It must be allowed to be a great disadvantage, to any country, to be very far from markets, courts of law, and good towns, where proper education can be had. James McLagan, 1790.
The Highlands - and most of the Islands - are now a green desert - but not long ago they teemed with people. In 1755, Dr Webster conducted a census that found 1,250,000 people in Scotland, of whom 775,000 or 62 per cent lived in the Highlands and Islands.1 They were virtually all Gaelic speakers and self-sufficient small farmers. Though the land in some areas was already broken down into very small individual holdings, the most common settlement unit was still the communal farm or township. In 1822 David Stewart of Garth deduced from the many abandoned settlements in the glens of north-west Perthshire that the population there had once been much greater than in his day. It ‘would seem at first sight to have greatly exceeded the means of subsistence, in a country possessing so small an extent of land fit for cultivation’.2 Stewart made the common mistake of believing that agriculture was the only source of subsistence. Now, most of the Highland area is deserted, except for a few hill farmers and the tax-funded populations of the few villages. Gaelic has been replaced almost everywhere by English. The story of Blair Atholl, a parish in north-east Perthshire, is not untypical of this rapid and disastrous change.
The 4th Duke of Atholl once looked back at the terrible state of things he found when he inherited his vast estates in 1774: ‘Implements of husbandry the worst construction. Ploughs used with four small horses abreast, a man between the centre horses walking backward to guide the plough from stones. Scarcely a cart but with axle moving round, and with wheels of two pieces of wood – a load seldom exceeding 5 cwt. Numbers of sledges used with a small basket to carry coals, &c, &c.’3. Now it is possible to see that this state of affairs ‘represented an adaptation of available techniques, not only to the physical resources of the area but also to accepted social purposes (e.g., supporting a large population), and they succeeded in these purposes more efficiently than later commentators would allow.’4
In 1848, in the time of the 6th Duke, Robert Somers visited Glentilt, which was part of the Atholl estates5 : ‘I took some delight in traversing the old roads, and in tracing out the sites of the numerous dwelling-places with which the glen has at one time been thickly studded. Formerly a seat of rural townships, Glen Tilt is now a scene of utter desolation. The Duke’s Lodge, two or three cottages inhabited by game-keepers, and one empty and fast-decaying farm-house, which is said to have sheltered under its roof seven of the crowned heads of Europe, are the only human residences remaining in a glen which must at one time have contained 400 or 500 people… So far as I can gather, the depopulation of Glen Tilt was effected between 1780 and 1790. This glen was occupied in the same way as other Highland valleys, each family possessing a piece of arable land, while the hill was held in common. The people enjoyed full liberty to fish in the Tilt, an excellent salmon river; and the pleasures and profits of the chase were nearly as free to them as to their chief. Three or four pounds a year was all the rent paid for possessions capable of supplying a family with abundance, but which, owing to the idle habits, the slovenly agriculture, and the imperfect commerce of the period, were of infinitely less value than they would be now, or than they might have been even then.
‘The present Duke’s grandfather acquired a taste for deer. The people were accustomed to take their cattle in the summer season to a higher glen that is watered by the Tarff; but a large dyke was built at the head of Glen Tilt, and they were forbidden to trespass, or suffer their stock to trespass, beyond it. The outer region was consigned to the undisturbed possession of the deer. These light-hearted creatures increased in number and paid no respect to their marches.6 They leaped over the enclosure, and destroyed the poor people’s crops. The Duke, observing this, gratified their roving propensities, and added a few thousand acres more to their grazing grounds at the expense of the people, who now began to be peeled of their possessions like one of their elms of its leaves by an October storm. Gradually the forest ground was extended, and gradually the marks of cultivation were effaced, until the last man left the glen, and the last cottage became a heap of ruins. The same devastation which William the Conqueror and the early Norman kings spread over the plains of Hampshire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was thus reproduced, at the end of the eighteenth, in this quiet Highland valley.’
