The Lowland Clearances

Evidence for the Lowland Clearances comes chiefly from estate rental records, contemporary agricultural improvement literature (itself often written by improving landlords celebrating the changes), parish records, and later academic reconstruction, notably by Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell in their dedicated 2003 study. Unlike several well-documented individual Highland clearance episodes, the Lowland process generally lacks detailed estate-by-estate eviction records of comparable granularity, in part because displacement there tended to occur more gradually, through non-renewal of leases and rent increases rather than dramatic mass removals, making it harder to pin down individual events and precise numbers. This has contributed to its lower visibility in both historiography and public memory.

Origins and Causes

The Lowland Clearances emerged from the same broad economic transformation — the Scottish Agricultural Revolution — that reshaped farming practice across Lowland Scotland from roughly the 1760s onward. Traditional Lowland farming had long relied on the "farmtoun" system: a central tenant farmer working runrig strips of land, supported by cottars — sub-tenant labourers who held small plots and cottages in exchange for labour, rather than paying cash rent. As landowners sought to increase income and adopted new agricultural techniques — enclosure of previously shared common and runrig land, crop rotation, selective livestock breeding, and larger, more capital-intensive farm units — this older structure became economically obsolete from the landlord's perspective. Larger, enclosed farms worked by fewer waged labourers on commercial leases produced significantly higher rental income than the traditional multiple-tenancy system, creating strong incentives for landowners to consolidate holdings. Compounding this, many estates moved to competitive leasing by auction, which inflated rents and made it harder for smaller tenants to retain their holdings even where consolidation was not directly forced upon them.

Course of Events

Unlike many Highland clearance episodes, which often involved sudden, visible mass removals, Lowland displacement tended to occur more incrementally: through the non-renewal of leases at the end of their term, through rent increases that smaller tenants could not meet, and through the gradual conversion of cottar labour arrangements into straightforward wage employment that no longer came with an attached cottage and plot. Over time, this process eliminated much of the traditional cottar class as a distinct social group. Displaced cottars and smaller tenant farmers had several broad options: remaining in the area as landless wage labourers (if estate work was available), moving to Scotland's rapidly growing industrial towns — Glasgow, Paisley, Edinburgh, and the expanding textile and manufacturing centres of the central belt — to seek factory or urban employment, or emigrating abroad, chiefly to British North America (Canada). Some landowners, to their credit from a welfare perspective, built planned villages with better housing to accommodate displaced labour locally, a practice distinct from the often harsher treatment seen in some Highland episodes; other landlords showed little concern for displaced tenants' subsequent welfare.

Scale and Impact

Precise aggregate figures for the number of Lowland Scots displaced by this process do not exist in a single authoritative count — a key reason it is harder to compare directly against documented Highland clearance episodes. Historians generally describe the numbers affected as being in the "many tens of thousands" over the full 1760–1830 period, a figure broadly consistent with the scale of population movement into Lowland industrial towns and emigration abroad during the same decades, though these population shifts were also driven by other factors (industrialisation's pull, general population growth) that make isolating the Clearances' specific contribution to migration statistics methodologically difficult. What can be said with more confidence is that the Lowland Clearances contributed meaningfully to supplying the labour force that fuelled Scotland's rapid industrial and urban growth during the same period — displaced rural labour becoming, in many cases, the first generation of an urban industrial working class.

Legacy and Historiography

The most striking feature of the Lowland Clearances, from a historiographical standpoint, is precisely how overshadowed they remain by the Highland Clearances in popular memory, despite plausibly affecting a comparable or greater number of people and a larger total land area. Several explanations have been proposed. The Highland Clearances carry a distinct ethnic and cultural resonance — the displacement of a Gaelic-speaking, clan-organised population by landlords, some of whom were themselves increasingly Anglicised or absentee, lends itself to a clearer narrative of cultural loss that resonated with later Scottish nationalist and land-reform movements. The Lowland process, by contrast, generally involved Lowland Scots landlords displacing Lowland Scots tenants within a broadly shared cultural and linguistic framework, lacking the same clear "us and them" narrative structure. The Lowland process was also typically more gradual and less visually dramatic — fewer mass evictions, ship departures, and burned townships to form the kind of memorable, retellable historical set-pieces that have anchored Highland clearance memory. Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell's 2003 study, pointedly subtitled "Scotland's Silent Revolution," was an explicit attempt to redress this imbalance in historical attention, arguing that the scale and consequence of Lowland rural displacement deserves far greater recognition than it has typically received, both in academic literature and in Scotland's broader national historical memory.

This imbalance has practical consequences for how Scottish history is taught and popularly understood. Because the Highland Clearances dominate public discussion of agricultural displacement, the Lowland process is frequently absent even from otherwise detailed general accounts of 18th- and 19th-century Scottish social history, despite the fact that it reshaped a larger total land area and plausibly a comparable or greater number of households. Economic historians such as T. M. Devine, whose work spans both regions, have argued that understanding Scotland's agricultural transformation as a single national process — rather than a Highland-specific tragedy set against an unremarked-upon Lowland "normality" — gives a more accurate picture of how thoroughly landlord-driven commercialisation reshaped rural life across the entire country in this period, not merely in the regions that later developed the strongest cultural narrative of grievance and loss.

A Clearance by Stealth: the Longer Story

Recent research, summarised by the historical geographer Robert Dodgshon in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), has changed the picture in two ways. It shows that the Lowland transformation began much earlier than the classic 1760–1830 "Improvement" dates. And it shows that, although slower, it was a genuine form of clearance.

