4
Forgotten History: Dispossession in the Borders
Today travellers by train from Carlisle to the north crossing the Border countryside can look out at mile after mile of uninhabited but apparently fertile land. Only the occasional cottage or farm steading is seen as a rare sign of human habitation. Flocks of sheep graze almost everywhere. This is not a natural landscape but one formed by social and economic change in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth.
For, contrary to popular belief, the removal and abandonment of traditional rural communities in eighteenth-century Scotland did not start in the Highlands. Two generations or more before clearances began north of the Highland line, the dispossession of many tenants and cottars was already under way in the hill country of the Borders, many miles to the south, in a social revolution which has long been mainly ignored. The proximate cause was the expansion of large sheep farms, often with flocks averaging between 4,000 and 20,000, and the parallel growth in other districts of extensive cattle ranches. The specialist region for sheep was Roxburgh and Peebles in the central and eastern Borders, while cattle rearing and fattening was more dominant further west in Galloway and the surrounding districts. What happened in those areas eventually generated the model for the later and more familiar clearances in the Highlands. Indeed, it was Border-reared and -improved Cheviot breeds which from the last quarter of the eighteenth century began to stock numerous farms across the north-west and the islands in a seemingly inexorable white tide which led to the uprooting of many peasant communities. Moreover, some of the pioneering flockmasters and shepherds who managed the new sheep walks in the Highlands were often men who were Borders-born and -bred from Liddesdale and Eskdale, where they had first learned how to run large-scale pastoral farms in the early eighteenth century.
This chapter considers the reasons for the early onset of dispossession in the deep south of Scotland by pastoral specialization and expansion and tries to document its extent and significance. The analysis also explores the intriguing question of what became of the people who lost land during a historic transformation which within a few decades had brought to an end a traditional way of life which had existed in the Southern Uplands for centuries.
1
Sheep farming in the eastern and central Borders had a long lineage. As far back as the eleventh century, the abbeys of Melrose, Jedburgh and Kelso began to develop upland pastures in the Cheviot Hills, upper Teviotdale and Eskdale, and the hinterlands of the Yarrow and Ettrick Waters. When the monastic lands were expropriated during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, it was influential Border families, such as the Scotts, future dukes of Buccleuch, and the Kerrs, later dukes of Roxburgh, who took much of the former church land into their own possession. By that time, sheep farming was already carried out on such a scale that it gave rise to some contemporary comment. Thus, Bishop Leslie in 1578 could write of Tweeddale: ‘in this contrie … evin as with other nychbouris [neighbours], that sum of thame are known to have four or fyve hundir [hundred] uthers agane aucht [eight], nyne hundir, and som tyme thay ar knawen to have a thousand scheip’.1
However, full commercialization was inhibited by continuing instability in the Border countryside, whether from marauding armies or endemic livestock rustling. Therefore the great families in the region, like their counterparts in the Highlands, still had to depend on large and loyal followings to provide defence for property and social position. The force of these kinship connections had not entirely disappeared by the last few decades of the seventeenth century, so that by that time land was not yet considered to be simply an economic asset to be exclusively used solely for profit. As one authority has commented: ‘So long as the Borders remained a troubled area, then large estates would have been tolerant of a numerous tenantry.’2 Rentals from the Buccleuch as well as the Roxburgh properties in this period confirm that both upland farms and those situated along the river valleys had large numbers of both tenants (often in multi-tenancy) and subtenants. Two detailed maps of Scotland, one published in 1654 and the other compiled between 1747 and 1755, provide a pictorial and visual complement to the documentary sources. The seventeenth-century Blaeu Map of Scotland is the first known atlas of the country. A section on Galloway depicts the large number of small townships in the region before the era of dispossession, most of which had vanished by 1800. The other map, the famous mid-eighteenth-century survey of Scotland under the direction of Major-General William Roy, has been considered by cartographers to be not entirely accurate but is nonetheless very useful for sites which interested the military such as settlements, manmade structures and cultivated land. The Roy survey therefore provides an invaluable bird’s-eye view of population distribution and cultivated arable in the Border counties, confirming once again their much greater density before improvement.
