I went to an absolutely fabulous session about the historical environment of Scotland in the middle ages.  Seems as if many of our presumptions about land and resource utilization in the pre-modern world are really radically inaccurate…in other words, monks and monasteries often devastated environments in order to gain fuel or food.

But perhaps the most interesting point was a brief aside about how medieval Scots would have, uhm, “disagreements” over things like water rights, fishing rights, etc.  And, of course, one thing they would do is damage each other’s fish traps or fishing grounds.  And in one particular case, according to my colleague Alasdair Ross of the University of Stirling,  there is a thirteenth century reference to an individual and his workers cutting down 9,000 trees and sending the trees down a river to ram a disputed damn and fish trap.

Now thats what I call “Dam Busters!”