Landholdings and Settlement Evolution in West Highland Scotland

Abstract

Until the eighteenth century in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, one general pattern of landholdings and settlement predominated. Land was organized either as single large grazing farms or tacks, or in a form of communal openfield agriculture comprising restricted infield and outfield, and predominant common pasture. The associated settlement was clustered in clachans.1 Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to a lesser extent in the present century, various changes have taken place in this landscape. The pattern has become essentially one of enclosed fields, often with regular lines, and settlement throughout the region is now predominantly dispersed, with only occasional relict or adventitious clusters. Only in a few areas, near the fringes of the Lowlands, do non-agricultural villages form a significant part of the landscape. The nature of the enclosure, moreover, differs considerably from one area of the Highlands to another. In the Inner Hebrides and along the southern fringes of the Highland seaboard, single small holdings and single farms of varying sizes are the predominant elements; crofting townships are few and far between. On the seaboard of the West Highland mainland, large grazing farms alternate with crofting townships. But in the Outer Hebrides, crofting townships of several types form the most important element in the landholdings pattern.2 These internal differences within the broad West Highland region are rarely the result of purely physical factors. More usually the different patterns have been the result of individual initiative. Scotland's Enclosure Acts3 enabled any landlord to enclose lands without the need to obtain an enabling Act of Parliament as was required of his English counterpart. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such initiative by individual landlords gave rise to various social, technical and agrarian changes. In turn, the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the introduction of changing policies of land settlement and other agrarian changes which have been instigated both by private individuals and by Government bodies. The different changes have resulted through time in the present pattern of landholdings and settlement, not only according to the different ideas of the various landlords, but lso to the degree of isolation from, or accessibility to, the centres of these ideas, the timing of the changes, and to the length of period over which changes took place. In the Inner Hebrides, the Clyde Islands and the Lowlands (Fig. 1) the impact of the Agricultural Revolution was felt much earlier than elsewhere in Highland Scotland. The changeover in these areas from common to individual farming, together with a drift of population from the land to the villages, occurred in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was at a time when pressure of population on resources was less than it was when changes subsequently affected the West Highland mainland and many of the islands. In Islay in the Inner Hebrides, for example, migration to the rising industrial centres of Lowland Scotland had been taking place gradually from the eighteenth century onwards. This migration aided the enlightened policy of the major landlord, Campbell of Shawfield, and his relatives. The policy aimed at a gradual reduction in numbers of people on the land, through the creation of non-agricultural villages. In these villages, agricultural day-labourers, craftsmen, fishermen, foresters, lead-miners and distillery workers feued land4 and built houses to a definite plan of the landlord. In Islay there were always relatively fewer people dependent on the land than elsewhere in the region. This in itself assisted reorganization of landholdings, whether planned or informal, not only in the earlier