It was only in the period following the Regal Union of 1603 that joint action by Scottish and English authorities began the process of bringing the Borders into a condition of final stability. Though old attitudes, traditions and loyalties still took many years to die out in their entirety, state-imposed pacification soon became the essential precondition for the rapid expansion of commercial pastoral economy in the region. Growing demand for wool and mutton was also influential, not least in the latter case from the mining villages of the north-east England coalfield. Table 2 gives an indication of the scale of the cross-Border trade in sheep which had developed even before the Union of 1707 established free trade between Scotland and England.
Also becoming more important were town markets in the central Lowlands. While the population of Scotland as a whole remained overwhelmingly rural, the five counties of the south-east, in and around the valley of the River Forth, had a surprisingly high level of early urban development. The number of small towns and large villages in East Lothian, Midlothian, Fife and Clackmannan meant the area had more urban dwellers than any other part of Scotland. In addition, of course, Edinburgh was by far the largest concentrated market in Scotland. The population of the capital doubled in size between 1560 and the 1640s to over 30,000. Edinburgh was also the richest town in the country, alone paying around one third of the taxation raised from the royal burghs in the later seventeenth century. Scotland as a whole may not have been a nation of meat eaters at this time, but the affluent middle and upper classes of Edinburgh had long had an appetite for Border lamb and mutton. Indeed, on the growing sheep farms, profits from the sales of lamb, hogs and cast ewes to the butchers at this time far outweighed those from wool and skins.
By 1700, then, sheep farming was already impressive in extent and geared to servicing demand outside the Border region. However, the evidence of estate papers shows that alongside the big holdings which specialized in stock rearing there was a considerable subsistence sector of small tenants and their families clustered in adjacent fermetouns. For example, a 1718 survey of the vast Buccleuch estate, with 140 farms spread across Ettrick, Teviotdale, Liddesdale, Ewesdale and Eskdalemuir, shows holdings of 500–1,000 acres and above were dominant in the upper hill country, but on the lower ground tenancies of 30–50 acres remained common. Equally, the big sheep farms all paid rental in cash – a sign of their commercial orientation – while many smallholdings still adhered to a regime of rentals partly in kind, a reflection of their subsistence status. Significantly, too, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century commentators, looking back to earlier times, often noted that in a number of districts long abandoned to large-scale pastoral husbandry by that later period, ‘the mark of the plough’ was still visible across the landscape, testifying to the small communities which had once worked the arable land.
As the prosperity of sheep farming grew, so a conflict between the two sectors of pastoralism and subsistence became inevitable. If the former was to maintain its unrelenting progress, the ground possessed by the small tenants would have to be given up. This was because increases in stock depended in the final analysis on the number of sheep which could be over-wintered and that in turn demanded access to the low-lying arable ground occupied by the fermetouns.
By about 1700, it must have been apparent to the more commercially minded farmers that by reducing their arable the size of their flocks and lambing rates could be increased. But, in order to do this, the subsistence needs of the farm had to be reduced. This, in turn, meant that tenant numbers had to be cut back and larger, more commercially viable units established.3
Sheep farming demanded considerable space for effective management of large flocks. That requirement in turn meant that the squeezing out of the small tenant class in the areas of expansion of large holdings was likely to be only a matter of time. One contemporary improving theorist with experience of pastoral farming in the Borders explained why size mattered:
It is well known that sheep when kept by a herd never thrive in a confined pasture. The reason is obvious, they are too frequently checked in their motions and disturbed in their feeding. Land therefore that is adapted principally, or for the Sole purpose of Sheep pasture Should be Laid out in pretty Large farms.
There is another Reason for this; the different ages and kinds of Sheep do not agree with the same pasture, the Store Master therefore Divides them into Separate Hirsels each of which must have a herd; a compleat Store or Sheep farm has at least four Separate Hirsels, viz. a live Hirsell an Eald Sheep or Wedder Hirsell, or Drummkond Hirsel, and Lamb or Hog Hirsel, each of these Hirsels or flocks must be so Large as to give the Herd proper Employment.
