Crofting Life

• Crofting is younger than it looks. It replaced the older runrig townships, in which joint tenants balloted for scattered strips. Most crofting townships were laid out between about 1780 and 1850.
• Crofts were made small on purpose. Many landlords deliberately gave tenants too little land to live on. That tied the tenants to kelp-burning on the west coast and to the deep-sea haaf fishing in Shetland.
• Kelp and potatoes built the crofting population, and their failure broke it. The kelp price collapsed after the duty on Spanish barilla was cut in the early 1820s. The blight of 1846 then destroyed the potato crop on which the crowded townships had come to depend.
• The crofters won their rights by agitation. Rent strikes, deforcements and land occupations from 1881 onwards led to a Royal Commission in 1883 and the 1886 Act.
• The 1886 Act made crofting a legal status. It gave security of tenure, fair rents fixed by a Crofters Commission, compensation for improvements and the right to pass on the croft. It did not give more land.
• The common grazing is the heart of the system. Each croft's share (the souming) on the township's grazing is regulated by an elected grazings committee.
• Crofting was always part-time. Crofters have combined the land with fishing, weaving, road work, the merchant navy and, now, tourism and remote work.

Before crofting, the farming township of the Highlands was the baile or clachan. It was a cluster of houses whose joint tenants shared the surrounding land. The arable land was held in runrig: each family worked a number of strips scattered among the better and worse ground. In many places the strips were reallotted by ballot from year to year. The justification was fairness, since good and bad land were shared out evenly. The cost was efficiency. Nothing was enclosed, so livestock had to be herded or tethered while the crops grew. After harvest the gates were thrown open and every beast in the township wandered at will over the fields, which made selective breeding impossible. Douglas Willis notes that the system survived very late at Auchindrain in Argyll, where strips were still being balloted for towards the end of the nineteenth century. Auchindrain is now preserved as an open-air museum.

In the Lowlands, improving lairds swept runrig away in the second half of the eighteenth century and consolidated it into single-tenant farms. Willis's central argument is that the croft was the Highland equivalent of that same improving impulse. The motive was the same: to rationalise the land and raise its rental. The lairds and their surveyors called the change rationalisation, while the people more often experienced it as the destruction of their way of life.

The new pattern replaced the untidy clachan with geometrically regular crofts. These were narrow strips of in-bye land running back from the shore, each with its own house, beside a common grazing beyond the head-dyke. On Iona, for example, thirty rectangular holdings were laid out between 1802 and 1804. Along the north coast of Sutherland, people cleared from Strathnaver were resettled in a chain of coastal townships. At Strathy, one allotment of a little over ten acres had only three acres that counted as arable, and arable land was the real key to a family's survival.

The smallness was the point. The estates wanted the interior of the Highlands for commercial sheep farming, and they wanted the people on the coast as labour. On the west coast and in the islands the work was kelp. Kelp was an alkaline ash made by cutting seaweed (sometimes wading neck-deep in the Atlantic with a hook) and burning it in stone-lined pits on the shore. It was sold south for making glass and soap. The industry began in the Northern Isles: James Fea is credited with introducing kelp-burning to Stronsay in Orkney in 1722. By the later eighteenth century kelp fires smoked along the Uists, Benbecula, Barra and the western mainland. The raw material was free and renewable, the capital needed was almost nil, and the profits were enormous. For the people who cut and burned the weed, the rewards were paltry.

By giving tenants holdings too small to support a family, a laird could make sure his workforce needed wages to pay the rent. Willis describes this as a kind of thirlage, a feudal word for compulsory service. Some estates even encouraged early marriage and the subdivision of crofts to enlarge the workforce. In Shetland the partner industry was the haaf, the open-boat deep-sea fishing, worked by men from crofts far too small to live on. Either way the population grew far beyond what the land could feed.

The crash came in two stages. In the early 1820s the import duty on Spanish barilla, kelp's main rival, was sharply reduced, and the price of Scottish kelp collapsed. The large labour forces the lairds had cultivated were suddenly surplus to requirements. The people had meanwhile come to depend almost entirely on the potato, which grew well on poor ground fertilised with seaweed. A poor season in 1835 gave warning. The 1841 census nevertheless recorded the highest Highland population ever.

The potato blight that devastated Ireland reached Scotland in 1845. It struck the north and west with full force in 1846, and crofters watched their crops blacken and rot within weeks. Relief committees in the cities and the churches raised money, and the Highland Relief Board shipped cargoes of oatmeal north. Relief was often paid in return for labour, and the "destitution roads" that crofters built in exchange for meal still survive in parts of the Highlands. Desperate families ate their seed corn and stripped the shore for cockles, limpets and whelks. The famous Gaelic staple buntàta is sgadan (potatoes and herring) failed at both ends, because the herring shoals were erratic and the west-coast crofters lacked the boats to fish deeper waters. On Skye, Willis records, the starving people of Dunvegan begged MacLeod of MacLeod to unfurl the clan's Fairy Flag against the disaster.

