10
More People, Less Land
1
A rapid and sustained increase in population was the critical and dominating factor in the social history of the Highlands in the century after c.1750, though often ignored in popular accounts of clearance. Numbers were rising, of course, all over Britain and Europe at the time, but the demographic revolution posed major challenges to those regions, like the Scottish Highlands, where their inhabitants had always lived close to the margins of subsistence. In the 1750s the population of Scotland was 1.265 million and by 1821 it reached 2 million. The retained population of the country between 1755 and 1820 had therefore grown by roughly two thirds in sixty-five years. The consensus among demographic historians is that the increase came about mainly because improved and more secure food supply had helped to cut to some extent the appalling levels of mortality among infants and the very young. To this amelioration in nutrition was added the impact of inoculation on smallpox from the 1760s, a disease which was by far the most lethal epidemic killer of the time.
A rise in numbers was evident across all four Highland counties, but two strikingly different regional profiles also became apparent throughout the period. In the southern districts of the county of Argyll and the eastern areas of the Highland plateau the increases were very moderate. Indeed, 41 out of 68 parishes there failed to show any actual growth at all between the 1750s and 1790s. It was a different story, however, in the far west and north, specifically along the seaboard from Morvern to Cape Wrath and including most of the islands of the Hebrides. Here, thirty-two of forty-three parishes showed a rise of more than 25 per cent, significantly above the average for Scotland as a whole.
The difference between the two zones became even more significant during the following half-century. Across the western districts between 1801 and 1841, the increase was of the order of 53 per cent, while in the south and east growth of a mere 7 per cent overall was recorded. At the local level the rise was sometimes more spectacular. On the island of Tiree, the population was 1,500 in the 1740s but had swollen to 4,453 by 1831. Throughout the Western Isles, growth was of the order of 80 per cent between 1755 and 1821. Even without clearances, increases of this order of magnitude would have posed massive challenges to a society which had always existed close to the very margins of subsistence. It was also a tragic irony that where arable was more available and a resilient agrarian regime had been introduced the rise in numbers was small, but it was significantly greater in those parts of the Highlands with the poorest land and the most fragile peasant economies.
The basic cause of this profound demographic differential, which was to profoundly shape the course of Highland history, was the variation in regional migration. In simple terms, many more people consistently left the parishes of the south and east than they did the north-west. Proximity to the booming centres of industry and urban development in the Lowlands was undeniably one explanation for this pattern. Studies of Highland migration to Greenock, Paisley, Glasgow and Dundee in the decades before 1851 show that the vast majority of those who settled in these cities and towns had been born in the southerly and easterly parishes which were close to them.
But the distinctive social structure of the region was also crucial. By c.1840 a moderate consolidation of traditional townships had taken place throughout the south and east which, as already noted for the Lowlands, led to a continuous decline in the numbers holding direct tenancies of land. The extent of contraction varied significantly within the area; it went furthest, for instance, in highland Perthshire and along the coastal plain north of Inverness. Nonetheless, across the entire region legal rights to land were being widely and inexorably reduced. Complete landlessness of the Lowland kind was not always common, since the New Statistical Account of the 1840s confirms that smallholdings and subtenancies clung on in most areas. But in the main they were effectively linked in with the labour needs of neighbouring larger farms and the people who lived on them were as much dependent on earning wages as on what they could grow on the land.
The attachment to land was further weakened by the development of work outside agriculture and the growth of small towns and villages. For instance, the prosperous fishing industry in southern Argyllshire, along the lochs of the Clyde estuary and Loch Fyne, provided secure income and steady employment. The fishery supported village populations with a commitment to the sea and only tenuous connection to the land. Several of the Argyll burghs, such as Campbeltown, Tarbert, Inveraray and Lochgilphead, had particularly heavy rates of migration to the Lowland towns, a pattern which reflected their capacity to pull in migrants from surrounding rural districts and then channel them south. This was therefore a regional society where a money economy was now in place which was likely to lead to an erosion of peasant culture and values. The local manufacture of necessities, such as clothing, was already in retreat and by the 1840s the import of foods, fuel and some luxuries like tea and sugar had become common. The southern and eastern Highlands were therefore being assimilated to the market economy of the Lowlands and in the process the age-old peasant attachments to land were starting to fray.
Some contemporaries argued that the spread of schooling in the region added to this social revolution by raising expectations and spreading literacy. In 1826 the Church of Scotland estimated that in the Hebrides and other western parts of Inverness-shire at least 70 per cent of the population were unable to read, but in Argyllshire and Highland Perthshire the figure fell to about 30 per cent. These data correspond with other evidence. In 1858, for instance, less than 20 per cent of migrants from Argyllshire to the town of Greenock signed marriage registers only by mark, compared to 8 per cent for Lowland migrants and 64 per cent for those who had come from Ireland. A number of experienced contemporary observers saw a close connection between literacy rates and migration trends, though there is no easy method of determining how accurate their opinions were. The Rev. Norman McLeod, minister of the Gaelic Church of St Columba in Glasgow, a man with intimate knowledge of the Highland community in the city, reckoned that ‘from the places where there are good schools young men come to Glasgow and Paisley to look for employment’.1 He also asserted that on the Isle of Tiree the density of population was ‘lower in parts where schools are’. Charles Baird, Secretary to the Committee for Destitute Highlanders in 1837, was equally confident of the relationship between literacy and mobility: ‘Highlanders when educated become migrants’ was his simple aphorism.2 It is not made explicit in these comments, but what might be implied by ‘good’ schools were those which favoured instruction in English.
The much greater increases in population in the northern, central and western Highlands bring into sharp focus an intriguing historical puzzle. This region was to become notorious as the centre of large-scale clearances to make way for extensive sheep runs. Yet, despite widespread dispossession, mass migration leading to depopulation did not automatically follow from the displacement of many communities. Only in parts of estates where removals hit particularly hard was there extensive evidence of abandoned dwellings and empty habitations. Indeed, in general, the population of the four main Highland counties increased decade by decade in this period. Argyll reached peak population first in 1831, because of the substantial outflows to the Lowlands already discussed. But Inverness did not do so until after 1841, Sutherland in the decade 1831–41 and Ross-shire only in the early 1850s. In fact, the loss of people had been proportionately heavier in parts of the Borders countryside of the eighteenth century, where the spread of pastoralism had also led to considerable levels of eviction. Indeed, many more Gaels left the Highlands for overseas or the Lowlands after mass clearance had come to an end in the later 1850s than during the era of the great removals in earlier decades.