To This quantity for Hay, and if possible to Induce the tennent to raise Turnip for winter feeding, and for Corn for the family. So that the extent of a Compleat Stores farm must appear very Considerable.
If possible every Store farm Should be of this kind, such a quantity of Land is indeed absolutely necessary to Carry on the whole process of breading and feeding Sheep to the best advantage and a Regard should be paid to this, in the manner of laying out the moor and pasture grounds, sometimes it happens that the different pastures proper for the Different kinds of Sheep do not Life so conveniently as to be put into the same farm.
Therefore the farmer must often submit to have only one or two of these kinds of Hirsels, in this Case. The farms may be proportionably less, but Still they ought to be of such an extent as to make the necessary experience of it sit Light upon the profites.4
[hirsel = flock of sheep under the management of one shepherd]
This was the economic background to the eventual dispossession of communities in the eastern borders during the decades which followed. There were signs, indeed, by the early years of the eighteenth century that some estates were already beginning to plan for the removal of tenants as part of a policy of building up larger holdings.
2
The thinning of the tenantry was under way before c.1750. Multiple tenancies disappeared first and these were then followed by the elimination of entire fermetouns, with their communities of tenants and cottars. The First or ‘Old’ Statistical Account of Scotland (OSA), published in the 1790s, contains much detail on this social transformation. The OSA was edited by Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster and was an enquiry into all parishes in Scotland at a time of wide-ranging economic change during the early stages of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. In 1790, Sinclair circulated a structured questionnaire to over 900 parish ministers across Scotland. The 160 questions ranged over geography, population, antiquities, religion, agriculture and industry. Inevitably, the quality and length of responses varied greatly, but for all its weaknesses the OSA remains a unique historical compendium of contemporary life of the period unmatched for any other country in eighteenth-century Europe. Evidence derived from it can also be supplemented from the Second or New Statistical Account (NSA), which was mainly published in the 1840s.
Some of the individual parish accounts, such as those of Smailholm, Sprouston (both in Roxburgh) and Selkirk, provide valuable outlines of the time frame of dispossession. It seems to have begun on a relatively small scale in the later seventeenth century, became more common from the 1720s, and speeded up again from the 1750s. The evidence of the NSA reports suggests that the suppression of smaller farms and cottages was virtually complete by 1815. Documentation of the removals can be presented in both a qualitative and a numerical fashion. The series of extracts reproduced below from the OSA reports leave little doubt about the scale of clearance. These are then followed by enumeration of population in a number of Border parishes for the half-century between the mid-1750s and 1790s. The accounts vividly illustrate the reaction of the local clergy to the dramatic changes they had witnessed during their own lifetimes, together with other evidence reported to them by their predecessors before they themselves were appointed to parish ministry. The tone is factual but also elegiac, descriptions of an older world which has now vanished:
There are no new houses built in the parish of late, nor cottages, but a great many cottages pulled down, the farmer finding more loss than profit from keeping cot-houses. The throwing down of cottages must be one principal reason of the decrease of population.
Parish of Broughton, County of Peebles
From the best information, there is reason to believe that the parish about 40 years ago was double in population to what it is at present. There were then considerable villages [N.B. almost certainly these were farming townships] in it: the one is entirely gone; and a few straggling houses are all that remains of the other. Farms now possessed by one, were then in the hands of 2, 4 and even 5 farmers, and the number of cottagers, besides the inhabitants of little villages, even greater.
Parish of Traquair, County of Peebles
The population of this parish has decreased considerably. About 70 years ago, the lands were occupied by 26 tenants, but the farms since that period have been gradually enlarged in extent, and of course diminished in number; even of the 15 to which they are now reduced, so many are engrossed in the hands of the same persons, and those often settled in other parishes, that there are now only 3 farmers at present resident in the whole parish.