Famine turned the earlier trickle of emigration into a flood. Earlier, lairds who needed kelp labour had lobbied against emigration. Now many of them actively promoted it, sometimes by paying passages and sometimes by eviction. Between 1851 and 1855 Lewis alone is said to have lost about 14 per cent of its population. Rent arrears there were treated as grounds for removal, and several townships were emptied entirely. At Sollas in North Uist in July 1849, a squad of Inverness-shire police met fierce resistance when it came to unroof the houses of people who had refused the estate's offer of passage to Canada. Some emigrant ships became bywords for suffering. The Hercules, carrying emigrants from Skye, Harris and South Uist to South Australia in 1852–53, was ravaged by typhus and smallpox and lay for weeks at Cork. Children returned home as orphans.

The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), sets out the scale of landlord-funded departure, drawing on T. M. Devine's work on the famine. Of about 14,000 emigrants estimated to have been assisted by Highland landlords between 1815 and 1856, almost 11,000 left in the decade 1846–56. John Gordon of Cluny sent 3,200 tenants from South Uist and Barra to Canada, 2,337 were sent out from Lewis, and a third of the population left the Duke of Argyll's island of Tiree. The government's only legislative concession to the famine, the Emigration Advances Act of 1851, let landlords borrow on favourable terms to pay for tenants' emigration. From 1852 to 1858 the Highland and Island Emigration Society sent almost 5,000 people from ten western estates to Australia, with landlords paying about a third of the cost.

How willing the emigrants were is the hard question. Harper finds the officials' talk of a "great disposition" to emigrate unconvincing, and notes that by the 1840s and 1850s clearance and emigration had come to be seen as "two sides of the same coin". Only 17 per cent of those selected for emigration from Lewis in 1851 were willing to go. When Gordon's emigrants embarked at Lochboisdale in August 1851, several hid in the hills and were chased by a policeman, the ground officer and constables; an affidavit signed at Quebec said that some were brought back only when officers tried to handcuff them, and that at least four families were divided. Yet Harper also argues that Highland emigrants were varied in background and motive, and that many crofting families paid their own way to join relatives overseas. Historians of the Clearances such as James Hunter and Eric Richards place more weight on compulsion.

By the 1870s the grievances of insecurity, high rents and, above all, shortage of land had been building for two generations. The spark came from Ireland, where the Land League, founded in 1879 under Charles Stewart Parnell, had won security of tenure and judicially fixed rents through the Irish Land Act of 1881. Willis notes that Parnell's campaign gave the English language the word "boycott".

On Skye, the crofters of the Braes, south of Portree, had long grazed the slopes of Ben Lee. They had lost those grazings years before, and in 1881 they withheld their rents from Lord MacDonald's estate. When a sheriff officer arrived with summonses of removal, a crowd surrounded him and burned the papers. That was deforcement, a serious crime. Sheriff William Ivory could not raise enough men in Inverness-shire, so he brought around fifty police from Glasgow by MacBrayne steamer. On 19 April 1882 they marched through pouring rain to arrest the ringleaders. At Balmeanach they were met with sticks and stones, and they got their prisoners back to Portree only after a baton charge that left several women bleeding. The "Battle of the Braes" was won by the police but lost in the newspapers. At the trial in Inverness the deforcement charge was dropped and the fines were small. When a messenger-at-arms later came with a Court of Session summons, the Braes women, practised by now, drove him back to Portree with clods. In late 1882 the estate conceded a reduced rent for Ben Lee.

At Glendale in north-west Skye, crofters short of grazing laid claim to the farm of Waterstein and drove off the police sent from Dunvegan. A gunboat brought a government official who persuaded the wanted men to surrender. They were jailed in Edinburgh and came home two months later as heroes. One of them, John Macpherson, "the Glendale Martyr", toured the townships for the Highland Land Law Reform Association. He spoke in Gaelic, opened with prayer and drew on Old Testament texts of land and justice. By late 1884 the government finally sent troops: a small fleet landed several hundred marines at Uig Bay in the north of Skye. The crofters watched passively and went about their work, and the expedition achieved little beyond showing that the problem could not be policed away.