The 4th Duke claimed to have good reason for his antipathy to these particular tenants, for the men of Glen Tilt had shown great reluctance to join the regiment which the Duke raised to serve in the American War. This was by no means the normal reaction of young Highlanders invited to serve under their chief. ‘By impressment and violence the regiment was at last raised; and when peace was proclaimed, instead of restoring the soldiers to their friends and their homes, the Duke, as if he had been a trafficker in slaves, was only prevented from selling them to the East India Company by the rising mutiny of the regiment! He afterwards pretended great offence at the Glen Tilt people for their obstinacy in refusing to enlist, and – it may now be added – to be sold, and their conduct in this affair was given out as the reason why he cleared them from the glen … His ireful policy, however, has taken full effect. The romantic Glen Tilt, with its fertile holms and verdant steeps, is little better than a desert. The very deer rarely visit it, and the wasted grass is burned like heather at the beginning of every year to make way for the new verdure.’
Other sources provide further perspectives on the clearing of Glen Tilt. One of these concerns the tenants’ exploitation of local woodland. By 1750 timber was a dwindling resource. Trees had been felled in the Highlands from at least the sixteenth century to supply timber to the increasingly treeless Lowlands7 and the shortage of timber and the consequent difficulties of constructing roofs and making good tools, not to mention the need for fuel for heating and cooking, is a constant theme in eighteenth century accounts. Burt noted of Inverness that ‘here are but few birds except such as build their nests upon the ground, so scarce are hedges and trees’.8. On seeing many ruins of little houses, he ‘was told, that when one of those houses was grown old and decayed, they often did not repair it, but, taking out the timber, they let the walls stand as a fit enclosure for a cale-yard, i.e., a little garden for coleworts, and that they build anew upon another spot’.9
In Balquhidder, after the destruction of the Civil War in the seventeenth century, the Atholl Estates moved to build improved houses roofed with couples in place of the ‘smoaky damp houses, built of turf and stone, and thatched with straw or heath’ which were common up to then.10. But the provision of couples required the felling of mature trees and within a century the supply was exhausted. When the township of Glencarnaig, with its mill and all its houses and barns, was burned in reprisals by government troops in 1746, the inventory of the damage included 354 pairs of roof crucks which the landlord was unable to replaced.11 The tenants eventually went bankrupt and at the end of their lease, the Duke of Atholl took back Glencarnaig and four or five other abandoned townships and let them as sheep farms. He created the nuclei of the later villages of Strathyre and Lochearnhead at this time by letting land as crofts to landless and homeless families.12
The problem of wood grumbled on. In Atholl, a series of Dukes had complained of illegal woodcutting from at least 1702, and in 1780 the tenants of Glen Tilt were charged in a body with cutting timber in the Duke’s woods without his permission. They claimed in defence that the woods in question were natural growth, that they had been cutting timber in the same woods for at least forty years, that they had not exceeded their customary rights in any way, and that it was the only wood available to them. Despite the evident truth of all this, the court upheld the Duke’s objection13 Now he no longer needed to burn their houses over their heads to clear them off his lands. He could afford to wait until their roofs collapsed.
The Duke had another string to his bow. In Atholl, as everywhere else in the Highlands, the tenants jointly owned a herd of cows, sheep, and goats which was kept within the winter town for half the year and for the other half grazed on the hill pasture. Horses were generally left on the hill all year round except when needed for ploughing or carting. The summer grazing was invariably let with the winter town and the use of separate winter and summer pasture was the essence of land use in Highland Scotland. The system preserved crops growing on the unenclosed low ground from the depredations of grazing animals, and it conserved the grass of the winter farm to be used as winter fodder in the absence of hay. In the hills in the summer the tenants produced cheese, butter, woollen yarn, and a surplus of fat young animals which were killed and salted down for the winter. However Andrew Wight, an eighteenth-century business consultant, advised the Duke to confine his tenants in future to the bounds of their winter farms and to let the hill pastures separately as sheep walks.14 The Duke accepted this advice and by 1790 the Glentilt shielings had been converted into sheep-runs (not more deer forest. The Duke was not daft.).
