Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  At Monymusk, Archibald Grant not only began the planting of trees – it is estimated that he had 50 million put in the ground in his lifetime – he also had the land drained and cleared of stones. These were used to build drystane dykes around the new fields and this simple, obvious but very arduous process probably doubled the number of acres that could be cultivated on his estate. Equally important was good drainage. New techniques were imported from the Netherlands and hidden under many of Scotland’s quiet and green fields are many thousands of miles of drains. These supplied another use for the stones picked up from the rigs. Old stane-drains were constructed at first (and many were still working until modern deep ploughing destroyed them) and later augmented or replaced by tiled conduits made from fired clay.

  In 1722, Archibald Grant was elected MP for Aberdeenshire. His visits to Westminster brought him into contact with famous agricultural improvers, notably Jethro Tull and ‘Turnip’ Townshend, the English aristocrat nicknamed for the vegetable he introduced. Tull’s seed drill replaced the old method of sowing by broadcast, the rhythmic scattering of seeds from side to side by hand while walking up and down the rigs. Instead of this more random and wasteful method, the seed drill planted in neat and regular rows. This, in turn, helped greatly with the grinding job of summer weeding. Between the straight rows of seedlings, Tull’s new horse-drawn hoe could root out weeds quickly and repeatedly and prevent the young plants from being choked.

  Crop rotation rather than the introduction of turnips (admirable vegetable though it is) was the real innovation imported by Viscount Townshend. In the old agriculture, rigs were rotated on a three-field system with two bearing crops while the third was left fallow. In Flanders, Townshend saw the benefits of four-field rotation because it left nothing fallow. Instead, nutrient-restoring root crops such as turnips and clover (classed as a legume) were planted. The particular advantage of turnips was that they supplemented winter feed for cattle and avoided the need for the traditional cull in late autumn. Some varieties were imported from Sweden and were, of course, called swedes. In Scotland the Swedish word for them was imported as well and rotabagga quickly adapted into Scots as ‘bagies’.

  Bagies were grown first in Scotland at Monymusk. While he was at Westminster, Archibald Grant ran his estate through his factor, Alexander Jaffrey, and sent streams of instruction north by letter. These served as a handy chronicle of some of the most radical changes. It is clear that the effects of new rotations, new crops, new machinery, all of the labour of land improvement and the intensive programme of tree planting took a generation or more to become obvious – but, despite initial hostility amongst the people of Monymusk, they were dramatic. With improved crop yields, milker cows kept alive through the winter and the general rise in the quality of the food produced, people were healthier and the spectre of famine dimmed and eventually disappeared. By the time of The First Statistical Account of Scotland in 1792, the population of Monymusk Parish has risen to 1,127.

  All over 18th-century Scotland, improving landlords and farmers created a new landscape, the homely geometry of fields, fences and hedges, drystane dykes snaking up hillsides, dense shelter belts and woods of deciduous and evergreen trees and busy farm steadings clustered together with the cottage rows – everywhere there was the overwhelming sense of the hand of man. Tull’s seed drill and Townshend’s innovations played vital roles but perhaps the most influential of all was a Scotsman whose name is now almost entirely forgotten. A Berwickshire blacksmith, James Small, invented the swing plough and it revolutionised agriculture.

  Working in smiddies in Berwickshire and in Yorkshire and in contact with the Carron Ironworks near Falkirk, Small made and remade dozens of prototypes of his new design. He wanted to replace the auld Scotch ploo. It was heavy and needed a team of oxen to pull it through the ground. Mostly made of wood, it often broke down and was unable to turn the furrow slice over completely. It also needed plough followers to bash down big clods and pull out weeds. By contrast, Small invented a plough-share cast entirely from iron. Its slightly screwed shape enabled it to plough deeper and to turn over the furrow slice completely. And, because it could cut cleanly through the ground and created less friction, a pair of horses or even a single strong horse could pull it. No plough followers were needed and both horse and plough could be guided by one skilled man.