In March 1883 the government announced a Royal Commission "to inquire into the condition of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland", chaired by Lord Napier of Ettrick. Its first hearing was held on 8 May 1883 in the schoolhouse at Ollach, close to where the Battle of the Braes had been fought. The Commissioners travelled from Argyll to Shetland and even to St Kilda. Their vessel, HMS Lively, was wrecked on the Chicken Rock near Stornoway, but they finished their work. The printed evidence is the most remarkable feature of the inquiry. For the first time ordinary crofters were invited to speak, and what they said was taken down verbatim.

Angus Stewart, the first witness at Braes, asked for an assurance that he would not be evicted for speaking. The estate factor, Alexander MacDonald, answered that Stewart was only a crofter's son, not a crofter. William McClure of Glen Bernisdale described the crofter's plough:

"As a proof that our holdings are too small, our only implement of agriculture is a stick with a crook at the end of it. We call it a caschrom, and if the stick has not a natural bend we have to nail a piece to it."

A Harris witness pointed out that the island's young men served the Queen in her wars while their families could not get a foot of land, and suggested that next time Britain should "send for the deer and the sheep of Harris as well as its young men". Angus Mackay, a crofter's son and divinity student from Farr in Sutherland, summed up the case of a whole people:

"We want more land, security against eviction, compensation for improvements, and fair rent."

The Commission reported in 1884. Its recommendations were cautious and its reception was mixed. Swayed by estate managers' claims of continuing overpopulation, it also recommended "properly conducted" state-aided emigration, although witnesses such as the Rev. Alexander Mackintosh of Daliburgh had urged it to redistribute land instead. Harper records that in 1888 the government granted £10,000 to settle crofter families from Lewis, Harris and North Uist on the Canadian prairies at Killarney in Manitoba and Saltcoats in the North-West Territories. The colonies were hastily planned, the settlers struggled on land-locked homesteads, and the loans of £120 a head were largely never recovered. Agitation continued and Crofters' candidates won seats in Parliament in 1885. In 1886 Gladstone's government passed the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act. It gave three of Mackay's four demands: security of tenure, fair rents fixed by a new Crofters Commission, and compensation for improvements, plus the right to bequeath the croft. It did not give more land. That omission kept the land raids going, from the Park Deer Raid in Lewis in 1887 to the raids that followed the First World War.

The Commission also heard about language. One witness told it: "When a man was convinced that his language was a barbarism, his lore as filthy rags, and that the only good thing about him – his land – was, because of his general worthlessness, to go to a man of another race and another tongue, what remained that he fight for?" The Rev. James Grant of Kilmuir on Skye put the crofters' wishes for their children more simply: they wanted them "to be able to read the Scriptures in Gaelic, but to be also able to speak English and carve their way through the world". The Commission recommended that Gaelic-speaking children be taught to read their own language and that the "discouragement and neglect" of Gaelic in Highland schools "ought to cease". These passages are quoted by the historical geographer Charles Withers in Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981 (1984).

The classic crofting dwelling of the Hebrides was the taigh dubh, or blackhouse. The name, Willis explains, probably arose only when the improved, lime-mortared and slated taigh geal ("white house") appeared beside it. The blackhouse had double drystone walls packed with earth or sand. The roof timbers rested on the inner wall, so rain ran down the thatch into the core of the wall. The broad outer ledge, the tobhta, was a sheltered seat on summer days. On South Uist women who called their menfolk home from it, or argued with the neighbours there, were teasingly called "pipers of the tobhta". The turf grew grass and flowers, which tempted sheep, and Willis passes on the story of a family at table who looked up to see a cow's legs coming through the thatch. After the famine of 1846, Robert Somers reported that Tiree crofters with too little land were sowing donated cabbage seed around the tops of their walls.

There was no chimney. The peat fire burned in the middle of the floor, and the smoke found its way out through the thatch, blackening rafters and turf alike. The soot-soaked thatch was stripped every year or so and spread on the fields as a rich manure for the potatoes. People and cattle traditionally lived under one roof, the beasts at the lower end, their breath warming the house. Improving estates tried to stamp out both practices. The best place to see a blackhouse now is No. 42 Arnol in Lewis, which was still occupied in 1964 by three generations of Gaelic speakers and is now cared for by Historic Environment Scotland. Thatched houses roofed with marram grass survive in the Uists and on Tiree, and Cairdean nan Taighean Tugha (Friends of the Thatched Houses) has worked to keep the craft alive.

Crofting work was shaped by poor, wet, shallow soil. On the west coast the cas-chrom, a heavy iron-shod blade on a long bent handle with a peg for the foot, turned ground too rocky and broken for a plough. Willis calls it appropriate technology long before the phrase existed. With the straight delving spade, the cas dhìreach, crofters built feannagan, the misnamed "lazy beds". Soil was turned from one side of a line onto the other to double its depth, then enriched with seaweed. The result was a deep, well-drained bed for potatoes and oats. Abandoned lazy beds still corrugate Hebridean hillsides, and Willis likens the larger ones to the long green graves of sleeping giants. In Shetland the equivalent was the delling spade, often worked by teams of neighbours, and the drystone planticrue, a gateless little enclosure on the open moor where cabbage seedlings were raised out of the wind and away from sheep.

