a) Winter pastures along the Spanish Mediterranean Castellón province.
In the province of Castellón, the practice of transhumance is evident in prehistoric, protohistoric and Iberian culture, prior to the Roman presence in the territory (Soriano Martí 2010).
One of the reasons for the Christian conquest of the Valencian lands was the strong interest of the Aragonese herdsmen, mainly from the province of Teruel, in taking advantage of the winter pastures of the coastal areas. In 1238, a.C. Aragón King James the First offered free access to the pastures throughout the recently conquered kingdom (Castán Esteban 2002). Since then and up to the present day, this transhumance practice has been carried out from the lands of Teruel to the coastal areas of the Valencian region. Tamborero (2010) demonstrated how the current corrals in the Sierra de Espadán have an origin between the 16th and 17th centuries, thus indicating a continued use of the space for livestock purposes.
The herdsmen come from both the mountains of the Javalambre range and the Gúdar range. It is from the latter that year after year they come down to spend the winter in the pastures of Sierra de Espadán villages, amongst others. One of these villages is Vall de Almonacid, a small community in Sierra de Espadán, located 440 meters above sea level1.
The municipality, with a length of 21.1 km2, had 1,528 hectares available for grazing. It was divided into four grazing areas or quarters, which were auctioned every year to the highest bidder among the herders of Teruel.
We know in great detail the origin of the shepherds since the 1950s, thanks to the local archives of the farmers. Until 1990, one shepherd would descend from Valdelinares, the highest village in Spain, 1690 meters above sea level. This mountain village has been the cradle of numerous shepherds and has exceptional summer pastures. However, the continental mountain climate paralysed all activity during the long and extremely cold winter. It is a clear example of how the transhumant activity was viewed as the most resilient and sustainable option for the development of the local economy.
Each of the quarters had an established carrying capacity, with the ratio of 2.35 hectares per sheep head. This prevented overgrazing, which could deplete the pastures and prevent their essential regeneration. Each town council, including Vall de Almonacid and fair men, was responsible that these rules were enforced.
Oral agreements were made with the livestock farmer and dates between which he could use the pastures were also established, from 1st of November to 3rd of May. This timeframe assured the farmer that he could leave the mountain pastures before the cold and snows began. It also gave the pastures time to recover after the summer heat. Likewise, the rancher had to leave at the beginning of May, so as not to shear the spring shoots and thus allow the grasses to recover for the following season.
The balance between the agricultural uses of the local population and the livestock uses of the ‘outsider’ shepherds was always what can best be described as an art. The herds could not enter the cultivated fields, but they could access the already harvested fields or where the fruit trees were growing before being ripe for harvest. Further, they could not enter cultivated land when the soil was wet, so they would not make any damage to the land. The farmers themselves invited the shepherds to enter their fields, once the harvest had been collected. This helped to clear the land of weeds and at the same time fertilised the soil with the manure from the shepherd’s sheep.
As expected, the coexistence was not always idyllic, since the interests of locals and foreigners, farmers and ranchers clashed. Possible disputes between one and the other were settled in informal trials in which the overseers or ‘good men’ played a prominent role. The objective was to settle things at home and avoid going to the official justice system.
Another example of sustainable use was the herd’s manure. For local farmers, being able to count on the manure of the transhumant herds was essential for the good development of their soil and crops. This was so important that the farmers erected corrals specifically for the herdsmen so that they would get the much-needed dung to fertilize the fields. The municipality of Vall de Almonacid had 13 corrals, scattered among the four available quarters. These corrals were always built in the transition zone between the cultivated areas and the pasture areas. Interestingly, the availability of manure was so important that the corrals’ owners often bribed the shepherds, with a bottle of wine or olive oil, to keep the flock in their corral and not in another one (Vidal-González 2007). At a time when chemical fertilizers were not available, the access to the manure made a critical difference in ensuring a good harvest.
b) Shielings in Iceland: An example from the Westfjords.
According to Wikipedia a shieling is “a hut or collection of huts on a seasonal pasture high in the hills, once common in wild or sparsely populated places in Scotland. Usually rectangular with a doorway on the south side and few or no windows, they were often constructed of dry stone or turf”.