  Small did not patent his invention (and he died in poverty) and therefore it was copied and adapted all over Britain and abroad. Because it was designed to plough deeper than the auld ploo, it improved drainage and brought more land into cultivation. More than any other Scot, more than Grant or the other improvers in the south, James Small changed the landscape and made life better and easier for those who worked on it. And, by his gifts, he also greatly accentuated the economic and cultural differences between Highland and Lowland.

  As one-man ploughing and other sorts of horse working developed and the use of machinery spread in the Lowlands, 18th-century farming became less and less labour intensive. Emigration abroad and to towns and cities took many away from the land their families had worked on for generations but others stayed and adapted. Horse working needed blacksmiths and not just for shoeing. Smiddies turned out cartwheels and made and repaired iron ploughs, harrows and all sorts of other gear. Masons and labourers built the new farmhouses and steadings and laid down better roads. There was a tremendous surge in textile production as it became, literally, a cottage industry. Not only was wool off the backs of the flocks woven into cloth, the increasing amount of flax grown on Scottish farms was made into linen. The Scots word for flax is lint and it can still be seen as an element in rural place-names all over the Lowlands.

  All of these seismic shifts in agriculture certainly changed life on the land radically but they also exerted a profound influence on those who were not directly affected – those who lived on the other side of the Highland Line.

  As the new techniques were progressively adopted and more land came under the plough, stock rearing became less attractive to Lowland farmers. High-yield cereal production was, in any case, more immediately profitable than waiting for cattle to mature. It was different in the glens. As the depredations inflicted by the Duke of Cumberland and his troops in the aftermath of Culloden demonstrated, Highland pastures could sustain many herds and flocks. In fact, the Union of the Parliaments of 1707 had opened up lucrative, large and hungry markets in England. Scotch beef was popular – even if its producers were not. Before the events of 1745 and 1746, cattle droving had begun to develop and, by the middle of the 19th century, the business of supplying the south with beef had become an enormously important sector of the Scottish economy.

  Here is a description of the main destination of droving out of the Highlands – the series of cattle markets known as the Falkirk Trysts. In 1849, they made a deep impression on an English essayist, Thomas Gisborne:

  [At Falkirk people] will there witness a scene to which certainly Great Britain, perhaps even the whole world, does not afford a parallel . . . There are three trysts every year – the first in August, the second in September, and the last and largest in October. The cattle stand in a field in the parish of Larbert at a distance of nearly three miles from Falkirk, at a place called Stenhousemuir. The field on which they assemble contains above 200 acres, well-fenced and in every way adapted for the purpose. The scene, seen from horseback, from a cart, or some erection, is particularly imposing. All is animation, bustle, business and activity; servants running about shouting to the cattle, keeping them together in their particular lots and ever and anon cudgels are at work upon the horns and rumps of the restless animals that attempt to wander in search of grass or water.

  The cattle dealers of all descriptions chiefly on horseback, are scouring the field in search of the lots they require. The Scottish drovers are for the most part mounted on small, shaggy, spirited ponies that are obviously quite at home among the cattle; and they carry their riders through the throngest groups [of cattle] with aston
ishing alacrity. The English dealers have in general, large, stout horses, and they pace the ground with more caution, surveying every lot carefully as they go along. When they discover the cattle they want, they enquire the price. A good deal of riggling takes place, and when the parties come to an agreement, the purchaser claps a penny of arles [a deposit] into the hand of the stockholder, observing at the same time ‘It’s a bargain’. Tar dishes are then got, and the purchaser’s mark being put upon the cattle, they are driven from the field. Besides numbers of shows, from 60 to 70 tents are erected along the field for selling spirits and provisions . . . What an indescribable clamour prevails in most of these party-coloured abodes!

