The Highlands and Islands. A Crofting Region?

Abstract

IT is widely assumed that the human geography of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is dominated by a so-called 'crofting system' of agriculture and rural settlement. The purpose of this paper is to examine this assumption and thereafter to seek to use some specific aspects of the 'crofting system' as indicators of regional differentiation within the Highlands and Islands. The material evidence is largely, but not wholly statistical and is derived from official, mainly unpublished, sources. It is not suggested that such material is a substitute for personal observation in the field; nevertheless, if regional geography is to be given any measure of precision and authority, more use should be made of appropriate statistics and similar empirical data. This paper outlines how this may be attempted in one of Scotland's major regions. The essential feature of the crofting system, the croft, is a rented small holding, the tenancy of which carries peculiar privileges awarded by a series of Acts of Parliament from 1886 to 1961.1 These acts apply only in the seven 'crofting counties' - Zetland, Orkney, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty, Inverness and Argyll. The original intention was to legalize and perpetuate certain traditional but non-statutory privileges which survived in this region, to relieve pressure of population on land resources, and to protect the small tenantry from excessive rents, arbitrary eviction and other injustices. Under the 1886 Act a parish had to be declared a 'crofting parish' before the rented small holdings within it could claim croft status. For this purpose the existence of common pastures (or proof of their former existence within 60 years), was an essential criterion. Crofts, also, had to be less than ?30 annual rent, a limit which was later raised to ?50 except in Lewis. Within a few years of the passing of the act all but a handful of the parishes in the seven counties had been declared 'crofting parishes' and subsequent crofter legislation has included the whole of the seven counties (Fig. 1). Thus, from the strictly legal point of view, crofts do not exist in the highland parts of Moray, Nairn, Banff, Aberdeenshire, Perth, Dunbartonshire or Bute, which comprise a substantial part of the eastern and southern highlands. This is not to say that small holdings do not here exist, nor that there was, here, never any small tenantry sharing common land. But the agricultural revolution, which swept through lowland Scotland in the eighteenth century, approached the Highlands from the south and east. The abolition of common arable cultivation ('run-rig'), the removal of many tenants and sub-tenants, and the introduction of new methods of land and stock management, took place on highland as well as lowland estates. Coming from the south and east this agricultural revolution was first, and most, effective on the southern and eastern fringes of