The answer to the conundrum cannot lie in the possibility that the scale of Highland eviction has been exaggerated. On the contrary, the historical record confirms the evidence of a troubled trail of social convulsion as the sheep frontier steadily moved north. The introduction of cattle ranching was first to have an effect in parts of Argyll, Dumbartonshire and Perthshire as peasant communities were widely dislodged in its wake. One observer, John Walker, estimated that, as a result of the conversion of small farms into large cattle holdings, population had fallen in seventeen parishes in those counties over the space of three decades since 1750. Much more significant, however, was sheep farming. The new Blackface and Cheviot breeds from the Borders, Na Caoraich Mora (the big sheep), had much greater carcase weight and wool-carrying capacity than the native animals. They were also greedy for land and required different levels and types of terrain for the different ages and genders of the flocks. The Cheviots in particular had special needs. Initially they enabled sheep farmers to pay twice the rent than was usually possible on land grazed by Blackface, but they could not easily survive the Highland climate without access to low ground for wintering, which inevitably posed a threat to the arable of the traditional townships. At the same time, sheep competed for grazing with the black cattle of the tenants. Also at risk, therefore, were the sheilings in the hill country where livestock were driven during the summer months to allow the grain grown in the townships to mature and ripen. Sheep farming consequently undermined the basis of the old economy by other means than direct clearance. So, in two sheep-grazing parishes in Sutherland (Creich and Assynt) between 1790 and 1808 the numbers of cattle fell from 5,140 to 2,906, while sheep flocks grew from 7,840 to 21,000.
Much more cataclysmic, however, was the direct removal of peasant communities to make way for the big pastoral farms. The new order and the old economy were fundamentally incompatible, since not only was there intense competition for scarce land, but the rental return from sheep was many times higher than that from black cattle. This was not only because of price differences in the market caused by the new industrial demand for wool. Sheep used land more intensively and extensively than cattle as they could graze in areas which had been little worked in the older pastoral economy. In addition, landlords stood to gain from more secure returns. Sheep farms were normally managed by affluent graziers from outside the Highlands who could guarantee proprietors regular and rising incomes in single large sums, whereas large numbers of small tenants were much less reliable as their rent payments fluctuated with the weather and volatility in the markets for cattle.
Nor could many of the indigenous inhabitants hope to gain a substantial share in the sheep economy. Pastoralism was most efficient when practised on a large scale, which built an insurmountable financial barrier for most Highland tenants. There is evidence, for example, on the estates of MacDonnell of Glengarry and Cameron of Lochiel in Inverness-shire of some townships putting together small flocks of Blackface in the 1770s. So-called ‘club farms’ with some sheep were also organized by the peasantry in several other districts. But by and large the landlords were too impatient for the huge profits to be won from grazing in big holdings, especially since there was a plentiful supply of ambitious and enterprising farmers coming in from the pastoral districts of Ayrshire, the Borders and Northumberland eager to bid highly for Highland leases. Most landowners and their managers seem to have taken the hard line that the unexploited lands of the north had become too valuable to risk being let to inexperienced peasant farmers.
As the sheep frontier advanced, so also therefore did clearance. The most notorious and controversial removals took place on the Sutherland estate, at the time the largest landed property in private ownership in Europe. Between 1807 and 1821 the factors of the Countess of Sutherland and her husband, Lord Stafford, removed several thousand people from the internal parishes to tiny crofts of no more than three acres established on the inhospitable eastern coast. There they were to labour to bring barren land into cultivation by spade husbandry and at the same time take up fishing in a harbour-less maritime environment. One of the principal managers of the estate asserted that the small size of the holdings would be sufficient ‘for the maintenance of an industrious family’ but also ‘pinched enough’ to force crofters to take up fishing as well.3 Meanwhile the fertile inland straths where their ancestors had lived since time immemorial were converted into large holdings for sheep. In its scale and ambition the Sutherland strategy was the most extraordinary example of social engineering in nineteenth-century Britain. Old men looking back from the 1880s, giving evidence to the Royal Commission on the Highlands and Islands in that decade, could name forty-eight cleared townships in the parish of Assynt alone.
The plan to create a dual economy with different specializations on the coast and in the interior might have some appeal in theory – such a division of function had been successfully implemented on a number of Lowland estates – but had grave weaknesses in practice. On more than one occasion the new houses and allotments were not ready for occupation when the people were moved. Those who had worked the land and grazed cattle for a living could not suddenly become expert fishermen. The process of dispossession was also sometimes carried out with great harshness, notably when two agricultural experts from Moray who had been employed by the Sutherland family, William Young and Patrick Sellar, forced through large-scale clearances in 1812 and 1813 which pushed the people of the Strath of Kildonan to open revolt. Sellar was a lawyer by profession but also a zealot for agricultural improvement. Two years later, in neighbouring Strathnaver, he was alleged to have behaved with such brutality in enforcing some clearances that he was indicted for breaking the law and eventually stood trial at the High Court in Inverness for ‘culpable homicide, oppression and real injury’. The indictment charged him with ‘wickedly and maliciously’ burning hill pastures, ‘violently’ turning out pregnant women, the aged and infirm from their homes and ‘cruelly depriving’ them of shelter. He and his henchmen were also accused of ‘setting on fire, burning, pulling down and demolishing … dwelling houses, barns, kiln, mills and other buildings’.4 Sellar was determined that, once cleared, the settlements would be rendered completely uninhabitable. Despite the weight of eyewitness evidence, however, he was eventually acquitted after trial of culpable homicide. Nonetheless, his name lived on in infamy as the most hated man in the Victorian Highlands.