Lowland observers often commented on what they saw as the waste of hill pasture by native farmers, but they did not recognise that the apparent fertility of these uplands was fragile and largely man-made. Under the old form of native management, the hill pastures had been managed very carefully. The value of different qualities of grazing and the demands of each type of animal were assessed and equalised so that each township could support an equivalent stock (the suim). The object of this was to limit stocks to the level experience had shown could support the population in the long-term without exhausting the soil.
The Suim.
‘Where there are several small tenants upon one farm, the farm is (what they call) soumed; which means, that the number of cattle it can properly maintain or pasture is ascertained, that none of the tenants may exceed his just proportion, nor over-stock the farm.’15 This calculation was known as colpachadh ‘the equalising of cattle stock’, from G. colpach ‘heifer’, which set out a scale of equivalents. The use of base 2 is universal, except in Argyll where sheep were counted in tens and twenties. Goats, another Neolithic import, were always reckoned in scores.
In Inverness-shire in 1728.
‘A soume is as much grass as will maintain four sheep; eight sheep are equal to a cow and a half, or forty goats. The reason of this disproportion between the goats and sheep is, that after the sheep have eaten the pasture bare, the herbs, as thyme, &c, that are left behind, are of little or no value, except for the browsing of goats.’16
In the Hebrides.
1 horse = 8 foals, or 4 one-year old fillies, or 2 two-year old fillies, or 1 three-year old and 1 one-year old filly, or two cows.
1 cow = 8 calves, or 4 stirks, or 2 two-year old queys, or 1 three-year old quey and 1 one-year old stirk.
1 cow = 8 sheep, or 12 hoggs, or 16 lambs, or 16 geese.17
In Argyll.
1 cow = 4 calves, or 2 stirks, or 1 two-year old and calf, or 1 three-year old.
1 cow = 5 sheep, or 10 hoggs, or 20 lambs.18
In Perthshire in 1791.
The rule in souming is, 4 sheep equal to 1 cow, and 8 sheep equal to 1 horse.’19
In the south of Scotland in 1764.
1 horse = 2 cows; 1 cow = 12 sheep.20
The Reign of Sheep.
‘The last two hundred years have been a particularly difficult period in the islands, as in the rest of northern Scotland, and in some respects there seems to have been an agricultural regression. The two earliest accounts of the islands, in the sixteenth century, are very brief and are also probably biased towards creating a re-assuring picture. Even so, it is evident that a great deal more grain (mainly oats and bere) was then grown, with reasonably good returns, and there are many references to cattle. Many small islands, long since deserted, were then inhabited, and described as ‘verie fertile’ or ‘verie gude for corn and fishing’. With hardly an exception the uninhabited islands were used for grazing. There was also game, especially deer, and there was line fishing both in the sea and fresh water, and exploitation of seals and whales. Since then there seems to have been a loss in fertility, both in cultivated ground and in pasture, probably partly due to a greatly higher ration of sheep to cattle, and to recent mismanagement or neglect of the land.’21
The native method of management was a conservative and conserving policy, intended to safeguard the survival of the community in the long term but commercial sheep flocks were managed on exactly opposite principles: to graze as many animals as possible in order to maximise profits in the short term. It is not surprising that problems rapidly ensued and have left their mark on the Highlands. The sheep ‘lost much of their old foraging hardihood, and new diseases got in among them – notably the crithein or ‘trembling’. This disease was unknown, or so rare as not to be marked, when cattle and horses and goats ate the coarser grasses, and sedges, and when the ferns they did not trample and destroy, were pulled for thatching and cut for bedding. A steady, if stealthy, progressive deterioration of hill grazings went on, which old natives were the first to notice. They remembered the days when herds of cattle, with many horses, were mixed with the sheep stocks, and when every bit of arable land was carefully cultivated, and even the last of the shealings had not been left vacant in summer. They said that the bigger animals manured the ground behind them, and consumed the rougher herbage; that the droppings of the sheep had no manurial value, and that, while incapable of keeping down the rougher vegetation, they nipped every patch of fine grass so close to the ground as to lay its roots bare to be destroyed by winter frosts… The sheep farmers of shealing regions, and of big holdings formed by the turning out of old communities of winter towns, where arable and pastoral pursuits used to be conjoined, profited for a long time by the unexhausted manures and other leavings of the old system which had been superseded by the sheep reign’.22