Parish of Tweedsmuir, County of Peebles
The great decrease of inhabitants, within the last 40 years, is evidently occasioned by the too general practice of letting the lands in great farms … lands, 50 or 100 years ago, were parcelled out into at least four times the present number of farms. As late as the year 1740, five tenants, with large families, occupied a farm now rented by one tenant. There were also, about these times, several small but proud lairds [owner-occupiers] in the parish. Their lands are now lost in the large farms, their names extinguished, and their mansions totally destroyed.
Parish of Hownam, County of Roxburgh
The decrease of the population has been chiefly occasioned by the monopoly of farms … in the village [farming township] of Oxnam, between 60 and 70 years ago, there were 22 tenants who kept above 16 ploughs drawn by oxen and horses; whereas now, 3 persons occupy the whole and have only 7 ploughs, drawn by horses.
Parish of Oxnam, County of Roxburgh
The aged people all agree in asserting that it [i.e. population] considerably exceeded the present and their testimony is corroborated from the numerous remains of old houses. Various causes may be assigned for this depopulation. One, undoubtedly, may be imputed to the monopoly of farms which diminishes the number of farmers’ families. Another may be attributed to the aversion of the farmers to rebuild cot-houses.
Parish of Yarrow, County of Selkirk
These comments, and the demographic evidence which follows below and supports them, suggest a number of conclusions. The parish ministers in their commentaries reveal a scale of dispossession in the early-eighteenth-century eastern Borders which evokes comparison with the more familiar Highland experience of later decades. Those primarily involved in the decisions to remove entire communities were, like those in north and west Scotland, the landowners, their factors and their agents. But the new breed of élite tenants which emerged in the sheep-farming districts was also directly responsible for the widespread removal of the subordinate cottar class which in traditional society had possessed tiny portions of land in return for seasonal labour services. Their social position had always been insecure since they had no legally confirmed rights to their modest possessions. Whether they continued to live on them or not depended in the final analysis not on the estate proprietors but on the decisions of the tenantry who sublet to them the plots of land which were vital to their subsistence and to whom they were directly responsible. Unequivocal confirmation of their dependent status was that when their masters moved to another holding, so did they, together with the ploughs, tools and other equipment of the farm. Yet rarely, except perhaps in crisis years of famine or harvest failure, had their lowly position in the rural hierarchy ever been systematically challenged. But now the cottar class as a whole was soon to be on the verge of extinction throughout the eastern Borders. Clearly, as more and more arable land was annexed for pastoralism, the need for cottar families to help with cultivation of the soil for grain cropping was becoming superfluous.
Also of significance in this narrative is the question of the silence of the people who were displaced in such large numbers. The process could not have been painless or devoid of stress, threat and anxiety. Yet, if surviving rent rolls had not revealed the extent of tenant removal and local ministers in the OSA had not described the reality of extensive dispossession in their parishes, the clearances in the eastern Borders could well have been lost to history. There was no evidence of public disturbance or protest against loss of land of the kind which might have attracted interest and concern beyond the region and so left a deposit of evidence for later scholars to evaluate.
The silence is indeed remarkable in light of the age-old connections which the people had with the land and which were so basic to virtually all material aspects of their existence. Moreover, the reintegration of the displaced populations into the big sheep farms as landless servants and labourers was unlikely. This did take place in areas of labour-intensive mixed or arable agriculture elsewhere in the Lowlands, a process which is considered in Chapters 8 and 9. But large-scale pastoral husbandry was land- and capital-intensive and needed little in the way of labour apart from a few experienced shepherds and labourers. The conventional eighteenth-century belief was that one shepherd was needed to manage 600 sheep. In other words, a giant sheep farm of around 10,000 sheep required only sixteen shepherds.
As the figures below suggest, tenant and cottar displacement was often followed by sharp falls in the population of individual parishes. Yet, while many did experience absolute decline in numbers, small increases in others could disguise the real extent of haemorrhage either due to dispossession or caused by young folk moving to seek opportunities elsewhere. The population of Scotland rose by an estimated average of 20 per cent, or one fifth, between the 1750s and 1790s. Therefore parishes with significantly lower increases than that were likely to be experiencing net out-migration.