The year turned on communal tasks. Peat was cast with an angled spade, dried in the wind and built into a stack that was a craft in itself. Harvest was a shared effort of scything, binding and stooking. Food was preserved by drying and smoking fish, and on St Kilda in the stone cleitean, where seabird carcasses dried in the wind. In summer the milking cattle went up to the shieling, the àirigh, to keep them off the growing crops. The women and young people went with them, and the shieling became a season of freedom remembered in Gaelic song. In Lewis the custom lasted into the twentieth century. Many communities supplemented the land with wild harvests: the men of Ness in Lewis still sail each year to Sula Sgeir for the guga, the young gannet.

At the centre of crofting's communal life is the common grazing, known in Shetland by its Norse name, the scattald. Each croft carries a souming, a regulated share of grazing, so a family's livestock is not limited to its few acres of in-bye. An elected township grazings committee manages the common in everyone's interest. The grazing also supplied peat, turf and building materials. The Napier evidence makes clear that losing a grazing to a sheep farm or deer forest was the deepest grievance of all. Ben Lee at the Braes and Waterstein at Glendale were both disputes about grazing.

Crofting survived the twentieth century by becoming, in Willis's wag's phrase, "a piece of land in the Highlands entirely surrounded by regulations". The Taylor Commission reported in 1954. The Crofters (Scotland) Act 1955 created a new Crofters Commission in Inverness, and the Crofting Reform (Scotland) Act 1976 gave crofters the right to buy their house and in-bye land. A crofter who buys technically becomes an owner-occupier, but the land remains under crofting law. The rent is for bare land only, since the crofter has always built the house. Crofting's grant schemes have long helped crofters improve land and housing.

The modern croft mostly produces store lambs and calves for finishing on Lowland farms. Few crofts have ever been a full-time living, and Willis argues that this is a strength rather than a weakness. Crofting's legal freedom to put up buildings and run side businesses suits the mixed, part-time rural economy now encouraged across Europe. Since Willis wrote, the Assynt crofters' purchase of their estate in 1993 began the community buyouts. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gave crofting communities a right to buy, and the 2010 Act created a map-based Crofting Register. The Crofters Commission became the Crofting Commission in 2012. Current debates concern absentee tenants, neglected crofts, housing for young people and croft prices that have risen beyond local reach.

• At Upper Carloway on Lewis, 19 crofts became 45 as people cleared from sheep districts were squeezed onto the township's common grazings.
• In the days of the blackhouse, a dark syrup of peat-soot sometimes dripped from the roof onto the family below. That was the sign the thatch was due for renewal and for spreading on the potato ground.
• The Napier Commission's steam yacht HMS Lively was wrecked near Stornoway in the middle of the inquiry. The Commissioners carried on regardless.
• Fair Islanders reached the grazing on top of the offshore Sheep Craig by a chain fixed in the rock. They went up to roo (pluck) the sheep's wool into the 1970s.
• A Shetland crofter told Willis that his forebears sowed cabbage seed in their planticrues by taking a mouthful of seed and water and spitting it out. Beards got in the way.
• The membership card of the Highland Land Law Reform Association bore a verse from Ecclesiastes: "The profit of the earth is for all."

• Crofting predates the word. Small holdings and cottars existed long before 1780. What changed was the separately rented, individually allotted croft.
• Not every laird was a villain. Willis notes that some chiefs, such as MacLeod of MacLeod in 1846, spent heavily on relief while others did nothing. Some resettlements also brought more ground under cultivation.
• The emigration figures are estimates. Willis gives the Lewis figure as "said to have" been 14 per cent. Harper's figure of 2,337 sent from Lewis in 1846–56 is of a similar order. Figures for whole decades and for landlord-assisted emigration also vary between historians.
• Voluntary and forced emigration overlapped. Arrears, notices of removal and offers of free passage often came together, so the line between choice and compulsion cannot always be drawn.
• Willis wrote in 1991. The land reform era of buyouts, the 2003 and 2010 Acts and the renamed Commission came after his book and is drawn from other sources here.
• Croft numbers vary by source. Willis gives about 17,700. Modern estimates of more than 20,000 count registered crofts, not active crofters.

• Crofting Law
• The Highland Clearances
• Who Owns Scotland? — Concentrated Land Ownership
• Machair