The main objective of the Countess of Sutherland and the Marquess of Stafford was to substantially increase income from their vast estate through the creation of enormous sheep farms across the interior worked by farmers and shepherds from the Scottish Borders and northern England. But they were not unmindful of the needs of the people who were dispossessed from these areas as the large pastoral farms came into being. The aim was not dispersal or expulsion but relocation of the population. The estate invested many thousands, building from scratch a large planned village at Helmsdale on the coast at the mouth of the Strath of Kildonan, complete with a harbour, designed by John Rennie, the famous engineer, and facilities for fish curing. This was intended to be the hub of a new fishing industry which would provide work for those who had lost their land. In outline, the scheme bore a resemblance to the villages successfully developed on several Lowland estates in the later eighteenth century, described in previous chapters, as alternatives for the displaced populations. But the scheme was botched. The people were alienated by Sellar’s reign of terror and little thought was given as to how peasant farmers with no fishing skills and little capital would adapt to a new and strange way of life. There was a striking contrast with the way in which many landowners south of the Highland line gradually nurtured their tenantry into the new practices of improvement. The Sutherland experiment, on the other hand, demanded instant transformation from the people. The Countess, but especially her estate managers, had apparently little understanding of the values and culture of the people and their attachment to a time-honoured way of life. To these non-Gaels, their attitudes were not only archaic but wholly irrational. Sellar, for example, had nothing but racialized contempt for the people, dismissing them scathingly on more than one occasion as primitives or ‘aborigines’. The inevitable failure of the strategy soon led to significant levels of emigration to North America from the coastal crofting settlement, and in the longer term a tarnished reputation for the House of Sutherland from which it never recovered.
In the scale and ensuing controversy which they generated, no other set of clearances matched those of Sutherland. Indeed, the vast majority of removals probably only involved a few people at a time until the more draconian episodes of the 1840s and 1850s took place during the potato famine. Gradual and relentless displacement rather than mass eviction was the norm, but taken together the numbers involved were considerable and suggest a systematic process of enforced movement on an unprecedented scale. A pioneering modern historian of the Highlands summarized what happened:
After 1800 in a more remote country and among a more stagnant population, sheep farms, individually much larger than the south, began to sweep over wide areas of the country; previously we hear of groups of families moved, and of remote glens cleared, but now of whole straths emptied from source to sea.
Where dispossessed families had been numbered in tens before, now there were hundreds. Kintail, Glenelg, Loch Arkaig, Balnagowan, Glencalvie, Greenyards, Strathglass and Glenstrathfarrar, names of bitter memory plot the movement of the sheep frontier.5
Press reports from external commentators on the evictions are not uncommon. But the reactions of the people who were actually cleared are rare indeed. One of them is presented below. It concerns the eviction from their homes of over fifty inhabitants of the settlement of Aoineadh Mor, or Inniemore, sometimes Unnimore, in Morvern, western Argyll, in 1824. Later surveys have found the remains of twenty-two buildings, fifteen of which were probably dwellings. Christina Stewart, a rich spinster from Edinburgh, bought the lands from the Argyll Estates in Morvern in 1824. Very soon after purchase, she evicted the smallholders of four townships, including Inniemore, a total of 135 people in all, in order to establish two large sheep farms. So far as is known Christina Stewart never visited Morvern.
The minister of Lochaline village in the parish had a son, Norman MacLeod, who later visited the Inniemore folk in their new homes in Glasgow and then published the Gaelic memories of Mary Cameron in his Reminiscences of a Highland Parish in 1863. The remains of the settlement had been long covered by forestry planted in the 1930s but they were rediscovered several years ago and the site is now open to public view.
Mary Cameron’s account runs as follows:
That was the day of sadness to many – the day on which MacCailein [the Duke of Argyll] parted with the estate of his ancestors in the place where I was reared.
The people of Unnimore thought that ‘flitting’ would not come upon them while they lived. As long as they paid the rent, and that was not difficult to do, anxiety did not come near them; and a lease they asked not. It was there that the friendly neighbourhood was, though now only one smoke is to be seen, from the house of the Saxon shepherd.
When we got the ‘summons to quit’, we thought it was only for getting an increase of rent, and this we willingly offered to give; but permission to stay we got not. The small sheep were sold, and at length it became necessary to part with the one cow. When shall I forget the plaintive wailing of the children deprived of the milk which was no more for them? When shall I forget the last sight I got of my pretty cluster of goats bleating on the lip of the rock, as if inviting me to milk them? But it was not allowed me to put a cuach [pail] under them.
The day of ‘flitting’ came. The officers of the law came along with it, and the shelter of a house, even for one night more, was not to be got. It was necessary to depart. The hissing of the fire on the flag of the hearth as they were drowning it reached my heart. We could not get even a bothy in the country; therefore we had nothing for it but to face the land of the strangers [Lowlands]. The aged woman, the mother of my husband, was then alive, weak, and lame. James carried her on his back in a creel. I followed him with little John, an infant at my breast, and thou who art no more, Donald beloved, a little toddler, walking with thy sister by my side. Our neighbours carried the little furniture that remained to us, and showed every kindness which tender friendship could show.
On the day of our leaving Unnimore I thought my heart would rend. I would feel right if my tears would flow; but no relief thus did I find. We sat for a time on ‘Knock-nan-Càrn’ [Hill of Cairns], to take the last look at the place where we had been brought up. The houses were being already stripped. The bleat of the ‘big sheep’ was on the mountain. The whistle of the Lowland shepherd and the bark of his dogs were on the brae …
What have you of it, but that we reached Glasgow, and through the letter of the saintly man who is now no more, my beloved minister, (little did I think that I would not again behold his noble countenance), we got into a cotton work [mill] …6
But despite widespread eviction of this kind, the numbers living in the north-west Highlands and Islands continued to rise until the 1850s. It is therefore difficult to argue that sheep farming per se triggered a great exodus from the Highlands as a whole, although the loss of people in particular districts was undeniably grievous. Thus the aforementioned parish of Kildonan in Sutherland had 1,574 inhabitants in 1811 but only 257 two decades later, or less than a sixth of the earlier figure. But the scale of migration from the south and east Highlands suggests instead that proximity to the Lowlands and a regional social structure which prevented the splitting of land among heirs and kinfolk were in the long run more potent ‘push’ factors than episodes of clearance. When fourteen sample parishes in Argyllshire are examined for the 1790s, no clear pattern of population loss emerges from those which had more sheep than the county average. However, when the same parishes are arranged in two geographical groups, a much more coherent picture can be traced. In those closest to the Clyde estuary, eleven out of twelve showed a decline in population. On the other hand, only two out of fourteen in the more remote northern parts of the county showed a decrease.7
2
Why then were clearances before the potato famine of the 1840s not followed by depopulation in the north-west Highlands but by continued growth in the number of people? Unfortunately, there are no systematic data available to chart the extent of land taken over by sheep farming, though in some areas, notably on the Sutherland estate, it is plain that the land lost by the old tenants was very great. The same could be said of the small islands of Rum, Muck, Canna, Lismore and Ulva, which were swept of almost all their native inhabitants, as were some districts on the western mainland such as the Knoydart peninsula in Inverness-shire. Yet it has also to be remembered that much of the territory claimed by the big flockmasters had never been cultivated before as arable and lay in the hill country rather than in the lower areas where the townships of the people congregated. Also, clearance sometimes involved the piecemeal erosion or removal of some townships, while others, even in the neighbourhood of those which had been lost, were left untouched and managed to survive for many years afterwards. Local evidence can provide some useful insights into what happened at the micro-level.
