The Institute of British Geographers' conference: Midges put bigger bite on Highlands

First Edition

Midges are linked to summer holidays in the Highlands of Scotland as sangria is to Spain. But things may not always have been so, according to Alasdair Roberts, of Northern College, Aberdeen.

Today the biting midge - Culicoides impunctatus - has become the great unmentionable. But although tourism agencies ignore the problem, visitors must inevitably be discouraged, Mr Roberts told the conference.

Queen Victoria acknowledged the scale of the problem facing shooting parties, especially when she relaxed her no-smoking rules, at Balmoral. But Mr Roberts suggested that, before the middle of the last century, the midge may have been far less prevalent, perhaps deterred by peat smoke issuing from houses.

Reference to midges is absent in Gaelic poetry, he said, and the accounts of visitors to the Highlands, from the first map-makers to Dr Johnson, made no mention of them. When Robert Burns did so, it was merely in terms of their small size, implying a non-biting species, and proverbs in English, Scots and Gaelic find midges interesting only for their contrast to larger creatures.

That midges were present before 1850 is not questioned by Mr Roberts, and accounts showed that Prince Charles Edward Stuart fell victim to an attack by midges in 1746 after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden.

But Mr Roberts thought there were good reasons to suppose that midges were now far more prevalent, with the blame put on the Highland clearances, coniferous forests and milder winters.

The replacement of people and cattle by deer and sheep after the clearances led to the loss of drainage management, increasing potential midge breeding grounds.