Robert A. Dodgshon - No Stone Unturned: A History of Farming, Landscape and Environment in the Scottish Highlands and Islands

NO STONE UNTURNED

NO STONE UNTURNED

A HISTORY OF FARMING, LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS

ROBERT A. DODGSHON

For
Zara, Caitlin, Adam and Toby

Robert A. Dodgshon, 2015

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jacksons Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 0351 1

The right of Robert A. Dodgshon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

The aim of this book is to bring together a number of themes that I have worked on over the years regarding farming, landscape and environment in the Highlands and Islands, and to combine my data and thinking with that of other scholars so as to produce a rounded, long-term view or history. Work on the background material for the text has been spread over quite a period of time, with the gathering of relevant documentary sources being backed up by increasingly focused site visits across the Highlands and Islands. As with my previous books, I am especially grateful to my former university at Aberystwyth for providing both research leave and grants for the work involved prior to my retirement, both documentary work in Edinburgh as well as the field work. Some of the specific material dealing with livestock farming on the Breadalbane estate was funded as part of my involvement with the NTS Ben Lawers project. Again, I am extremely grateful for their support. Over the years, I have consulted documentary material in a number of archives, from the NAS and NLS in Edinburgh to family muniments in the Highlands: the help of all those who dealt with my requests and queries has been greatly appreciated. Most of the maps were drawn by Ian Gulley and Antony Smith, the cartographers in my former department, the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University. Sadly, Ian Gulley died during the later stages of the books final preparation. As someone who has produced maps for a number of my publications over the past twenty years, I would like to take this opportunity to record my deep appreciation of all his fine work as a cartographer for me. Lastly, I am extremely grateful to John Watson and Ellie Bush of Edinburgh University Press for helping to steer my book through to publication.

This is the first book that I have written surrounded, on more than a few occasions, by my grandchildren. It is appropriate, therefore, that I have dedicated it to them.

Robert A. Dodgshon
Aberystwyth and Stratton Audley

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AREAL MEASURES

Acreages down to and including (following the 1824 Weights and Measures Act standardising measures) are given in imperial acres.

This book looks at the long-term history of farming communities in the Highlands and Islands and the impact they had on landscape and the environment. Until comparatively recently, the prospect for such a history was limited by the fact that while a great deal had been written about the changes of recent centuries, enabling us to understand the major discontinuities represented by the Clearances and spread of crofting, there was a dearth of studies for the centuries that stretched back from this point. In part, this neglect had to do with the evidence to hand. An abundance of both cartographic and written estate surveys become freely available from the mid-eighteenth century onwards that have been used to cast a revealing light as much on what existed immediately prior to the Clearances and crofting as on what followed. By comparison, the documentary sources that are available for the centuries stretching back prior to the mid-eighteenth century are fewer in number, more fragmented in character and more limited in content. Faced with this thinning of material earlier than the mid-eighteenth century, it was hardly surprising that our first position on what the traditional or pre-Clearance landscape of the region looked like should have relied heavily on what mid-eighteenth-century surveys could tell us. Of course, given the richness of the surviving field archaeology, field surveys and excavations always had the potential to offset these documentary limitations. Indeed, the point at which field archaeology and excavation can become the prime source of understanding for farming and its landscape history is probably reached at a shallower point in the history of Highland landscapes than elsewhere in Britain. Until recently, though, approaches to field archaeology in the region, as elsewhere, tended to be site based, ignoring the wider landscape context.

Yet in part, this neglect of work prior to the mid-eighteenth century was also bound up with a particular reading of this history. Some early commentators

That the region may have seen little progress was a theme taken up by writers such as John Walker. On the basis of two separate tours (1764 and 1771),