  Far in the afternoon, when frequent calls have elevated the spirits and stimulated the colloquial powers of the visitors, a person hears the uncouth Cumberland jargon and the prevailing Gaelic, along with innumerable provincial dialects, in their genuine purity, mingled in one astounding roar. All seem inclined to speak: and raising their voices to command attention, the whole of the orators are obliged to bellow as loudly as they can possibly roar. When the cattle dealers are in the way of their business, their conversation is full of animation, and their technical phrases are generally appropriate and highly amusing.

  The trysts were the – usually – joyful culmination of immense journeys, a great deal of effort, some danger and no little skill. Droving developed in the Highlands as more than a complement or a reaction to the agricultural revolution in the Lowlands. The Union of 1707 opened a huge market for beef (and lamb and mutton) while improving farmers were cultivating more and more arable land and, for Highland stocksmen, their beasts became more valuable, in fact their sole cash crop. More than that, the market for salt beef expanded greatly in the later 18th century as Britain sought to be Great and embarked on a series of imperial wars, both in Europe and North America. Not only did the glens and the islands supply many of the soldiers who fought and died to create the Empire, those they left at home reared the beef the armies marched on. But, by the time Thomas Gisborne wrote his entertaining account of the Falkirk Trysts in 1849, droving was beginning to wane. Built at tremendous speed, railways were reaching across the country and, by the 1860s, cattle dealers could buy their beasts ‘off the hill’ and transport them quickly to southern markets by train. The tracks could not reach everywhere, particularly through the awkward and precipitous geography of the Highlands, and the trysts lingered on until the end of the 19th century. But their great days had passed and the remarkable phenomenon of droving became little more than a memory.

  It left few accounting records but historians have pieced together some colourful sources that show that the organisation of the trade was simple yet impressive in its scale. Highland chiefs and landowners were generally paid rents in kind rather than cash and cattle was the main currency. Landowners also acted as agents for tenant farmers who had surplus to sell or they bought from them directly. Many crofter–farmers had to sell their beasts on before the winter in any case since they did not have easy access to the new sources of fodder being grown in the Lowlands. And cattle supplied their own transport. They walked to market.

  After the first herds were collected up in localities, the cattle were driven on to a larger, more central market. Aikey Fair at Old Deer in the Buchan was one such. The largest in the north of Scotland, it was always very busy at the end of July. After one fair day in 1839, a drove of 6,000 beasts moved south through Tarves in a continuous line, a mile long.

  Lairds and their tacksmen, the men on the shaggy ponies who so impressed Thomas Gisborne, drove their herds to Lowland markets or trysts but most men walked and had dogs with them to keep the herds together. It was thought that one man and a good dog could manage 50–60 head. And, when drovers stopped for the night, the first thing they did was to find food for their faithful dogs. Often these men were farmers who could afford to be away between sowing time and harvest time. All were armed. Moving large herds of valuable animals through countryside that was not very friendly could be problematic and men carried dirks, pistols, swords and even muskets. In the Disarming Acts after the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, drovers were exempted. The trade was so important to England that it could not be jeopardised and, in the Highlands, cattle stealing was almost an honourable tradition and very widespread.

  At the likes of Aikey Fair in the Buchan and St Lawrence Fair in the Garioch, cattlemen who assembled droves as large as that of 1839 may have done so for security but such scale did present problems. As thousands of beasts moved through the countryside, especially in late July, they could be a danger to crops and stampeding or panicked animals would break down fences in moments. Eventually, droving paths were made, corridors 50–100 feet wide enclosed by dykes or turf banks on either side. Some are still visible in the Border hills. However many there were in a drove, the beasts were not to be hurried. So that they kept their condition and could graze and drink along the way, dogs did not snap at their heels and men tried only to keep the herd moving forward as one. If a drove covered ten or twelve miles a day, that was a good day.

