Farming Practice in the Western Highlands and Islands before Crofting: A Study in Cultural Inertia or Opportunity Costs?

Abstract

Farming in the western Highlands and Islands of Scotland was transformed over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the clearance of some townships to make way for commercial sheep production and the reorganisation of others into crofts. Commentaries on the region prior to these changes portray it as a cultural backwater, with communities employing a range of seemingly archaic and primitive practices. Early agricultural surveyors and ‘Improvers’ who visited or worked in the region were especially important in laying the foundation for this view. Admittedly, their near moral conviction about change and the virtues of new husbandry made them disdainful of traditional practice everywhere, even in the Lowlands. When it came to the western Highlands and Islands, though, their tone underwent a perceptible change, with words like primitive and barbaric creeping into their descriptions. Early travellers added to this picture of a region rooted in the past, with customs and practices that seemingly set it apart, chronologically as well as geographically, from the rest of Britain.