The progressive decline in the population of some parishes was accompanied by a contraction in the arable which had once been cultivated. There is evidence that on the estates of Roxburgh, Marchmont and Lothian, rising prices for wool and mutton were encouraging landowners to insist in the tacks issued to new tenants that more and more land on upland farms should be converted to grazing. Travellers in the region noted the shrinkage of cultivation. Thus Robert Heron in 1793 wrote of the parish of Robertson in upper Clydesdale: ‘Everywhere as I proceeded up the vale, I could discover by certain marks, that it had anciently been a scene of agricultural industry and a seat of no inconsiderable population. The houses were only cottages. But in many instances, the walls of these cottages seemed of very ancient erection’. He wondered what had become of the people who once lived there and grew corn on the now empty and barren fields.5 Evidence from the Lammermuirs suggests that 48 settlements were abandoned between 1600 and 1750. Over the following half-century, the figure was 21 and between 1800 and 1825 the rate increased to 54 over that twenty-year period.
However, there is little indication in the Poor Law figures in the OSA parish reports that thinning of the working population had led to significantly increased poverty or vagrancy. The numbers of supported poor in virtually all the registers were described as being at normal or even sometimes at lower levels. Indeed, several ministers asserted that, far from causing immiseration, depopulation had led to sharp increases in money wages. Poverty, therefore, could have been exported through the emigration and migration of the dispossessed. Some OSA reports did indeed mention that movement to the American colonies occurred on an extensive scale from the region in the early 1770s. It was noted of Smallholm in Roxburghshire, for instance, that many young men from the parish had joined the army and navy during the American War of Independence and never came back home. Others were said to have left for the East Indies, the Americas, the Caribbean and above all for England. The parish minister was of the opinion that from the whole of Scotland ‘10,000 journeymen, wrights, carpenters, bakers, gardeners, and taylors [sic] go yearly to London’. He went on to suggest that ‘Many of them emigrate from this part of the country, sailing from Berwick and Newcastle, where the passage is short and frequent, and the freight easy.’6 Regrettably, however, little systematic evidence has survived about the specific extent of outward movement for this period. Between 1755 and 1801, the population of the rural parishes in the county of Roxburgh rose by 7 per cent, Peebles by 18 per cent, Dumfries by 19 per cent and Kirkcudbright by 24 per cent. The national average population figure for the same period was an increase of 20 per cent. Apart from Roxburgh, therefore, the numbers do not imply mass outward migration from the central and eastern Borders before the 1790s. On this evidence, the demographic impact of dispossession seems mainly to have been contained within the Border region itself.
On the other hand, there is compelling evidence that many of those removed from the land by the spread of large-scale sheep farming moved to towns and villages in the region where they managed to find some work in the developing cottage industries. The town populations of Kelso, Hawick, Galashiels, Selkirk and Jedburgh all showed significant increases in the later eighteenth century. These urban spaces were gaining people at the expense of the surrounding countryside, which was continuously shedding inhabitants. Of Kelso in the 1790s, for instance, it was said:
In 38 years the increase in people has been 1543. This great increase may, in part, be accounted for from the destruction of many villages (farm townships) in the neighbourhood, occupied by small farms. From the enlargement of the farms, many were obliged to follow other trades, and Kelso, being the metropolis of the district, they flocked there for habitations and employment; and in proportion as labourers and mechanics have become fewer in the country, Kelso increased in population.7
Another case in point was the village of Yetholm in Roxburgh. In the second half of the eighteenth century, it more than doubled in numbers because many townships in the adjacent parishes of Hownam, Morbottle and Linton ‘had been totally razed since the memory of people now living’ and many of their inhabitants had moved to Yetholm.
