From afar, a shingled roof is also possible to be misidentified as slate, so in cultural memory, the specific use of roofing shingles is somewhat forgotten. John Alexander Smith, the vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, writing in 1873, captures a historic example of roofing shingles at the Edinburgh Canongate Tollbooth, and how easy it can be to misinterpret them.

Some years ago when walking with a friend down the Cannongate, on a bright sunny day, I made a discovery which rather astonished me; the sun was shining brightly, as we passed, on the picturesque roofs of the turrets and tower of the Old Tolbooth, and from its rich brown colour and general appearance, I saw that it was not covered with slates, but with wooden shingles; and my friend, who was familiar with shingled roofed church towers in Berkshire agreed with me on this opinion. The fact was a new one to me, though it may have been known to others, and must have been well known at least to the workmen who from time to time would require to repair the roof. I looked into the various published works which gave details of the antiquities of Edinburgh and the adjoining burgh of Cannongate; but though some gave short, and others larger accounts of the Tolbooth, none that I could discover made the slightest reference to the fate of its shingled roof. In the course of this winter, I happened to notice planks and scaffolding projecting around the eaves of the old building, and on making closer inspection, I found that it had been undergoing a thorough repair; but I was startled to find the shingled roof had altogether disappeared, and that it was now newly covered with small blue slates.

Roofing shingles are very likely to have been in existence in Scotland as far back as the 10^th Century. The Meigle Stones is a collection of 33 Pictish carved stones. The 25^th in the collection, a Hogback Tombstone is noted for its ”Anglo-Scandinavian recumbent tradition”^{3 is} is of a type found near Glasgow. It features features carved ‘tiles’, which bear a striking resemblance to some of the Scandinavian pattern of shaped pine shingles (Stavspån or Kyrkspån).

The oldest surviving example of a roofing shingle in Scotland dates to around 1250. Unearthed from waterlogged ground during excavations in Perth High Street in 1975, this small example is made from oak.⁴

Shingles were evident further north in the Highlands. Fairburn Tower, west of Dingwall, was recorded as having its oak shingled roof blowing off in a storm in 1803.⁵ As an oak shingled roof can last over sixty years without issue, it would be likely that at the point of failure the roof was at least eighty years old. There are records of repairs being made in the 1720s⁶, which if it were taken that at this time the tower was fitted with new oak shingles, would correlate reasonably well to reaching such a decayed state by 1800 that a storm would destroy it.   

With this information, a reassessment of the use of shingles can be made, which also challenges the institutional history of Scottish roofing materials that there was “no physical evidence of the early use of shingles in Scotland.”⁷ It is highly probable that before the advent of slate, and well into the 19^th Century, roofing shingles continued to be used for high-status buildings. Bruce Walker's excellent paper describes this best.

Scotland had had a long timber tradition and Scottish aesthetic preferences were linked to that tradition. These preferences included extremely steep pitched roofs, ideal for shingles but not readily adapted for the application of extremely heavy grey or blue slate. Substantial timber resources appear to have resulted in a continuation of the shingle-roofing tradition on high-class properties, although there is some evidence to suggest that grey slate may have been used in Angus, the Borders and Caithness at a slightly earlier date than its introduction into central Scotland.⁸

The Highland clearances of the 19^th century contributed to a huge loss of craft and folk traditions as generations were moved from land inhabited for hundreds of years. The land ownership changes that came with the clearances made it harder to access forestry, with firstly Estates and latterly the Forestry Commission having a monopoly on forestry geared towards producing fast grown, poor quality timber which would be unsuitable for shingle production. The advent of the Victorian Highland shooting estate heralded the normalisation of overstocked deer populations, seriously inhibiting forest regeneration and further widening the loss not just to shingle making, but all timber craft traditions. Many of the emigrants of the Highlands during the second wave of clearances in the 19^th Century settled in Canada and it would be probable that some of the cultural knowledge of shingle making went with them and fed into the fast growing Canadian shingle making industry. By 1909 Canada was producing 725 million shingles a year a increasing to 2.5 Billion by 1919.⁹

Oak shingle reclaimed from Perth High Street during building works in 1975. This shingle is dated to 1250, dispelling the myth that there was no evidence of early shingle making in Scotland. (Perth Museum)

Roofing shingles are not the only pattern of wooden roofing found in Scotland. A planked roof, a common type of roof in parts of Austria known as a Brettendach, can also be found in Scotland. A planked roof is, as the name suggests, made of sawn timber boards, laid vertically. Single planks are either laid in continuous lengths for the whole span of the roof, or smaller lengths are laid, much like large shingles. Built in 1853, the historic Finzean Bucket Mill in Aberdeenshire features a preserved example of a planked roof , hidden inside the roof space, where a later extension was added. A record exists of the miller's cottage, which was sold in the 1850s, as having been shingled.¹⁰ After the growth of more industrial sawmills, but before the wholesale introduction of cheap corrugated iron roofing sheets, planked roofs may have been more common, at least on ancillary and agricultural buildings in Scotland.

The Scottish slate industry reached a peak in the 1890s¹¹ and by this time the widespread use of slate, with its ultimately superior longevity, combined with the huge societal shifts of population and economic order ultimately nailed the coffin for the making and use of roofing shingles in Scotland by the end of the 19^th Century.

After the Second World War, a revival came in the form of sawn Cedar shingles, imported from North America, which were used on scale to clad the roofs and sometimes walls of many of the pre-fab homes built after the war. The Forestry Commission in Scotland was notable for its provision of forester’s bungalows, with Cedar shingle roofs and walls. The pre-fabs came from a variety of sources, with many frames coming from Sweden.¹² Imported Cedar shingles made their way into roofs of new builds across Scotland post-war, not just for the Forestry Commission with social housing from Benbecula¹² to Strathconon¹⁴  featuring shingled roofs, partly driven by the shortage of building materials in the UK.

Cedar shingles remain available throughout the UK but suffer from increasing costs. Between 2013 and 2022 the price has increased 6.5 times.¹⁵ This of course makes a home-grown Scottish product all the more viable and with patience, good institutional support and a growing appetite for sustainable, locally produced building materials, can see the beginning of a new generation of shingle production in Scotland.