Commercial flocks of sheep were well-established in Atholl by the time of the first Statistical Account in 1790. ‘Formerly, almost every tenant had a small number of sheep; at present, many of them have none. There are now in the parish 4 considerable flocks of sheep; two of them belonging to the principal heritors; but the others to sheep farmers. They consist of from 1000 to upwards of 2000 sheep each; which, added to what the tenants have, according to the old method, may amount to more than 16,000 sheep in all. The number of black cattle may be from 2000 to 3000. The goats are almost gone… Some think there may be about 1000 horses, large and small, in the parish still. Before the introduction of sheep-farms, and the keeping of distinct marches, a number of the common people had small horses in the hills, all the year round, excepting in the time of deep snow, when their owners brought them home, and helped them with fodder. At a certain time of year, each caught and marked his own, and broke them for his own use, or sold such as were fit for work, except the breeding mares. During the rest of the year, they ranged, where they pleased, through the hills. As they cannot do this any longer, they are almost extirpated, and the price of horses has risen beyond all bounds.’23
In the same volume the minister of Balquhidder sounded a warning note. ‘For some years past there has been a great demand for sheep-hogs and lambs from the West and North Highlands, but it is decreasing, as these lands are now mostly supplied from adjacent farms that are already stocked: as a necessary consequence, lambs are falling in price, which must soon affect the value of sheep farms in this country, almost all of them being at present stocked with breeding ewes. The returns from a wedder flock will not afford the rent at which many of these farms are now let.’24
In Atholl in 1844, ‘by some of the more intelligent storemasters, a few goats have lately been introduced, as they consume many plants which the sheep reject; and among rocks they can find their way to pasture which is inaccessible to sheep.’J. Stewart, NSA Blair Atholl, 1844, 571. But the goat never really made a come-back. It is an ideal animal for a small-holding, not to run wild on the hills. By this time the onslaught of thousands of sheep had destroyed the conserved fertility of the hill pastures, reducing them to poor, tough grass and weeds, and destroying the heather.25
‘The cause of the flowers being so plentiful in the good old times was that neither my grandfather nor his forbears would ever hear of a sheep coming near the place, except on a rope to the slaughter-house. The stock consisted of sixty Highland milk cows and their sixty calves, besides all their followers of different ages. These were continually shifted from place to place, and this gave the plants and bulbs a chance of growing.’26 The deleterious effect of sheep on flowers may also explain the disappearance of wild bees.27 All this is explained by the fact that sheep are not native to Western Europe but arrived in Scotland no more than five thousand years ago, whereas cattle have had fifty or a hundred thousand years to achieve a mutually beneficial balance with nature. The plants which flowered so excessively in the old pastures were those which had found a way of coexisting with cows.
Despite the pessimism with which some observers greeted the introduction of commercial sheep flocks, landowners who had cleared native tenants off their lands to replace them with sheep-farmers did very well for a while. ‘Whatever its passing fluctuations … that reign for a hundred years was a profitable one for landlords whose rents were doubled or trebled, and to farmers who knew how to make good use of their opportunities, and secure themselves from losses by wintering out the young of their flock.’28 But problems that not even the most pessimistic had foreseen arose as the reign of sheep went on. Unlike the old tenantry, commercial sheep-farmers were not bound to their landlords by any feelings of loyalty or responsibility and learned to enhance their profits by over-stocking. This gave their holdings an artificially high valuation when leases came to an end. Landlords were obliged to meet these valuations but began to find that they had to reduce their new rents by a third or even by half to attract a new tenant. By 1880, this drop in revenue, a glut of sheep, the damage done to the grazings, and a fall in world wool prices, not to mention their own extravagant lifestyles, was forcing many old Highland families to sell their lands to stave off bankruptcy.