The ‘other trades’ mentioned in the description of Kelso were mainly associated with textile work organized at the time on a domestic basis. Home-based spinning, weaving and knitting proved to be the salvation of many of the evicted families in the years immediately before the rise of factory-based woollen manufacturing in the Border towns. It is known that many of these skills had long been practised within the communities of the fermetouns. David Loch, in his tour of the region in 1778, noted the range of textile working in the closing decades of the eighteenth century which included the making of plaids, carpets, linen, stockings, napkins, serges and blankets and was centred on the towns of Hawick, Peebles, Melrose, Kelso, Jedburgh, Moffat, Carnwath, Sanquar and Dumfries. As the decay of the old rural society gathered pace, some alternative possibilities were beginning to emerge which provided a basic living for families who no longer had a place in the modernizing rural economy which had sustained their ancestors for generations in the past. That interaction between the growth of small-scale urban industry and the parallel process of dispossession on the land might go some way to explaining why this part of the Borders, unlike some parishes further west in Galloway, never erupted into violent peasant resistance.
3
While the great sheep runs concentrated in the centre and east, the heartland of cattle rearing in the Borders was the south-west. In the later seventeenth century more than nine out of ten of the cattle which crossed the border for sale in England were accounted for by the three western customs precincts of Alisonbank, Castleton and Dumfries.
These figures confirm that the droving trade was already substantial before the Union of 1707. As with large-scale sheep farming, pacification of the Borders in the decades following the Regal Union had been a precondition for expansion. But other influences cannot be ignored. The rapid growth of English urban markets for meat during the second half of the seventeenth century was also very relevant. London’s expansion, for instance, was little short of phenomenal. By 1660 it was second only in size to Paris and fifty years later had become the biggest city in Europe, dwarfing all others, with a population of some half a million people. The gargantuan size of the ‘Great Wen’ forced the suppliers and traders of the city to draw on the whole of Britain for essentials of foods, fuel and raw materials. After months of fattening in the fields of East Anglia, cattle from Scotland were driven on the hoof a short distance to the slaughterhouses of Smithfield in the capital. Many of these beasts had been bred in the Borders. Some had been reared in the Highlands counties and in addition cattle from the Buccleuch lands around Dalkeith were fattened for sale close to Edinburgh.
A critical factor in the emerging market for Border stock was the passage of the Irish Cattle Act by the English Parliament in 1666 prohibiting live imports from across the Irish Sea. Irish cattle were heavier and bigger than the Scottish breeds, which offered them little competition in the English market. By 1663 it was estimated that as many as 61,000 Irish cattle were imported annually into England, a volume of trade which completely dwarfed the Scottish enterprise. The prohibition of 1666 was therefore a precondition for the rise of Borders cattle ranching and its eventual success in the London market.
Droving was also encouraged by a successive lowering of customs duties at the Anglo-Scottish border. The Scottish Privy Council changed from a policy of preventing livestock exports to one of encouraging them with considerable enthusiasm. So, by the 1680s, the customs charge per beast had sunk to a twentieth of that levied at the start of the century. More than ever, the way was now open for Galloway landowners to enter the cattle trade across the border in a big way. By the end of the seventeenth century, some estates were each sending annually droves of 400–500 cattle to England. One estimate suggests an overall yearly average of 20,000–30,000 cattle were crossing the border. But this was based on official figures of stock passing through the customs precincts. As the frontier between the countries was very porous at the time, there is no way of knowing how many more came over by clandestine routes. Then came free trade after the Union of 1707; Border landowners were more than ready to profit from the anticipated bonanza of cattle sales to English markets.
In response to these increasingly favourable market opportunities, some of the south-west gentry began to develop cattle parks and extensive grazing grounds. One of the leaders in the development was Sir David Dunbar. At Baldoon, south of Wigtown, he constructed a large grazing area in 1684. Estimated to be two and a half miles in length and one and a half in breadth, it was reckoned to be capable of providing wintering for 1,000 cattle in the mild climate of the Solway lowlands. Dunbar bought cattle from neighbouring tenants and landowners in late summer, wintered them in the park and then drove the fattened animals to markets in England in August and September.