This definition lacks for Iceland a very important aspect: that the shieling was a place where milk was collected from milking animals, cows, ewes and does (female goats), and processed to produce butter, skyr and whey whilst other animals were kept at afréttir (communal areas) (Thoroddsen 1919). Also, another important issue is the social aspect. In Iceland, a farm was an individual unit and considered as an autonomous operation. Some farmers owned their farms, and in the Middle Ages it seems that many farms had access to shielings that were usually located in the outfields no further away than 12 km from the main farm unless in some exceptional cases. They were most often situated in the uplands or at least at a moderate high altitude. Even tenants, especially apropos practical matters in the operation of the farm, had an autonomous position in pre-industrial era in Iceland (Jóhannesson 1956; Graca 2015).
Our knowledge regarding the rise and fall of shielings sites in Iceland is still inadequate. We know that shielings were utilised in some areas of the country in the settlement period, with the only shieling excavated fully, Pálstóftir in E-Iceland dated to the 10th century (Lucas 2008; Vésteinsson 2011, 47 for a possible late 10th century sheiling in NE-Iceland, and Einarsson 2011 for a possible 10th century sheiling ruin in S-Iceland). Pálstóftir had a role in relation to livestock and summer transhumance, but subsidiary activities such as small-scale craftwork and hunting was also evident (see Hermanns-Auðardóttir 1992 for a similar argument regarding multipurposed use of shielings).
Archaeological walk-over surveys have revealed an impressive number of shielings, but sadly we lack chronological resolution at the majority of the sites. In the valleys of Svarfaðardalur and Hörgár- and Öxnadalur in Northern Iceland, the number of shielings corresponded largely to the number of farms lögbýli, with about 50–60 shielings and farms in each valley (Júlíusson 2016, 2022, 86–89, Fig. 3). A burning issue in Iceland is to get a better idea of the chronology of sheiling sites and in a new research project “Transice”, we aim to establish when periods of intensive and widespread transhumance occurred and decline. Our evidence from excavations indicates that shielings in N-Iceland did not become common until after 1300 (Hreiðarsdóttir 2023). Historical evidence hints at a huge decrease in shieling activity after the Black Death pandemic in 1402–1404 and seems not to have ‘recovered’ until the 17th century (DI, Hitzler 1979). The project also aims to advance our knowledge regarding the spatial distribution of Icelandic shielings. To get a cursory glance of the shielings’ distribution, we can examine a land census Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalín (hereafter JÁM) from the early 18th century for Southern, Western and Northern Iceland. Looking at Svarfaðardalur and Hörgárdalur specifically in this period with the activity in the Middle Ages, only three or four shielings were active in each of these valleys, compared to around 50 in the Middle Ages.
Here, we will focus on a farm called Kirkjuból in Langidalur, Westfjords (NW-Iceland)2. Kirkjuból was valued at 48 “hundreds“ (120) so it was considered a high valued farm in the area. The farm was a staður, meaning it had a church that owned half of the farmland. According to JÁM, a farmer named Eggert Snæbjörnsson owned and worked at the farm. The farm owned four cows, one bull (one year old), 47 ewes, five wethers, three goats and seven horses. JÁM further details that grazing meadows were plentiful and Kirkjuból had access to a forest to gather firewood and use for coal making. The farmer could also fish trout in the nearby Langidalur river. JÁM (VII, 231) details that the farm had a shieling situated at the end of a valley (Fig. 4). The sheiling was erected on the ruins of a farm named Skeggjastaðir, a phenomenon seen elsewhere in Iceland (Grímsdóttir and Snæsdóttir, 1993).
In 1786 the priest Guðlaugur Sveinsson published the article „Um selstöðu og þeirra nytsemi”, (e. “On the usefulness of shielings“) in the journal Rit hins íslenzka Lærdómslistafélags, that centred on publishing articles by the Icelandic intellectual élite and academics. The article provides a great example of the use and purpose of shielings, drawing on the direct experience that Sveinsson gained whilst working at the shieling at Skeggjastaðir mentioned above (Sveinsson 1786). We can easily say that the article is one of the best descriptions of shielings found in Icelandic documentary sources. Sveinsson stated that only a few shielings were in use, despite laws from 1754 ruling that a shieling ought to be utilised at each farm. Those few shielings that were in use started in mid-June and operated until late August. Sveinsson recommended that more people should use shielings in Iceland, especially farmers with meagre and unfertile home meadows for reasons detailed below.