This disaster had been predicted. David Stewart pointed out that the clearance of farming tenants who were capable of improving the land or undertaking other profitable work left landlords utterly dependent on the value of the animals which grazed their otherwise empty lands. D. Stewart 1822, 206. He castigated a development which allowed a single genteel tenant to ‘drink wine, to drive to church in a gig, to teach his daughters music and quadrille dancing, and to mount his sons upon hunters, while the ancient tenants are forced to become bondsmen or day-labourers, with the recollection of their former honourable independence still warm.’29
Not even the Marquis of Breadalbane was immune from these problems and, quite suddenly, it became a misfortune to be a great landowner. In 1938 Gilles wrote: ‘The depressed condition of Agriculture has recently compelled many of the farmers on the estates to take advantage of breaks in their leases, and give up their farms. In this way Lord Breadalbane has had to take over large stocks of sheep at acclimatised value, and sell them to the incoming tenants at market value, which has entailed him in considerable losses.’ He sold the estates of Ardeonaig and Auchlyne to meet these charges but also ‘to effect renovations on his property’, perhaps not an absolute priority when steaming towards an iceberg. Previously, to meet payments of taxation and death duties, the family had disposed of Roro and Lochs in Glenlyon, Edinample, Lochearnhead, Armaddy, the islands of Seil, Easdale, and Luing, the Black Mount, and Glenfalloch.30 This was almost unthinkable but worse was to come.
Duncan Campbell lamented that ‘It hurts one to see old landed families disappear from the places which had so long known them’,31 but he might with more justice have directed his sympathy towards the native tenants who had been cleared away off their own tribal lands so that those to whom ownership had passed could indulge in a short-term speculation. The old landed families had suffered with newer proprietors but they had inaugurated their own ruin and also the ruin of their lands and their communities.
A century earlier, the tenants of Glen Tilt, faced with a hostile landlord, encroaching deer, imported sheep, a prohibition on cutting timber, the impossibility of keeping sufficient cows or horses and a difficulty in getting enough to eat, were among the first to disappear from the places which had so long known them. The Duke consistently denied that he had cleared Glen Tilt but this was a quibble. All his actions show the deliberate design of a well-informed and powerful man, motivated as much by a strong antipathy towards his native tenants as by any economic considerations. He did not drive his tenants out of Glen Tilt by force but he deliberately made it impossible for them to continue to live there. To complete the story, history reveals that he had other plans for them.
New enterprises.