His enterprise drew most attention at the time – it was described as ‘the mother of all the rest’ – but other Border landlords, such as the Stair family and Lord Bargany, were also active in the same way.8 Enclosed pasture had several advantages over open-field grazing because it permitted segregation of livestock and better management of herds. Now it became possible to prevent inbreeding of sick and healthy animals and improve the quality of the animals. Selective breeding of beasts took place on what was usually the best land on an estate, while the pasture ground was enriched further by liming and cattle manure. The result was improved livestock with higher sales value at market.
Even before the Anglo-Scottish Union then, what the local people calling ‘parking’ was a familiar trend in some western districts of the Borders. It was inevitable, however, that at some point there conflict would arise between the subsistence way of life of the small tenants and cottars and the continued spread of the cattle ranches into contested areas of good grazing land. This was likely to be the equivalent for Galloway of the depopulating effects of commercialized sheep farming in the central and eastern estates of the Borders. Evidence soon began to emerge of the clearance of townships and the annexation of common grazing lands which were essential to the functioning of the peasant livestock economy. Travellers in the region saw the impact. In 1723, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik noted in his journal: ‘The inhabitants of Galloway [Wigtownshire] are much lessened since the custom of inclosing their grounds took place, for there are certainly above 20,000 acres laid waste on that account.’ He described ‘the inclosures for black cattle’ with ‘diks [dykes] of stone without mortar, very thinly built’ and ‘had occasion to compute that they bring in ten thousand guineas to their country, for the price of their cattle is commonly paid in gold’.9 Another source noted how ‘the very little town of Minnigaff belonging to Mr. Heron [Patrick Heron, Laird of Kirroughtree] is only a nest of beggars since he inclosed all the ground about’. It was also reported that ‘Evry year several tenants are exposed to the mountains, and know not where to get any place’, and alleged that there were instances of peasant suicides about the Whitsun term time ‘when they were obliged to go away and did not know where to go’.10
The plight of the dispossessed was described in a vitriolic, anti-landlord ballad, Lamentation of the People of Galloway by the Pairking Lairds, composed by James Charters of the Kirkland of Dalry. Charters was a tenant of the Gordons of Earlston and there is some evidence he was associated with the ‘levelling’ of cattle dykes in protest against the removals. Originally circulated in manuscript, the ballad was then printed in Glasgow for wider distribution:
A generation like to this
Did never man behold,
I mean over great and might men
Who covetous are of gold.
Solomon could not well approve
The practice of their lives
To oppress and to keep down the poor,
Their actions cut like knives.
Among great men where shall ye find
a godly man like Job,
He made the widow’s heart to sing
But our lairds make them sob.
It is the duty of great men
But worldly interest moves our lairds,
Their mind another end
The lords and lairds may drive us out from mailings
[tenant farms] where we dwell
The poor man says: ‘Where shall we go?’
The rich says: ‘Go to Hell.’
These words they spoke in jests and mocks
That if they have their herds and flocks,
They care not where to go
Against the poor they will prevail
with all their wicked words,
And will inclose both moor and dale
And turn cornfield into parks.11
The enclosures soon led to a loss of people. Of the fourteen parishes in Kirkcudbrightshire which showed a fall in population below the Scottish average in the later period 1755–1801, the six which experienced absolute decline were situated in the remote hill country. They included Carsphairn, Dalry and Kells. The adjoining parish of Balmaclellan registered a rise of only 3.7 per cent, though the national average increase was over 20 per cent in the second half of the eighteenth century. But there was one dramatic difference between the clearances for sheep farming in the northerly parishes of the Borders and those which facilitated the expansion of large-scale cattle ranching in Galloway. As noted above, in the sheep-farming districts the removals took place in silence with little evidence of any social disturbance. But in 1724 Galloway was convulsed by a major peasant revolt against the ‘parking’ of land and the evictions which were said to cause much distress among the people of the region.