A clear advantage of shielings according to Sveinsson was that if the livestock was moved there in mid-June and driven back in the end of August the homefields would have remained ungrazed. This could double the feed of the animals, thus increase the milk production. Winter grazing, which was used to feed both sheep and horses, would also be better utilised if the shielings had been used during the high summer. Indeed, by utilising shielings there was less need to drive the livestock to and from grazing areas, than if the livestock was kept at home. By locating grazing areas close to the shielings, it might save the shepherd time who could instead gather wood, hay, or produce charcoal from nearby resources. Further, because there were usually three or four persons at each shieling, once they were done milking the animals, which was done in the morning and evening, they could collect fjallagrös (Icelandic moss). If gathered during the shieling season, one would not need to send out a special expedition to the uplands solely for this purpose. Clearly, many vital resources were only available in the uplands, and it is likely that people wanted to use the time spent there as efficiently as possible. The use of upland resources at shieling sites is an issue of great interests and requires more critical attention and spatial details than we can provide here.
The article by Sveinsson also contains an interesting point regarding sheiling location and buildings at the sites. He suggested that people would use the old shieling sites since their location was usually ideal with much and good grazing nearby, hinting that these factors were the most vital ones. Regarding the buildings, he stated it would be most beneficial to erect three houses. Ideally, a shieling should have a sleeping house, a special kitchen and a milkhouse with shelves and other necessary furniture. Sveinsson recommended that the houses should be built high and wide and the milkhouses should be equipped with windows close to the shelves, whereby too much heat, steam, and damp from milk, skyr and butter could evaporate and cool the house with the lower outside temperature. He further advocated that small farms should only build one shieling together and share it with the communal. The last point is hard to prove archaeologically, but it has been suggested that Gjásel at Vogaheiði in SW-Iceland was used by multiple farms (Guðmundsdóttir 2007, 80).
How good was the sustainability of this practice? In environmental terms, it seems to have sheltered the homelands from grazing during the period of the summer when the homefields - infield and outfields - needed most to be kept beyond the reach of grazing animals. Instead, the livestock was kept in an outlying area with adequate biomass, where the grass growth probably was topping slightly later than in the home farm area. The shieling area was thus a great addition to the utilisable biomass of the farm. Indeed, using shielings was a strategy to save the homefield from overgrazing and perhaps avoid land degradation, a common problem in Iceland (Brown et al 2012). There is at present no evidence of the shieling practice causing erosion or depletion of resources in the shieling areas. On the contrary, we have found evidence at Gráskriðusel and Grænahólssel in Hörgár- and Öxnadalur in North-Iceland, that the shielings seem to have been erected with the purpose of increasing the grazing and biomass in the area. This was done by erecting earth walls around the sheling so the animal’s dung could be used to fertilise the grazing area (Hreiðarsdóttir 2023). This is an interesting issue that merits further research.
In other aspects of sustainability of this kind of transhumance practice the question of the availability of work power was the most critical. The fall in the availability of working power led repeatedly to a discontinuation of the shieling practice on many farms. The desertion of farms nearby reduced the need for using vegetated areas high in the mountains or inside valleys, as plenty of good grazing land became available close by. This happened both in the 15th century and in the 18th century but increasing population in the 17th and 19th centuries most likely reversed the situation, with more shielings being used again.
We have provided a brief glimpse of the shielings activity in Iceland based on a description from a man who had the experience of the many aspects of how to organise a shieling, what benefits it had and why it could be of great value for farmers to invest in such an undertaking. The primary goal of a shielings was two folded: on one hand to enable exploitation of grazing that otherwise went mostly unused, and on the other to shield the home meadows from livestock grazing during the main growing season in June to August.
[1] Co-ordinates for the location of Vall de Almonacid N 39.90333 W 0.45639
[2] Co-ordinates for the locations in Langadalur. Kirkjuból (N 65° 49'32'' W 22° 21'18'' - ISN93: A 346704, N 596118). Skeggjastaðir (N 65° 46'40'' W 22° 18'19'' - ISN93: A 348693, N 590683)