For the 4th Duke was very keen on industrial innovation. As early as 1775 a bleachfield which became a ‘very large and important concern’ was established on his lands at Huntingtower, near Perth. And in May 1785, after much consultation and deliberation, he feued land at Stanley, on the river Tay, for the building of a cotton mill.32 In addition to a damp climate and an ample supply of water, an eighteenth-century cotton mill required a great number of child workers with nimble fingers, and a greater theme than a fondness for deer or a desire to protect natural woodland now becomes evident in the Duke’s designs. His tenants were to be useful to him. To those then under notice to quit on his Nairn estate, he wrote in his own hand to advise them that a welcome awaited them at Stanley, under certain conditions:
‘Encouragement held out to any of the tennents in the above farms who follow trades are industrious and have families of three children and upwards the Duke will give them as much ground near Stanley as will be sufficient to erect a house upon with a little garden behind for potatoes the Duke will furnish the necessary wood and give them that and the ground gratis for their prospective lives the neighbouring works will give constant employment to their children who instead of being a burthen to their parents will help materially to support them.’ Those who do not have three or more children, or a useful trade, or who do not wish to live on the earnings of their children and such potatoes as they can grow ‘will do well to look out for possessions elsewhere as the Duke is determined not to let his lands again in such small farms.’33
Eighteenth-century cotton mills were not healthy places. ‘The numbers that are brought together … the confinement, the breathing of an air loaded with the dust and downey particles of the cotton, and contaminated with the effluvia of rancid oil rising from the machinery, must prove hurtful, in a high degree, to the delicate and tender lungs of children … Tempted by the wages, parents send their children to this employment at a very early age, when they have got little or no education; and the close confinement deprives them of the opportunity of acquiring more’.34
Stanley grew but did not exactly prosper. In 1845, it had a population of nearly 3,000 ‘though begun only in 1784, and in a state of utter stagnation from 1814 till 1823… . A very large proportion of the inhabitants are employed in two extensive cotton-factories; a considerable number are hand-loom weavers; and the rest are principally shop-keepers and labourers. The village has a small public library, not greatly in request; a savings’ bank, not very much appreciated; a benevolent society, and a funeral society.’ Parliamentary Gazetteer of Scotland, 1845 Atholl declined. In 1844 ‘it can scarcely be said that there is a village in it.’35 The Atholl estates are now a limited company and the Duke's home is open to tourists.
POPULATION AND DEPOPULATION
Population figures for Highland parishes are available from Dr Webster’s census of 1755, from the first Statistical Account (OSA) of 1790, from the first census in 1801, and from several later sources. Exact comparisons are not always valid but general trends can be identified.
Perthshire.
General Stewart was correct in thinking that the population of Perthshire had reached its peak before his time, in the first half of the eighteenth century. This was, as he also noted, several generations before the mixed blessings of agricultural improvements, vaccination against smallpox and the great potato had begun to make their impact. Blair Atholl, whose story was told above, is not untypical of the Highland parishes. Between 1755 and 1790 the population went down only by a few percents, from 3257 to 3120 (of whom 758 were under eight years old) but this apparent stability evidently masked significant and unsettling changes which were numerically compensated by reduced child mortality. Among the adverse factors, the parish minister in 1790 noted rising rents, the clearance of tenants to enlarge private policies, and the conversion of populous townships into farms occupied by a single shepherd and his dog, though ‘this last particular is not, as yet, so much the case here, as it is in many other places.’36 By 1801 the population of Blair Atholl was only 2848, in 1831 2384, and in 1841 2231 Parliamentary Gazetteer of Scotland, 1845., thus going down by almost one third over the previous fifty years. By 1961 there were only 1458 people living in the parish.37
Many parishes in Highland Perthshire fared worse. The upland parishes of Bendochy, Dull, Glendovan and Monievaird lost 30 per cent of their populations between 1755 and 1801, and Kirkmichael lost 42 per cent.38 Many of these migrants went, at least in the short term, no further than the neighbouring parishes of lowland Perthshire where employment was available in textile mills, such as those at Stanley and Deanston, and in the new cottage industry of hand-loom weaving.
In Balquhidder the introduction of sheep coincided with a new phenomenon: voluntary migration. This began in the 1770s when certain of the gentlemen farmers, tacksmen and long-established tenants chartered their own ships and organised their own removal, together with their relatives and dependants, to the more certain prospect of freehold property in North America.
The American War of Independence interrupted this movement and migration was impeded until new destinations for the emigrant ships had opened up. By 1841 the population of Dunkeld had gone up by 43 per cent compared with 1755 and that of Crieff by 50 per cent. A great draw was the free leases offered in Kincardine-in-Menteith, where moss clearance projects attracted a horde of landless tenants and cottars from the Highland parishes (the so-called ‘moss lairds’), producing a short-lived population increase of 77 per cent and an equally short-lived experiment in democracy, for their leases gave them the right to vote. The land was cleared and improved, then their leases expired, and most of the moss lairds, an enterprising and hard-working body, moved on to the colonies.
The Hebrides.