On the Duke of Argyll’s Ross of Mull estate in the 1840s and 1850s, there were eleven townships before 1840. As Table 13 below shows, the process of eviction was complex. Five townships – Kilvicuen, Knocknafenaig, Tireregan, Shiaba and Ardalanish – were cleared, sometimes quickly but also over much longer periods of time. Crucially, many of the displaced were not expelled from the estate but resettled from the fertile districts of the southern Ross to the poorer lands of the north, centred on the township of Ardtun, which saw a considerable rise in population as a result. Six of the settlements survived into the post-clearance era after c.1860 in the southern Ross of Mull, though by the later twentieth century they were all abandoned and entirely bereft of inhabitants as a result of ‘voluntary’ migration from the later nineteenth century.
The modern history of the parish of Morvern in west Argyll is probably the most thoroughly researched of any in the western Highlands to date. Phillip Gaskell’s micro-history, Morvern Transformed (1968), drew on a great mass of estate papers and plans, personal correspondence and census returns, together with careful archaeological surveys of existing township remains. It is known that Morvern was the scene of ten clearances carried out by five local landowners between 1824 and 1868. In all, these proprietors evicted 150 families over a period of sixty-four years. Gaskell’s meticulous scholarship provides an unusually comprehensive guide to what happened. Over 760 men, women and children were forced to move from their homes in the parish during the course of the century. The despair and distress of the people who were cleared are described. However, known evictions accounted for only 23 per cent of the estimated 3,250 people who left Morvern over the same period, most of whom moved away after c.1870 when no significant removals took place. The migration of the great majority was therefore ‘voluntary’, or at least was not triggered directly by eviction, though the estates had other means at their disposal to induce movement if they chose to deploy them.
The remains of forty-six settlements with three houses or more in each case were also analysed and yielded significant results when combined with appropriate documentary evidence. Ten survived into the twentieth century and sometimes beyond; one had been partially cleared, but some of the inhabitants lived on for some time afterwards before the settlement was finally abandoned; ten were fully cleared; and twenty-five were eventually abandoned, mainly in the later nineteenth century, but with no evidence of any evictions having taken place. In sum, of the forty-six settlements, 22 per cent were emptied by clearance alone.
The history of clearance on the Isle of Skye is different again. Unlike on Mull, there are few physical remains of townships abandoned because of eviction, although it is known that clearance did take place on some properties. Strathaird in 1849 had a population of over 600, most of whom according to the landowner, Alexander Macalister, had not paid any rents for several years. All were served with summonses of removal in that year and offered assistance to emigrate. The tenants petitioned Sir George Grey, the Secretary for Home Affairs in London, calling on him to intervene and prevent this ‘compulsory emigration’:
Your petitioners are utterly averse to emigrate to America, on considering their inability to do so arising from these distressed conditions of potato failure, low prices for cattle, together with the numerous privations to which they will be subjected by being cast pennyless and unprovided for on a foreign shore without any aid from the proprietor to convey them from the place of their landing to that part of the country where they could obtain farms.8
Grey refused to intervene, but pointed out that writs of ejectment were perfectly legal and that no landowner could compel the people of his estate to emigrate. The only further record of the Strathaird people came in May 1852 when 148 of them embarked for Australia under the auspices of the Highland and Island Emigration Society, with Macalister paying part of their passage.
The papers of the biggest landowner on the island, those of Lord Macdonald, suggest the estate tended to target the displacement of the cottar class and for the most part left the rent-paying tenantry undisturbed. That is one reason why the visitor of today sees a more populated island with many crofting communities compared to the empty glens and shores of much of the landscape in Mull. However, there was at least one well-documented and famous exception to this pattern. The clearance of the two townships of Boreraig and Suishnish in the parish of Strath in 1853 attracted considerable publicity and external comment. Boreraig had a population of 120 men, women and children living in 22 households before the removals took place. Eight of the families and nine from Suishnish were resettled in other townships on land left behind by those who had gone to Australia supported by the Highland and Island Emigration Society. Most of the remainder of the evicted also sailed later for the Antipodes in one of the ships chartered by the Society.
But in general tenant removals were unusual on the Macdonald estate. The surviving rentals suggest continuity rather than change. In 1848 there were 410 small tenancies paying rents of £10 per annum or less on the Macdonald lands in the parishes of Sleat and Strath. Ten years later 387 of them remained on the rental books, a marginal loss of 6 per cent.
One of the most extensive and best documented series of removals occurred on the Island of Lewis in three phases between 1851 and 1855. The wealthy owner, Sir James Matheson, the China opium magnate of Jardine, Matheson & Co., decided to ‘emigrate’ many of his destitute tenants and cottars through a huge programme of eviction and ‘assisted’ transportation to Canada. No fewer than 2,327 men, women and children were eventually given the bleak choice of being cleared and left destitute or of boarding the emigrant ships for supported passage across the Atlantic. This was the essence of compulsory emigration. In 1851, just before the evictions, the population of Lewis outside the town of Stornoway stood at 17,320 men, women and children. The proportion ‘emigrated’ accounted for just over 13 per cent of that total. By 1861, after the clearances and emigrations had come to an end, there were still 1,125 more people in the landward parts of Lewis outside Stornoway than in 1851. The diary of the estate chamberlain, John Munro Mackenzie, makes it plain that his programme of eviction was based on clinical and rigorous selection, in which human feelings or concern played no part, of those families who had to go. Both within and between townships those not in heavy arrears and involved in successful fishing kept their crofts, while the poorest and those who had laboured in the declining manufacture of kelp were scheduled for removal. As the tabulations below confirm, summonses of removal were targeted at specific parishes and areas, with Barvas and West Lewis coming off worst.
Elsewhere, not all or even the majority of those who suffered eviction migrated to the Lowlands or emigrated, though some obviously did so. Others, as will be shown later, were forced to move to already-crowded settlements in other parts of the estates. Also, in the wake of the removals, the displaced often sank into the ranks of the semi-landless cottar class, with the dispossessed gathering in villages across the region. One contemporary description reported of them:
The cottars possess nothing but the cottage which shelters them, and depend on the kindness of neighbours for a few patches of ground for potatoes, and supply their other wants by fishing, and such work as they may obtain at home or abroad.
