"John Hall" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Martin Brown writes:
Incidentally where exactly were these vineyards in Scotland? It has the
smell of an urban legend - it is just far too wet in winter up there
and nothing remotely like a suitable continental climate.

Figure 65 in HH Lamb's "Climate, History and the Modern World" maps the
known medieval vineyard sites in England. I think we can assume that had
any been known in Scotland they would have been shown. (Of course, that
book was written a couple of decades ago, and it is possible that some
may have been discovered more recently.) There are a lot of vineyards
south of 53N (the latitude of The Wash) but only 3 small ones north of
that, and nothing north of 54N(roughly the latitude of Leeds).

The aspect which so many people forget when using this as a
'denialist' argument is the economic one. No-one would dream
of setting up a seriously-sized vineyard in the 21st century without
an expectation that it would be economically viable ... in other
words it would have to provide a substantial crop of usable
grapes in at least 8 years out of ten. Such exigencies did not
apply in the 12th and 13th centuries. You could undoubtedly grow
vines in a walled garden in, say, the Carse o'Gowrie (between
Perth and Dundee) which is widely known for its soft fruit
production, and they would probably have ripened in six
out of ten years in the 1990s, but who in their right mind would
grub up acres of profitable raspberries, loganberries, gooseberries,
etc, to plant a vineyard? (Not for another 30 years anyway).

Philip Eden