Session 4 - Conflicted histories of the peat-coal transition | Rhind Lectures 2024

Denigrated since the 18th century as the fuel of the ignorant and culturally inferior, chiefly in the Highlands and Islands, peat was the primary source of thermal energy for most Scots in Lowland as much as Highland regions into the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Although coal has been presented as prevalent since the 16th century, it remained beyond the physical and financial reach of the majority. ‘Energy crisis’ and ‘fuel poverty’ seem very modern concepts but perceptions of a ‘peat crisis’ affected individuals and communities from the early 1500s and provoked legal challenges, fuel-raids and physical violence on the mosses. The legacies of this fuel fear and energy hunger can still be seen in landscapes across Scotland.

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The Rhind Lectures 2024, “Two ‘little’ ice ages and an anomaly: climate, environment and cultural change in medieval and early modern Scotland” are presented by Professor Richard Oram MA(Hons) PhD FSA FRSA FSAScot. Livestreamed and recorded by the Society at Augustine United Church. Sponsored by GUARD Archaeology Ltd. 

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The Rhind Lectures 2024: 

Our current climate emergency and its ecological and wider environmental consequences are concepts with which we are all familiar, but the impacts of historic climate change on the environment of Scotland and its people are little recognised or understood. Between the dawn of the ‘Late Antique little ice age’ in the 6th century CE to the waning of the ‘little ice age’ in the 19th century CE, climate change and how Scotland’s people responded to it was one of the most dynamic agents affecting environmental conditions and resources and a key stimulus of social and cultural transformation. From epidemic and epizootic disease to energy crises and transitions, ‘Golden Ages’ to ‘Ill Years’, this was an era where dearth, abundance, sustainability and resilience shaped Scotland.

The Lecturer: 

Richard Oram graduated MA (Hons) in Mediæval History with Archaeology and PhD in Mediæval History from the University of St Andrews. Appointed Lecturer in Scottish and Environmental History at the University of Stirling in 2002, Director of the Centre for Environmental History from 2005 and in 2007 becoming the first Chair in Environmental History in the UK, he has published extensively on the environmental histories of Scotland and the wider North Atlantic region, specialising in historic climate change, energy transitions and the impacts of epidemic disease.