The latter class live at all times in a constant struggle for the means of bare subsistence, and do not rise above the lowest scale of living necessary for existence, not to talk of comfort. In some seasons they are frequently reduced to live upon such shellfish as they can collect, with a little milk etc.9
Colonies of impoverished cottars were to be found by the 1840s in Tobermory in Mull, Lochaline in Morvern, Arnisdale in Glenelg, Ullapool, Lochcarron and Scoraig in Wester Ross, and in other similar settlements.
On Lord Macdonald’s Skye estates there were 1,300 families who did not pay rent, ‘chiefly relatives of the tenants, such as sons and sons-in-law, sometimes two or three of them are on the lot’.10 On Macleod of Macleod’s property on the same island, it was estimated that for every tenant family there were two cottar families. In Harris 450 tenants paid rent but a further 400 families existed as cottars on the estates. Similarly, in Barra more than half of those who held some land were not recorded in the rental book. In Skye in the later 1840s there were 1,900 crofter families and 1,531 cottars. The majority of the inhabitants of Glenelg, North Morar and Knoydart were also nominally ‘landless’. On the Duke of Argyll’s estate in Mull cottars outnumbered tenants, with 1,455 belonging to tenant families and 1,533 cottar families. In Tiree 63 per cent of the population belonged to tenant families and 37 per cent (1,838) to cottar families. The number of cottars varied significantly between estates, but in many of the Hebridean islands they often comprised as much as half and sometimes more of the entire population.
Arguably, then, the real effect of clearance before the 1840s was not to depopulate the Highlands in the short run, but to increase the terrible poverty and congestion of those townships which were spared but forced to accept more and more of the evicted by the process known as ‘crowding in’. This in turn intensified the splitting of holdings into ever smaller sizes in order to accommodate the displaced. As a result the north-west became ever more at risk to the impact of crop failure and volatility of markets for fish, cattle and kelp.
3
But for the remarkably rapid spread of the potato crop as a new source of food in the Highlands after c.1750 there would have been a much greater flight from the land, especially by the poorest tenants and cottars. The history of the potato as a food crop in the Scottish Highlands is well documented. The first specific reference occurs in Martin Martin’s account of the Hebrides in 1695, although by 1750 cultivation of the crop was still relatively uncommon. The period of greatest expansion was probably the last quarter of the eighteenth and first few decades of the nineteenth century. By then potatoes were being grown widely as a subsistence crop. Their importance was highlighted during the grain harvest failures of 1782–3, when they helped to save several communities from near starvation. Potato cultivation seems also to have developed further after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Dr John Macculloch, who travelled annually in the western Highlands between 1811 and 1821, was one of several observers to comment on its increasing significance. In 1811, James Macdonald claimed that potatoes by then constituted four fifths of the nourishment of Hebrideans.
Potatoes grow in virtually any soil, adjust to different climates, but flourish best where the weather is cool and moist. They also allow for a dramatic increase in food supply without the need for radical changes in traditional methods of cultivation, technology or social organization. In the western Highlands the crop was grown by the lazy-bed (feannagan) method. Soil was turned over with the cas-chrom, or foot-plough. Earth from ditches dug between different ridges was cast on top, seeds were broadcast and the ridges well covered with seaweed, of which there was usually an abundant supply in the maritime districts, as well as animal manure. Once dug up, potatoes were ready for the pot and unlike grains did not require any additional labour to make them edible. They were easy to store but quickly lost their nutritional content if kept over long periods. The calorific content of a given quantity of potatoes was considerably less than the same amount of grain, but since potatoes had a much greater yield, an acre under them gave as much as 3–5 times as many calories as an acre in grain. They can provide for all human nutritional needs.
But the widespread adoption of the potato in the Highlands was not only because it provided more food. Only in the crofting region of the north-west and islands did potatoes assume overall dominance in the diet of the majority of the population. This suggests that they suited not only the natural limitations of these districts but also met the social and economic needs of the people who lived there. In the eighteenth century, the inhabitants of the western Highlands and Islands lived close to the very margin of subsistence. Famine was always a threat and, in several years, a reality. Any food resource which would provide more security was a welcome addition. A significant factor was that oats tended to ripen later in the western Highlands than elsewhere in Scotland. The earliest potatoes, however, were available in August, two months earlier than the oat crop. They therefore helped to fill part of that key gap in the period between the consumption of the old grain harvest and the harvesting of the new. Grain crops were notoriously volatile in much of the Highlands and yields in most areas were relatively low. In 1814 it was estimated that oat yields in Scotland as a whole varied between ten and sixteen pecks per boll and in ‘the best cultivated counties’ from thirteen to eighteen pecks per boll. But in the western Highlands the average was a return of four to six pecks. In this respect, the potato had a crucial advantage. The produce of grain in the Hebrides was often no more than one third of land elsewhere in Scotland, but the return from the potato was equal or superior. The heavy rainfall and high winds which harassed grain farmers were often a positive advantage in potato cultivation. They provided a natural protection against the ‘curl’, the most destructive potato disease of the eighteenth century. It is now known that the greenfly which spreads the disease rarely moves from a host plant when the wind rises above eight miles per hour. Heavy rainfall washes plants clear of the parasite altogether. The potato was not invulnerable, but until the partial failure of 1836–7 the crop was only damaged by early frosts. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century at least it promised a much more secure return than grain.
Yet the major attraction of the potato lay not simply in the fact that it lowered the threshold of risk. It also had a remarkably high yield. In Mull a normal return would be twelve barrels for each one planted. In parts of Skye it was between eight and ten barrels and in Lochalsh six to eight. Sir John Sinclair estimated that four times as many people could be supported by an acre of potatoes as by an acre of oats. As the greatest yielder of food of any crop known in early-nineteenth-century Europe it therefore formed an integral part of the social and economic revolution which spread across the Highlands between 1750 and 1840. The cultivation of the potato expanded with such speed not simply because of its intrinsic merits but because the development of crofting, the movement of communities into areas of waste and marginal land and the subdivision of holdings could not have occurred on the same scale without widespread adoption of the new crop. It was almost a precondition of the social transformation which swept over the Scottish Highlands in this period.