  In the late summer of 1723, a large drove was collected at Broadford on the Isle of Skye and then moved eastwards to the shore at Kylerhea, where there is a narrow strait. An account of 1813 tells what happened next:

  All the cattle reared in the Isle of Skye which are sent to the southern markets pass from that island to the mainland by the ferry of Kylerhea. Their numbers are very considerable, by some supposed to be 5,000 but by others 8,000 annually, and the method of ferrying them is not in boats . . . but they are forced to swim over Kylerhea. For this purpose the drovers purchase ropes which are cut at the length of three feet having a noose at one end. This noose is put round the under-jaw of every cow, taking care to have the tongue free. The reason given for leaving the tongue loose that the animal may be able to keep the salt water from going down its throat in such a quantity as to fill all the cavities in the body which would prevent the action of the lungs; for every beast is found dead and said to be drowned at the landing place to which this mark of attention has not been paid. Whenever the noose is put under the jaw, all the beasts destined to be ferried together are led by the ferryman into the water until they are afloat, which puts an end to their resistance. Then every cow is tied to the tail of the cow before [in front] until a string of six or eight be joined. A man in the stern of the boat holds the rope of the foremost cow. The rowers then play [sic] their oars immediately. During the time of high water or soon before or after full tide is the most favourable passage because the current is then least violent. The ferrymen are so dextrous that very few beasts are lost.

  Once the cattle had shaken off the seawater and been untied, the drovers moved them inland from Glenelg to Glen Shiel before reaching the Great Glen at Fort Augustus. From there, they pushed on into the mountains and over the difficult Pass of Corrieyairack and thence to Dalwhinnie. There, in the late summer of 1723, they met a travelling clergyman, Bishop Forbes, and he was also impressed by the drovers’ skill, organisation and resourcefulness:

  They had four or five horses with provisions for themselves by the way, particularly blankets to wrap themselves in when sleeping in the open air, as they rest on the bleak mountains, the heathy moors, or the verdant glens, just as it happens, towards the evening. They tend their flocks [he means herds] by night and never move till about eight in the morning and then march the cattle at leisure that they may feed a little as they go along. They rest awhile at midday to take some dinner and so let the cattle feed and rest as they please. The proprietor does not travel with the cattle but has one [man] for his deputy to command the whole and he goes to the place appointed against the day fixed for the fair. When the flock is very large, as the present, they divide it, though belonging to one, into several droves that they may not hurt one another in narrow passes, particularly on bridges many of which they go along. Each drove has a particular number of men with some boys to look after the cattle.

 
; What kept the herds together was mostly instinct. Compared with modern bullocks that spend winters in huge cattle courts and are fed on silage, Highland cattle of the 18th century were wild and often difficult to manage. Having spent all their lives, winter and summer, out in unfenced, open pasture, conforming to their own hierarchies, deferring to king bulls, they could be a handful for the herd laddies and their dogs. Not shaggy like the familiar picture-postcard Highland cattle, they were in reality small and most of them black. But they did have horns and, in the narrow places mentioned by Bishop Forbes or in potentially panicky situations like river crossings where they might at best spook or at worst stampede, they could be difficult and dangerous.

  Armed, kilted, weather beaten and used to living outside, Highlanders also presented a vivid spectacle as the herds moved through the Lowlands at the end of their journeys. Observers thought them bearlike, swathed in thick plaids that smelled of heather and peat smoke, and some believed the drovers to be wild, shaggy like their ponies and uncultured. What helped convert the unfamiliar into a threat was, of course, language. The herdsmen shouted at their cattle and their dogs in Gaelic and many will not have had much English.

  But the drovers were much respected for their skill and hardihood. Here is Edmund Burt, writing in the 1720s, watching a difficult moment in a drove:

  It was a time of rain by a wide river where there was a boat to ferry over the drovers. The cows were about 50 in number and took the water like spaniels, and when they were in, their drivers made a hideous cry to urge them forwards: this, they told me, they did to keep the foremost of them from turning about, for in that case, the rest would do the like and then they would be in danger, especially the weakest of them, to be swept away and drowned by the torrent.