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IF, during the twenty years
between 1828 and
1848, with which I am now discursively dealing as
memories serve and thoughts arise in my mind, a
stranger like Dr Johnson in 1772, and Leyden the
border poet in 1800, passed through the glens, hills,
and straths from Stirling to Caithness, he would
naturally conclude that except in orderliness and
means of education, the Highlands still remained
essentially unaltered. And that conclusion would
not be without justifying facts. Within the old
Highland Lines Gaelic was still the language of the
people, and the people themselves, as their surnames, and the traditions, customs, and superstitions
which had come down to them on the wings of
untold centuries plainly indicated, were, taken as a
whole, of genuine Celtic descent. But the old and
the new were already beginning to hustle and jostle
one another, and the observer who looked below the
surface could see that a great change was in
progress, although he might not foresee the revolutionising effect of the railways which were to open
the Highlands up in after years. Before the Highlands were penetrated by railways, the changing
forces at work were economic, educational, and
religious. From the unrecorded days of antiquity,
Highland farming proceeded unintermittingly on
simple lines the cultivation of every bit of soil on
which crops could be raised, and the keeping of
large stocks of cattle, horses, goats, and small flocks
of little sheep, which produced sweet mutton and
fine wool. Cows, goats, and sheep were all milked,
for next to stock increase, crops, and on the sea-
coast fishing, dairy industry took its place in the family reckoning,
although domestic spinning, dyeing, and weaving, besides providing clothing and
linen, also supplied the money needed for purchasing
what could not be made at home, and much more.
Under the ancestral farming dispensation, Highland
tenants had in township companies two holdings
namely, winter towns and shealings or summer
grazings. The shealings might be adjacent to the
winter-towns, or ten or twenty miles away. But
whether near at hand or far off, the young and yeld
animals were sent to them in the spring, and women,
children, and the main stock migrated to them early
in May, and remained there till fairly on in the
autumn. I saw the last of the shealing life
and shared in its romance, and also in its
weirdness, when we herd-boys slept in the
lonely huts before the spinning milkmaids came up
with the cows and the dairy utensils. The ruined
mills on many streams dumbly testify, and the
records, in which rents in kind are enumerated, bear
written evidence to the fact that under the old
husbandry the scanty arable lands of the Highlands
produced heavier crops than they produce at the
present time. The old farmers had plenty of farmyard manure, and, speaking in particular for my
native district, the tenants used far back a good
system of rotation, burned much lime, and so
planned that every field that would be the better of
the lime application got a dose of it every eight or
ten years. Farming implements were simple and
rude compared to what they are now, most of them
being made at home, but in result cultivation was
much better than it is now, and much more land
was under crops.
Although Jacobites might
still hope and plot
for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, within
twenty-five years after Culloden the Highlands, by
garrisons, military roads, and, immediately after the
battle, by Cumberland atrocities, were brought into
the firm grip of law and order. "Creachs" and clan
feuds were put an end to for ever more. No room
was left for even another Rob Roy. The Church of
Scotland, which had all along stood firmly for the
Revolution Settlement, and had in many a district
of Gaeldom to encounter the hostility of Jacobite
chiefs and potentates, was now able to assert a
dominating position in regard to matters of faith,
morals, and education. Clannishness retained much
of its pristine vigour, and still survives as a sentiment of kinship and brotherhood from far off times.
The feudal power of nobles and landowners had,
however, its tap-root cut by the abolition of heritable jurisdiction. Therefore proprietors turned their
attentions to the management and improvement of
their estates. It was not till well on in the next
century that they realised the letting value of their
fishing and shooting rights, which they were far
from enforcing strictly as long as they kept them in
their own hands. But they were easily persuaded
by Lowland advisers that they could get higher
farm rents by abolishing the shealings, as far as
they were separable from winter-towns, and by
stocking them with blackfaced sheep from the
Borders, which were much bigger and hardier then,
whatever they may be now, than the small native
breed, which in hard winters had to be housed and
hand-fed. Economically, or from the higher rent
point of view, the advice was good, and it held good
for the subsequent hundred years, until colonial
and foreign wools reduced the value of the home
product, and the cost of wintering the home sheep
had run up to almost the equivalent of a second
rent. Pacification of the Highlands next turned
the attention of the Lowlanders to the chances
opened to the Lowland sheep-farmers and shepherds,
who, acting as proprietors' grieves and instructors of
native tenants in Border sheep-farming, gathered
gear and courage to take shealing farms themselves.
The Lowland invasion of estate-managers, grieves,
shepherds, and blackfaced sheep began in 1770. On
the part of most proprietors who were continuously
resident on their land, excepting for winter visits to
Edinburgh, and who had kindly sympathies and
relations with their people, the social revolution
involved in the abandonment of the old system was
fully realised and dreaded. Noblemen who, like the
Earl of Breadalbane, had wide stretches of old deer
forest lands, turned them into sheep-farms, and on
them the blackfaced sheep from the Borders, under
the care of Lowland managers and shepherds, were
placed and found to be profitable. But tenants'
shealings were in most cases left undisturbed for
the next thirty years. Old Culdares, who was an
agriculturalist beyond his age, put blackfaced sheep
on his home farm of Gallin and its far away Ben-vannoch shealing, but did not disturb the tenants'
double-holdings. In bringing into the Glen Walter
Grieve from Huntly, Selkirkshire, and Walter Scott
from Wester Buccleuch, Roxburghshire, his avowed
object was the teaching of native tenants how to
manage club-stocks of southern sheep for themselves. That object was fully attained, although he
did not live to see it. In 1779 a temporary backset was given to the new sheep regime by the price
of wool falling from 5s to 2s 2d per stone; but the blackfaced once introduced very soon superseded
the small native breed. The native farmers formed
club-stocks of them, while their other animals, like
the arable land, remained as before in individual
ownership. Old Culdares was pressed by debt.
His chief adviser, Mr Anderson, afterwards minister
of Old Deer, proposed to divide the barony into a
few large separate farms, but however pressed for
money and tempted by what Mr Anderson assured
him was a certainty of gain, Culdares was too
much of a Highlander to adopt a plan so radically
revolutionary and so harsh to his native tenants.
The Lowlanders who came with the blackfaced, and
later on with the Cheviots, remained in most cases
in the Highlands and drew others after them; but
the conquering Lowland invasion only began with
the railway era. |