Four factors were fundamental. First, the minuscule holdings formed to support kelp gatherers and burners, whisky distillers and fishermen were only able to provide a subsistence living because of the high yields derived from potato cultivation. Their work was seasonal, so potatoes provided food for much of the rest of the year and especially during the winter and spring months. Second, the fragmentation of lots among cottars depended on the adoption of the potato. The evidence suggests that the smaller the holding, the greater the reliance placed on the crop. Third, potatoes were well suited to the policies of clearance and relocation pursued by landlords as they could be grown in all soils except stiff clay. It was partly because of the potato that new communities could be established on narrow strips of land on coast, moorland and moss. One contemporary claimed that ‘It is by the potato crop that all the wild land has hitherto been reclaimed.’11 The capacity of the potato to support evicted people on small patches of land helps to explain why clearance in the western Highlands caused dispossession but not immediate or wholesale regional depopulation.
Fourth, the potato became even more vital after the Napoleonic Wars. Sir John Sinclair estimated that the typical crofter had to be able to obtain at least 200 days of additional work outside his holding to escape destitution. But external employment within the Highlands contracted in the 1820s and 1830s in some areas and vanished altogether in others. At the same time, there was a slump in cattle prices. The price of a three-year-old, which in 1810 had stood at about £6, had, by the 1830s, fallen to around £3.10/-. Black cattle had traditionally been the peasant’s store of value and an important means of both paying rental and covering the costs of meal imports in seasons of scarcity. Cattle stocks were diminishing over time and many small tenants and cottars by the 1830s had only one or two beasts, or none at all. In a survey of holdings of stock in thirty-four tenancies, in a wide sample of areas, rented at £6 per annum or less, the average number of cattle ranged between 2.5 and 1.84 per holding. This was substantially less than was allowed for in rental agreements. Almost certainly these problems in the pastoral sector dictated a greater reliance on the arable patch than hitherto and hence on the potato as a primary source of food.
4
Like their counterparts elsewhere in Scotland, West Highland landowners in the eighteenth century remained convinced of the value of a large population as an economic resource. Their concern to maintain the people on their estates may have also reflected a lingering sense of patriarchal obligation to former clansmen who had served their families loyally for generations. But new economic incentives for large estate populations also emerged in the later eighteenth century as Lowland markets opened up even more for kelp, fishing, distilling and slate quarrying. As with the dispossession of the cottars in the Lowlands who were relocated in villages, so small tenants in the Highlands were moved to the coasts from the glens, where large grazing farms were taking over much of the land. Eighteenth-century theorists argued that the maritime resources of the western Highlands in both fish and kelp were richer by far than those of the soil. It therefore became common to emphasize the benefits of a division of labour, of a dual economy which would efficiently combine the pastoral potential of the interior and the quasi-industrial possibilities of the coast. The impoverished population of the inland districts should be resettled in the maritime areas, there to earn a living and generate rental income for the estates by working in the labour-intensive activities of fishing and kelping. The rich grazings of the inland straths would at the same time be laid down to sheep farming.
This programme of action had powerful economic attractions. In the 1790s and early 1800s demand for Highland kelp, an alkaline extract from seaweed, used in the chemical manufactures of the time, reached hitherto unprecedented levels as industrialization broadened markets and the Napoleonic Wars impeded the supply of cheaper Spanish barilla (soda ash produced from plant sources). The herring fishery also flourished as the shoals began to visit the western sea lochs on a more regular basis. Moreover, laying out land in individual crofts was in theory an attractive solution to the problem posed by an increasing population in an era of agrarian rationalization. It transformed communities likely to be made redundant by a more profitable form of pastoral husbandry into a productive resource and a significant source of revenue. There had been a few crofts in the old society but the idea of a crofting system was new. It was not in any way an archaic hangover from the past but judged by theorists to be just as innovative in its way as the steam engine and the textile mill.
Crofting had three particular attractions. First, like their counterparts in the north-eastern counties of Aberdeen and Banff and some other parts of Lowland Scotland, Highland landlords viewed the settlement of colonies of crofters, in the first instance at nominal rents, as an effective means of bringing into cultivation by spade husbandry the stretches of waste and moor land which dominated large areas of their estates. It was characteristic of late-eighteenth-century optimism that those barren tracts were thought ripe for profitable reclamation by presenting a major opportunity for a region rich in abundant and underemployed resources of labour but very poor in arable land. Expansion of smallholdings into waste land was likely anyway as numbers increased and areas of existing settlement no longer sufficed for all the additional numbers which had to be fed.
Second, the increasing prosperity of illicit whisky making in the later eighteenth century encouraged landlords in districts where it flourished to divide holdings in order to accommodate a larger population able to pay higher rents from these ‘industrial’ earnings. Third, during the wars of the later eighteenth century, there was a huge expansion in the recruitment of Gaels to regiments of the British army. Several proprietors became military entrepreneurs, raising family regiments from the men of their estates in return for payments from the state. It therefore became common for land to be allocated in return for service. For instance, one reason given for the proliferation of tiny holdings on the island of Tiree by the 1820s was that ‘four fencible regiments of men’ had been raised during the Napoleonic Wars by the Duke of Argyll. Plots were carved out of existing tenancies to accommodate those who had served in order to honour the obligations made by the ducal house.
Between the middle decades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, numerous communities were therefore displaced and moved to the crofting townships which have formed the characteristic settlement pattern of the western Highlands and Islands since that time. Since kelp manufacture, whisky making and fishing were highly seasonal, some land had to be made available to provide food and fuel for a part of the year. But too much land would act as a powerful distraction from other tasks. These crofters were to be labourers first and agriculturists only second. The townships in which they lived were essentially therefore quasi-industrial communities where rents were forced up beyond their limited potential in order to force dependence on the produce of the sea, loch and shore. The central weakness in the entire system was that most smallholdings were simply not designed to provide enough for the needs of a normal-sized family from subsistence cultivation alone. It was reckoned in the early 1850s that only crofts rented at £15 per annum could produce secure self-sufficiency from agricultural activity in average seasons. Yet the overwhelming majority of holdings in the western Highlands were valued at £10 per annum or less. Crucially, however, crofting helped to retain people in the region rather than induce the migration levels of the south and east districts of the Highlands, where controls over subdivision were much more rigorous.
Subdivision did not simply help to anchor many of the next generation on the land. The splitting of croft holdings among younger male kindred also created the possibilities for more marriages, new families and the birth of additional children. Partible inheritance, therefore, became a precondition not only for population retention, but also, in the longer term, for population increase. This was a process which would have more than compensated numerically for those lost to the western Highlands and Islands through clearance and emigration before the 1840s.