The main mechanism was not dramatic eviction but tenant reduction. A pre-improvement Lowland "toun" was usually farmed jointly by several tenants in runrig. When leases ended, landlords simply let the land to fewer tenants, and eventually to one. No court process was needed beyond a routine summons at the end of a tack (lease). T. M. Devine calls this a "clearance by stealth". Dodgshon notes that it differed from the Highland clearances only in its rate of tenant reduction. The eventual outcome, the end of the old toun community, was the same.

The process was well under way by the 1690s. In fertile low-ground Aberdeenshire, Ian Whyte found that over 70 per cent of touns were already in single tenancy in 1696. Devine found 60–75 per cent in West Lothian, Midlothian and Berwickshire. The rest went quickly in the first half of the eighteenth century. On the Morton estate in Fife, multiple tenancies fell from 43 per cent of holdings in the 1710s to 3 per cent by the 1740s. On the Douglas estate in Lanarkshire, they fell from 64 per cent in the 1730s to 16 per cent by the 1750s. Tenancy was not secure even before this: on the Panmure estate in Angus in the later seventeenth century, only 18 per cent of tenants held their land for more than eighteen years.

Another change followed. In the early eighteenth century landlords converted rents in kind into cash, perhaps to protect their income after the famines of the 1690s, which Dodgshon calls "as much crises of rent as they were crises of subsistence". Tenants now had to sell their own produce and face market prices directly.

Where the Displaced Went

Why was there no Lowland equivalent of the Highland protests? Dodgshon's answer is the pace and the alternatives. Tenant reduction was gradual and, in a phrase he quotes, "relatively painless". Displaced tenants could become cottars, labourers or tradesmen, move into new estate villages or nearby towns, or take up smallholdings. Estates carved many small lots out of muirs and mosses, such as the Cowie muir in Stirlingshire (1760) and the "moss-lairds" settled on reclaimed moss in Airth parish. These schemes acted as a form of internal social budgeting, absorbing people displaced elsewhere on the estate. In parts of the north-east they produced as many smallholdings as in what later became the crofting counties.

The cottars' story is different. At first, single-tenant farms kept as many cottars as the old touns. In the 1690s cottars made up a quarter to a third of the rural community even in the most "advanced" areas. The new husbandry after the 1750s actually needed more labour: in the 1840s East Barns in East Lothian had 150 people living on the farm. Yet cottars vanished from the rentals in the later eighteenth century. At Inverdovart on the Tayfield estate in Fife there had been as many as thirteen cottars in the early seventeenth century and none by the early nineteenth. The work had not disappeared; the contract had changed. Improving farmers replaced cottars, who had rights to a few rigs of arable and to graze a cow, with day labourers and hired farm servants paid in wages. On the Rossie estate in Fife, cottars were said to have held 20 per cent of the infield. Taking that land back was a real saving for farmers and a real loss for the cottars.

• At least 164 planned villages were founded in Scotland between 1770 and 1799. They were costly: Sir James Grant spent about £3,000 building Grantown-on-Spey between 1765 and 1792 (Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, 2013).
• At Lichtnie in Angus, two tenants were made to choose between a fiddle and its bow in a lottery to decide which of them would keep the farm as sole tenant.
• By the 1690s, well before the "Agricultural Revolution", most touns in the most fertile Lowland counties were already held by a single tenant.
• The traditional Lowland "farmtoun" system, based on runrig strip farming and cottar sub-tenancy, had existed for centuries before being largely dismantled within a few generations.
• Some Lowland landowners built entirely new planned villages to rehouse displaced agricultural labour, a notably different approach from some of the harsher Highland clearance episodes.
• Displaced Lowland cottars became an important early source of labour for Scotland's rapidly growing textile and manufacturing industries.
• Competitive leasing by auction, which pushed up Lowland rents sharply from the late 18th century, is a less widely discussed driver of displacement than outright eviction.
• Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell's 2003 book The Lowland Clearances was written specifically to counter the public perception that only the Highlands experienced large-scale agricultural displacement.
• Unlike several Highland clearance episodes, there are no comparably detailed estate-by-estate records of individual Lowland eviction events, making the process harder to document precisely.
• Some historians argue the Lowland process is a clearer example of "economic modernisation" with less direct landlord coercion than certain harsher Highland episodes, though both displaced large numbers of people against their economic interests.
• The most visible phase of the Lowland Clearances (1760–1830) overlapped with the first phase of the Highland Clearances. But Lowland tenant reduction had begun in the seventeenth century, so in a longer view it came first.

The most significant issue surrounding this topic is not exaggeration but near-total popular neglect: the Lowland Clearances are frequently omitted entirely from general accounts of Scottish historical displacement, which default to discussing only the Highlands. A related disputed point is precisely how to compare the two processes' relative severity and scale, given the comparatively thin individual-event documentation for the Lowlands relative to well-recorded Highland episodes — any direct numerical comparison between the two should be treated with caution. Some accounts also risk overcorrecting by presenting the Lowland process as uniformly gentler or more consensual than the Highland Clearances; while it generally lacked comparable dramatic mass evictions, individual tenant experiences of displacement, rent pressure, and loss of traditional livelihood were often genuinely severe.

The 1760–1830 dating used on this card marks the most visible phase of Improvement, not the start of Lowland clearance. Rental and poll-tax evidence shows tenant reduction under way from the later seventeenth century. The Old Statistical Account of the 1790s is often quoted on the shrinking of farming communities, but Dodgshon warns that its parish ministers were unreliable witnesses. They often did not say which kind of occupier they meant, and the key changes had frequently happened before living memory.