The Crofting Way by Katharine Stewart, author of Croft in the Hills, Garden in the Hills and The Post in the Hills collects together the best of the On the Croft and Country Diary columns she wrote for the Scotsman over many years. As her diary begins, she and her husband are working a croft high up in the hills by Loch Ness. From day to day she captures the actuality of life on the croft: the blizzards and thaws, the pair of sparrows nesting in the eaves of the byre, the first lambs born in the season, the turnip-singling, the neighbours working together at harvest-time and Charlie the horse carting the stooks. Threaded throughout the diary entries are more considered pieces on crofting and country life in the Highlands, dealing with subjects like the Summer Walkers, Halloween, the shielings, the cutting of the peats, the magical uses of the rowan tree and many more.

Wonderfully evocative though it is, what Katharine Stewart writes about crofts and crofting is not merely a lament for the golden days of the past. Drawing on her own experiences and her deep knowledge of rural history, she has much to say about the present viability and future development of this unique form of farming.

The issue of sustainable and ecologically-friendly land use in the Highlands is one of the thorniest issues the new Scottish Parliament has to grapple with, and The Crofting Way is an important contribution to this debate. Katharine Stewart is in no doubt: ‘A land revolution is needed now... the land must be made available for a vastly increased amount of real production.’ Crofting, she believes, is the key to the renewal of the Highlands. She adds: ‘With reform in the system of landholding at the top of the politicians’ agenda there is surely hope, now, that crofting may be able to progress, to take its rightful place in the scheme of things.’

In his Foreword to The Crofting Way, Iain MacAskill, Chairman of the Crofters’ Commission, writes: ‘To preserve the unique and valuable heritage and culture in the Highlands and Islands we need vibrant communities...by preserving what is best from the past and taking advantage of new technological developments we can, I am sure, realise many of the hopes that Katharine Stewart outlines in her book.’

EXCERPT:

We came north in 1950. Before that the hills we walked were the lowland hills. There was lark-song and the scent of heather. But always in the inner eye were the hills of the north, vast hills under a white sky. And the distant curlew calling.

With the aftermath of war and its effects slowly seeping away, we began to think… a tangle of thoughts which began, slowly, to take shape… We each had close links with the land. Jim’s forebears had been crofters and weavers in Atholl, mine had farmed further south, in Galloway. A spell in the Women’s Land Army had taught me to milk a cow, to stook corn, to drive a tractor at the tattie-lifting. We had grown vegetables and fruit, had kept chickens and bees. So it was that we came, quite naturally, it seemed, with our small daughter Helen, to live and work on a croft, close on 1,000 feet up, in the hills above Loch Ness.

The house stood, four-square and solid, its walls of granite and whinstone, its roof of fine blue slate, facing the morning sun. Cleared fields surrounded it, rough grazing stretching west, and in the distance those vast hills, and the white sky, there, in reality. Nearby stood the ruin of the original house on the holding, a small single-storey structure, and a good steading with stable, barn and byre, with traces of the old horse-driven mill.

It is not always realised that crofting, as we think of it today, originated only about some 200 years ago. The word ‘croft’, from the Gaelic croit, means a small piece of enclosed land. This is significant. Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the people had lived in ‘townships’, small clusters of houses, working the land on the ‘run-rig’ system, that is, as joint cultivators, the arable apportioned in strips, the good alternating with the poor. Their mainstay was the cattle which they grazed on large areas of hill-ground. In these close-knit communities there was much interchange of ideas, discussion, debate.

When the chiefs who, in the movement of the time, had become landlords, set out to make their estates profitable by the introduction of large flocks of sheep, many of the people were cleared from their holdings in the glens and given small plots of land, or crofts, to provide some sustenance for their families, with a share in a common hill-grazing and the possibility of finding some paid employment. For those sent to the coast this meant work at the ‘kelping’, the burning of sea-weed to produce alkali, or in developing the fishing. Some, as in the area we had come to, were given a few acres of barren, shelterless land with the possibility of obtaining some seasonal employment at draining, ditching, wall-building, with a small wage paid by the estate, which, of course, obtained the ultimate benefit. It was at this time that there were many emigrations, some willing, many enforced, to the developing colonies in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

The people who remained, eking out a living as best they could, seeing the land they craved turned into sheep-walks or deer forests, these people began to realise that to fight was the only way to solve their problems. This time the fight was to be, not with their chiefs as in former times, but against them, against those who had abandoned them. From some of their supporters, men who had travelled in America, they heard stories of the troubles of the native people there. Broken promises, reservations…? There were riots in many places, rents were withheld, summonses burned, ricks destroyed, fences pulled down, police attacked with sticks and stones. Eventually, after several years hearing evidence from crofters, a Royal Commission set up to investigate the situation reported its findings. A crofter was defined as ‘a small tenant of land, with or without lease, who finds in the cultivation of his holding a material portion of his occupation, earnings and sustenance and who pays rent to the proprietor.’ In 1886 the Crofters’ Act was passed by the Government. This gave crofters security of tenure in their holdings but still did not restore the land they needed. Since that date many more measures have been adopted to improve the lot of the crofting community. We had always known something of the background to crofting. We were to learn more as we experienced the actuality.

Our place was one of a small community scattered over this upland strath known as Caiplich, the ‘place of horses’. In former times the ground had been fit only for the rough grazing of the many horses needed to work the surrounding areas. Quite soon friendly and helpful hands were stretched to us by members of the families all born and bred in the place. We were to value their skills and their wisdom, their companionship and help over the times to come.

The first years were hard but rewarding—seeing good ground bearing sturdy crops, sheep and cattle thriving, producing most of our foodstuffs, sharing the warmth of the old way of life. Schooling for Helen was in the best tradition, with the added benefit of new friends, new ploys. If spending money was hard to come by there was always the possibility of earning something from a spell of paid employment in a nearby town—Inverness or Dingwall. The crofter has always had recourse to something similar. But to have to split up, even for a short time, was not a happy thought. Then came a fresh idea. There must be many Highland people in the towns of the south who would like to hear about life as it was still lived in the uplands, I thought. I had always written diaries, letters, had had one or two things published…

One bleak afternoon in the January of our fourth year on the croft I sat down at the kitchen table, a large blank sheet of paper in front of me, a pen between my fingers. Jim was outside, shifting loads of muck from the yard, Helen was not due home from school for a couple of hours. The writing came quite naturally. It was simply a description of a quiet January on a hill croft. Rejected by one editor on account of ‘lack of space’ it quickly found a home in the pages of the Weekly Scotsman and was to be the first of many welcomed by successive editors of that paper. This was the start of a record of our life and that of our neighbours in the crofting lands of Caiplich, part of Abriachan. Today, this may seem to many to be almost the stuff of legend, to us it was the reality of our daily lives.

REVIEWS:

‘A richly evocative picture of rural life.’—Scotland on Sunday

‘Gives a valuable insight into crofting life and other aspects of the countryside… A fascinating book and one that needed to be written.’—Highland News

‘Those of you who have read some of Stewart’s previous four books will know they have a rare treat in store here. For those new to this splendid writer this is a chance for a really good read.’—Shetland Times

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