Some estimates suggest that, on average, west Highland mothers in mid-Victorian times each had around five surviving children. As one distinguished historical demographer has commented:
On some rather big assumptions, I think it is reasonable to estimate the average family size of married women who stayed and lived to age 49 in Rosshire, and were not widowed before then, to be at about five children.
Evidence at parish level for 1881 suggests that rates were higher in Skye and the Outer Isles, and in most of mainland Inverness-shire and a bit lower in mainland Rosshire.12
This perspective once again confirms how crucial the impact of population change was on the history of Gaeldom in the nineteenth century.
West Highland and insular landlords had embarked on an extraordinary collective gamble by completely restructuring their estates and transforming the lives of the people on them solely on the basis of high wartime prices for a few commodities which happened to be in great demand during the conflict with France. Some historians argue that the implacable influence of objective market forces made the policy inevitable. But what can easily be forgotten is that the decisions made at the time were subjective and consciously carried out by individual factors and owners, some of whom at least were aware that the rich harvest being reaped from kelp might prove transitory when hostilities inevitably came to an end. The potential dangers were spelt out by one of the most powerful Highland magnates of the age, the 5th Duke of Argyll, in 1794. He heavily criticized his factor on Tiree for allowing the agriculture of the island to be neglected for the sake of the kelp industry, so causing rental income to depend on a very risky enterprise:
In place of recovering the rents from the natural [my italics] productions of the island as was done before kelp was known, you have allowed the tenants to drink their barley and squander the other productions of the land, and taught them to trust the payment of their rents to the price of kelp, and the consequence is that whenever a market for an article like that fails I am getting nothing for my land.13
There is little evidence either that the ephemeral flow of income from kelp and fishing led to social mobility, planned investment or the emergence of a richer peasant class which might have given the western Highlands a degree of social resilience in the hard times after 1815. Instead, landowners creamed off the earnings during the good times through higher rentals, which were absorbed in their own consumer expenditure and that of their families. At the same time, indebtedness on a large scale remained a serious and pressing problem, even on some of the best-run properties. The 5th Duke of Argyll, for example, had been a benevolent proprietor who was interested in improving his vast estate not only for his own benefit, but also for the people who lived on it. He was succeeded at his death in 1806 by his son, George, the sixth Duke. He was a dandy, spendthrift, gambler and familiar of the Prince of Wales. His estates soon went to rack and ruin and subdivision of land among crofting families was allowed to run out of control, so that by the 1840s widespread clearance had to be enforced to reduce the number of destitute small-tenant and cottar families. It is reckoned that the sixth Duke had personally reduced the Argyll fortune by something of the order of £2,000,000 during his lifetime.
By the 1820s the entire economic edifice on which the crofting system had been built was crumbling rapidly. The renewal of trade with Spain, allowing the importation of Spanish barilla, cheaper and richer in alkaline content than seaweed, and the repeal of the salt duties, leading to production refinements within the chemical industry, destroyed the prosperity of kelp manufacture. Illicit whisky making on a commercial scale had virtually disappeared in most areas by the 1830s as a result of changes in revenue legislation and more determined measures of enforcement by the excise service. Earnings from military employment fell away rapidly after 1815 and instead peace was followed by a considerable return migration of both demobbed soldiers and sailors, which added further to the demographic pressures becoming ever more evident in several districts. Although the herring fishery survived and in some years in the 1830s managed to equal the good times of the 1790s, it was much more sporadic, and the erratic shoals could vanish from several lochs for long periods. By the 1840s the fishing villages of Plockton, Dornie, Tobermory, Lochcarron and Shieldaig, the fruits of the era of high optimism in the later eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, were considered to be among the poorest communities on the west coast.
Nevertheless, there was still no mass desertion from the land during the economic crisis which followed the end of the wars. In 1841 there were 85,342 more people living in the west Highlands than the total recorded in the region in the 1750s, a rise of 74 per cent over the period. The growth in emigration was significant, but even in areas of substantial outward movement, such as Skye and parts of Wester Ross, the numbers continued to rise until the 1840s. The Sutherland removals achieved national notoriety, but during the decade of widespread clearance between 1811 and 1820 the population of the county continued to rise because, as described above, eviction was followed by attempted resettlement of the people rather than outright expulsion. Thus the estate records reveal that 3,331 men, women and children were removed in the year 1819. The managers reported that of those who could be traced afterwards, 2,304 (70 per cent) were relocated on the Sutherland estate and most of the remainder moved to other parts of the county. Just eighty-three were reckoned to have emigrated. It was only in later years, as the ambitious programme of transformation collapsed when the fishery stagnated and peasant families inevitably struggled to adapt to the challenges of eking out a living on the lotted marginal coastlands, that the real exodus of people began.
Actual decline in numbers therefore did not normally occur at a regional level, but instead was unusually confined to districts where landowners indulged in especially intense programmes of clearance and did not invest in schemes of resettlement. Thus, while the population of the Lochaber area in general rose into the 1850s, parishes such as Morvern, Ardgour and Ardnamurchan, and Sunart experienced a precipitous fall from the 1830s. In the half-century before the potato famine, the grip of most of the population on the land had not been completely broken. Eviction was more often than not followed by relocation in crofting settlements. Further, no entirely landless class of any magnitude emerged and the western Highlands remained a peasant society with the tenacious attachment to land characteristic of all such societies.
The productivity of the crofts did rise because of potato cultivation. As one contemporary noted: ‘the potato has done more to prevent emigration than any device whatever’.14 Temporary migration for work in the Lowlands also became increasingly important. It peaked during the months of summer and autumn, the period of greatest hardship in the Highlands, when the old grain and potato harvests had often been consumed and the new had yet to be gathered. While ensuring that there were fewer mouths to feed at this critical time, temporary migration also produced a flow of cash income into the north-west (since seasonal migrants had a very high propensity to save), which was used to buy meal and, to a lesser extent, defray rental payments. This support of the peasant way of life was, however, as insecure as any other and income from temporary migration fluctuated dramatically over time. Those who went south and east found jobs mainly in casual agricultural or industrial employment, the very sectors of the labour market which were most volatile.
