Natural Breadalbane
Breadalbane is home to the Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve while about 25% of the Loch Lomand and The Trossachs National Park also lies within the Breadalbane area.
Nature lovers will find a landscape shaped by geology and ice, populated by giant trees and rare arctic and alpine plants, and inhabited by majestic birds and animals such as golden eagles, ospreys and red deer.
From giant trees to Arctic plants
Perthshire is known as "Big Tree Country". The county is home to the world's tallest hedge, and Britain's widest conifer and tallest Japanese larch, while at The Hermitage near Dunkeld one can see a Douglas fir (named after Perthshire plant hunter David Douglas) over 210 feet tall. Within the Breadalbane area the Fortingall Yew is thought to be the largest in Europe and may also be the oldest living thing in Europe (anything between 3,000 and 9,000 years old).
Wildlife
Rocks and Landscape
As its name indicates Breadalbane ("the high ground of Scotland") lies wholly in the Scottish Highlands, north of the Highland Boundary Fault.
The ancient rocks of the Breadalbane area were deposited as sand, mud and limestone several hundred million years ago, probably between 740 and 515 million years before the present day. Some boulder beds, notably on the mountain Schiehallion, represent glacial deposits from a worldwide glaciation that occurred about 700 million years ago. About 600 million years ago, basaltic lavas flowed over much of the sea floor. This Dalradian rock sequence, as it is known, was deposited on the eastern margin of a large continent, most of which is now North America.
About 450 million years ago, in the early part of the geological time period known as the Ordovician, the Dalradian rocks of the continental margin collided with oceanic and volcanic island arc rocks on the present day south east. This collision, known as the Grampian Orogeny, resulted in intense folding and thrusting of the Dalradian rocks and metamorphism of the sand, mud and limestone into quartzite, schist and marble. The metamorphosed limestone has been worked to provide fertilizer and evidence of lime kilns can be seen in many places.
Over most of Breadalbane, south of Glen Lyon, these metamorphic rocks are relatively flat-lying. The unusual thing about them, however, is that as a result of folding they are upside down!
The next major geological event to take place occurred in Silurian to Early Devonian times when the metamorphic rocks of the Grampian Highlands were displaced by a series of major faults. In Breadalbane these include the Tyndrum, Killin and Loch Tay faults.
You can see the evidence of the Tyndrum Fault on the hillside SW of Tyndrum where the vein that filled the fault produced thousands of tons of lead plus associated zinc and silver at various times between 1741 and 1862. An offshoot of the Tyndrum Fault in the Cononish glen may shortly go into production as Scotland's only gold mine.
The evidence of the Loch Tay fault is also clear on any map, as glacial erosion along the line of the fault has created the "bend" in the central part of the loch where the water depth is greatest.
The most obvious features of the Breadalbane landscape, however, result from the much more recent Pleistocene glaciations of the past 1.6 million years. Ice-sculpted mountains with large corries, U-shaped glens and elongated loch
basins all attest to the abrasive effects of ice while glacial deposits abound in the hummocky moraine deposits that occur throughout the region and the rather more unusual dried lake bed that lies in Glen Dochart between Ledcharrie and Lix Toll, SW of Killin.