Demographic history of Scotland towns had populations of over 10,000, with the capital, Edinburgh, the largest with 57,000 inhabitants. The Highland and Lowland Clearances led to the depopulation of rural areas, but overall the population of Scotland grew rapidly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1801 it had reached 1,608,420 and it grew to 2,889,000 in 1851 and 4,472,000 in 1901. By the beginning of the twentieth century, one in three lived in the four cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. Glasgow emerged as the largest city, with a population of 762,000 by 1901, making it "the Second City of the
Demographic history of Scotland expense of forest from about 2000 BCuntil the time of the Roman advance into lowland Scotland in the first century AD, suggesting an expanding settled population. Thereafter, there was regrowth of birch, oak and hazel for some 500 years, suggesting that the Roman invasions had a negative impact on the native population. There are almost no written sources from which to reconstruct the demography of early medieval Scotland. Estimates have been made of a population of 10,000 in Dál Riata and 80–100,000 for Pictland, which was probably the largest region. It is likely that the fifth and sixth centuries saw