover terms now almost
wholly a modern plantation. From our observations, only
the deep gully of the Buchany Burn has a rich semi-natural
tree cover, possibly developed since the late 18th-century
re-routing of the Carse of Cambus drainage through it,
and there are no really old trees in the Wood of Doune.
Any field evidence for its longer history is more likely to
come from archaeological remains than from the woodland
cover. The survival of what is thought to be part of the park
pale at the SE edge, and furthermore of a bank well within
the interior of the Wood of Doune, suggest that ground
disturbance has not been all that great and that a LiDAR
survey of the wood’s footprint could gauge what cultural
heritage features survive. Otherwise, historic timbers may
be the only remnant of the medieval Wood of Doune, with
the oak draw bar within Doune Castle’s gatehouse being a
likely candidate.
The likely oldest living trees we encountered were not
in the Wood of Doune but much further W, on the minor
Drumloist Road near the Annet Burn and Doune Lodge.
These remarkable trees, and the old dyke on which they grow,
alerted us to an exciting possibility, that some potentially
early boundary features may survive beyond the Wood of
Doune, and that it may be possible to trace the outline of an
earlier, wider park.
Archive: NRHE (intended). Report: Stirling Council
Funder: Historic Environment Scotland
Coralie Mills and Peter Quelch – Dendrochronicle for CFA
Archaeology Ltd
(Source: DES, Volume 19)