In the Hebrides, the sequence of events was different but the end result was remarkably similar. Before 1764, when the islands were visited by the Rev. John Walker, there had already been a considerable voluntary emigration of young people from the southern Hebrides to Ireland. ‘As these Islands raise a greater number of people than are requisite for their present system of agriculture and labour, this emigration must continue till they can be allured to stay at home, by being profitably employed’.39 Some eighty had left Islay in August 1764: ‘They usually go about that season of the year, to the harvest, but scarce any of them ever return. Nor do they even continue long there, but generally join the emigrants which now go annually in great shoals from the North of Ireland to America’.40 These are the so-called ‘Scots Irish’ who were not Irish at all. In Mull he saw extensive arable that had been abandoned and grown over with heather within the past century and attributed the decline in population to emigration and army recruitment.41 In the Hebrides generally there was evidence for a remarkably density of population at a time before any substantial interference with the native way of life.
When the flow of migrants to North America was interrupted by the War of Independence, the population of the southern Hebrides rose dramatically. That of Mull, supporting Walker’s observation, grew from 5325 in 1764 to 8367 in 1801, 10,538 in 1831, and an unsustainable but remarkable 18,118 in 1841.42 Iona’s population increased from 200 in 1764 to 1084 in 1841. The population of Skye, less affected by earlier emigration, went up from 15,067 people in 1764 to 18,908 in 1861.43 The Hebrides at this period enjoyed a mild boom arising from sympathetic management and the development of small-scale local industries. The tenants earned money to pay their rents and to buy oatmeal imported from Lowland Scotland where they could not grow enough themselves by manufacturing kelp and potash, by growing and spinning flax, by weaving the coarse local wool on hand-looms, by renting their houses to summer visitors, and by finding paid employment either at home or further afield. They cleared and fertilised marginal land by hauling seaweed from the shore and planting potatoes, they learned to catch fish, to process fish, and even to eat fish. But the increase in population was unsustainable and a crisis arose when potash became available from other sources. The landlords, who had largely created the problem, solved it by clearing whole populations. The clearance was piecemeal and sporadic but by 1961 the population of Skye had gone down to 7478, that of Iona was only 130, and most smaller islands were completely depopulated. Rum was occupied only by red deer, as in the Mesolithic.44
Aberdeenshire.
Population changes in the Highland parts of Aberdeenshire are similar to those found in Highland Perthshire (above). Both began to decline in the second half of the eighteenth century, in tandem with agricultural improvements and other changes. The figures are from the parishes of Braemar and Crathie (BC) , and Glenmuick, Tullich and Glengairn (GTG) in Upper Deeside. The rural decline is masked in the second case by the growth of the resort town of Ballater.45
BC GTG
1700 (calculated from the Poll Book) >2300 >1800
1755 (Webster’s estimate) 2671 2270
1791 (O.S.A.) 2251 2117
1801 (Census) 1876 1901
1851 (Census) 1788 1984
1901 (Census) 1452 2347
The editor, echoing what David Stewart said of Breadalbane, was surprised by this picture. Judging by later circumstances, he felt that the 1755 population ‘was certainly far in excess of the resources of the district. The agricultural improvements that have doubled the returns from the soil were yet to come, the cattle and sheep were much inferior in size to the stock of today, and except for domestic requirements, productive industry was unknown.’
The editor also noted that by 1760 an unprecedented amount of land was under cultivation, and that Highlanders displaced from ‘the head of Dee’ were living as squatters in the Forest of Birse. This he puts down to over-population but the district had supported a large population before 1760 – indeed, a high level of population is noted in the Highlands generally at this period. The destabilising factor in Deeside was almost certainly the Disarming Act of 1746, which was enforced more effectively than its predecessors. Movement of people out of the deer forests and the cultivation of marginal land, not to mention poaching at Birse, can be put down to deprivation – a simple shortage of calories – caused by the absence of game from their domestic economy. In Upper Deeside, wild game was an essential resource, in the eighteenth century as in the Mesolithic.