The role of the landlord classes was also relevant. Their control over land was absolute and they were in a powerful position to promote the movement of people out of the region by eviction, assisted emigration and control of subdivision. If most landlords had been intent on maximizing their economic opportunities, the exodus of people would undoubtedly have been much more rapid and extensive, as it was only commercial pastoralism which could guarantee secure rentals in the 1820s and 1830s. If landowners had placed the profit motive above all else, the crofting sector would have been crushed to an even greater extent than it actually was in order to accommodate more sheep. Sheep farming would not simply have become dominant but, in theory, might have obtained a virtual monopoly of all Highland land. Emigration did not occur on a greater scale partly because landlords refused to exploit their economic opportunities to the full and settled instead for a muddled response of partial clearance, inaction, resettlement, indirect and direct subsidy to the people who lived on their estates, and desultory attempts to sponsor assisted emigration.
The reasons why the élites were unwilling before the 1840s to put into effect a strategy of fundamental economic rationalization varied. Some were reluctant for paternalistic and humanitarian reasons or simply discouraged by the unacceptable social costs and reputational damage of total clearance. Others could not afford to incur the expense of supporting emigration to North America. By c.1830 most hereditary estates in the western Highlands were burdened with heavy debts, and a process of massive transfer of ownership from the old proprietors to the new was already underway. Again, the crofting population had become less vital to the economic health of most properties. As the sheep economy flourished, so the small tenants furnished but a small and declining fraction of total rental. Even this minor contribution fell in real terms as arrears accumulated among them in times of hardship. Any real pressure to thin the population in order to reduce Poor Law rates in the western Highlands only became imperative after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1845 and, even more so, during the potato famine a decade later.
In the event, therefore, some landlords became associated with policies which indirectly inhibited migration rather than promoted it, the very opposite of the stereotype in the popular literature. Three aspects merit comment. First, on several estates there was considerable tolerance of increasing rent arrears which was in effect an indirect subsidy to the small tenantry at the cost to them of more insecurity and indebtedness. In Ardnamurchan, in 1838, total arrears had reached £7,101, or £133 more than the annual book rental. In Coigach they ranged between 169 per cent and 121 per cent of total rental between 1834 and 1841, and had risen to £8,121 by 1839 on the Skye estates of Lord Macdonald. The widespread incidence of arrears suggests that a considerable part of the reduction in regional income after the Napoleonic Wars was being passed on to the landlord class by the small tenants. Their aspiration remained the traditional one of maintaining a basic level of subsistence on land and they were now quite unable to pay sums which could only have been justified during the wartime bonanza of high prices. Second, many landlords continued to provide grain in scarce years at cost price, which was initially credited against the rental account but eventually became submerged among the mass of arrears. Third, the decline in the profitability of kelp manufacture did not always have the expected demographic consequences because, despite falling returns, kelp continued to be made in several areas until the 1840s. In North Uist, in 1837, 400 families were still engaged in kelping, and in South Uist 1,872 persons. Production continued in Tiree, Harris and Lewis on a major scale until the later 1830s. One commentator explained:
The price of Kelp bounded downwards; but the fall of price did not tell so rapidly upon the condition of the people as might have been expected, because considerable quantities were continued to be made long after it had ceased to afford a fair immediate profit. The employment enabled the labourer to pay his rent, that rent however consequently to be paid in work, and not in money. The circulating medium of exchange has become greatly diminished in the country; and in many cases the society is gradually going backwards into a state of barter.15
The maintenance of kelp production in some districts therefore restricted the outward mobility of the population, and probably also plagued estates through the perpetuation and intensification of subdivision. Since labour power paid the rent and kelping was highly labour-intensive, main tenants had a continued vested interest in providing a patch of land for kinfolk to augment the labour team. Landlords were indeed trying to exert some control of subdivision in Islay, parts of Skye, Coigach, Canna, Loch Broom and Barra by the 1830s, but it continued to flourish in many other areas of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, not least because kelp manufacture endured there in several districts. Elsewhere it was alleged that the fall in cattle prices encouraged many small tenants to break up their holdings in order to spread the burden of maintaining rent payments. In western Inverness-shire, ‘when a man becomes unable to pay his rent or to manage his loss, he seeks to lighten his burden without parting with all his interest and accordingly takes a partner into the concern. This is the way in which subdivision has mainly arisen.’16 Proprietors therefore connived at a practice fraught with potential danger for the future in the hope of extracting a more favourable return from their tenants in the present. But by allowing many of the new generation with even a tenuous connection to land they helped to dissuade large numbers from permanently leaving the Highlands.
The inherent weakness in crofting society was brutally exposed in 1836 and 1837 when two partial but successive failures in the potato and grain crops pushed many of the population to the very edge of mass starvation. The deficiency in potatoes ranged from one quarter to one half of the normal crop, while oats failed from one half to two thirds throughout the region. This was a classic subsistence crisis reminiscent of pre-industrial times and entirely alien to the dynamic world of Victorian Britain, now proudly proclaiming itself the Workshop of the World. A concerned and alarmed government sent a special emissary to the north to report on the extent and causes of the disaster. Their agent was Robert Graham, Whig advocate and former Treasury Lord. Graham’s detailed letters to the Treasury in London and his final report provide an authoritative guide to west Highland society in the later 1830s.
He reckoned that the total population of the distressed districts was around 105,000 people. Many communities faced the risk of starvation, though conditions varied markedly between areas and social groups. Sutherland had escaped relatively lightly, as had much of Wester Ross. The worst-affected localities were the island of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. The cottar classes were most vulnerable, but many small tenant families also suffered to a considerable extent.
However, Graham recognized that crop failure was simply the proximate cause of crisis. The more fundamental factors were long-term. The ‘grand cause of the evil’ was that ‘the Population of this part of the country has been allowed to increase in a much greater ratio than the means of subsistence which it affords’.17 Although emigration was a limited safety valve, numbers in some areas had continued to grow or did not decline rapidly enough in relation to the diminished job opportunities available in the 1820s and 1830s. The people depended on a narrow and fragile economic structure supported by the potato, subsistence fishing, temporary migration and occasional landlord assistance. It was a deeply precarious way of life which did not yield enough savings in good years to provide a margin of security in bad times. The whole system was likely to be threatened with total collapse if crop failure, even of a partial nature, took place. In times of shortage, the majority of the inhabitants of the distressed districts did not possess the purchasing power to buy supplies of food from other sources to avoid severe malnutrition. In the event, disaster was averted in 1836–7 by the combined efforts of government, landlords and Lowland charities. But that crisis was the harbinger of an even greater calamity which was to fall upon the region during the following decade.