The figures show that during the period 1700-1750 the population of the Highlands was remarkably high, even in upland parishes where cereal growing was at best a marginal activity and hardly a new initiative during this period. We can put this picture together with the communal deer drives which once took place in many parts of the Highlands and which are described in a later chapter. Deer drives required small armies of beaters – several hundred men were involved in the larger efforts – but they were equally capable of producing enough food to feed these small armies. Given experienced leadership and sufficient manpower, the technique is capable of exploiting upland areas remote from any settlement and plausibly explains the Mesolithic presence in such places.
Richard Tipping noted that the considerable changes found in Scottish woodlands in the Mesolithic might represent hunter-gatherer activity or natural events. The research necessary to distinguish the two has not yet been done in Scotland but ‘the comparative abundance of mesolithic activity reported from pollen diagrams from Scotland … can only indicate either an astonishingly large population or, more likely, that not unexpectedly we are confounding artificial with autogenic deflections of woodland processes.’46 An ‘astonishingly large’ Mesolithic population is perhaps more possible than he thinks. A very large population survived in Highland Scotland under very similar conditions prior to 1750. It is possible that there may have been many more people living in Scotland in the Mesolithic than is normally thought. They did not use pottery, build houses, plough the earth or bury their dead but they were nonetheless there, hunting deer and herding cattle.
The potential for disaster when a native culture subsisting in a fragile environment is exposed to modern influences is not unfamiliar. Before 1750 the Highlands and Islands of Scotland were populous and self-sufficient, though untouched by 'improvement'. In less than two hundred years the basic settlement unit – the communal township – was extinct, and the last of the native Highlanders had gone or would go within a generation. That their ancestral way of life had been primitive no-one denied, but even the most altruistic of landlords saw past the poor housing, the naked children and the dirt, to the mechanisms which supported Gaelic society. They confused material simplicity with deprivation and identified it as a problem which required to be solved. That the Gaels possessed exceptional survival skills was never considered amidst complaints about primitive huts and offensive middens. These foreigners (whatever their origins) understood nothing of the complexity of a minimalist rural culture which had survived through thousands of years. It did not cross their minds to study what they were about to change and to consider that it might after all be the best, if not the only possible way, of surviving in a difficult environment.
It is significant that whenever the balance of the old way of life was upset, for whatever reason, it invariably collapsed. It could not and did not adapt. This suggests that up to that time, economy and land use in the Highlands had changed very little from the time of first settlement, and that the Highlanders had persisted with their old ways, not out of obstinacy or poverty but because topography and climate gave them few options in the matter.
It became evident long after the event how much the native population contributed to their own survival, how well-adapted and sustainable their primitive methods had in fact been. The Marquis of Tullibardine, later 8th Duke of Atholl, was every bit as astute as his illustrious ancestors. In August 1909, responding to political agitation against the use of ‘good’ land for deer forests, he invited eleven competent working men, chosen ‘from the very class whence the demand for small-holdings arises’, to tour the deer-forests of Atholl. They had apparently been offered the gift of any land they thought suitable for a smallholding and all were fired with enthusiasm. But they retired frustrated. Their unanimous opinion was that the land they had seen had no value for agricultural purposes. It was poor and boggy, the climate was bad and it was too far from markets. Glen Tilt was ‘not suitable for small holdings. The existence of small holders would be miserable up there.’47
And yet the Gaelic natives of Glen Tilt had loved their glen, had lived there very comfortably, and lamented when they were forced to leave it. But this was a mutual story of respect and support. By 1909, after a century of neglect, their beloved glen was uninhabitable and remains so. No part of the Highlands has escaped this green devastation. And yet the only recorded complaint, from a people who might have complained about a great deal, was that they had no security of tenure. They could not rely on their landlords to renew their leases, even when they had created whatever value was in the land and paid their rents promptly. The incentive that drove them to the ends of the earth was the dream that they might once again be free men, living on their own land, as they had been free throughout prehistory.
