Scott Macfie | University of Glasgow
If asked to describe the British countryside, most people would probably conjure up an image of lush green fields, surrounded by hedgerows or dry-stone walls, and filled with herds of cattle and woolly sheep. It’s a romantic image and one that feels timeless; a place rooted in tradition and unchanged for centuries.
However, in the Scottish Lowlands, this orderly, enclosed rural landscape is a relatively recent creation. The hedges, ditches and dry-stone walls that cut across and subdivide the landscape were mostly only planted, dug, or constructed in the latter half of the eighteenth century. They are the most enduring monuments left behind by a revolution in farming that is usually termed ‘Agricultural Improvement’, which sought to bring order to, and increase the productivity of, the Scottish countryside. The erection of these borders reshaped the face of the Scottish countryside and ushered in a new, more intensive system of farming that had profound consequences for rural society.
Before 1750, a communal system of farming persisted in most of the Scottish Lowlands that had scarcely changed in two hundred years. The print of the countryside around Arbroath from the 1690s provides a helpful depiction of this rural landscape before enclosure.
There were few physical barriers cutting across the landscape, and instead of fields, the land was farmed in a series of long curving ridges. These strips were rented from the landowner and distributed among the various families living in a ‘fermtoun’, or township. The strips would be redistributed each year so that no one person was able to farm all of the most fertile land. Pieces of marginal land lying between different estates were used as commons, where livestock from various fermtouns were pastured together. These provided an essential source of building materials and fuel for rural populations, who could dig turf or gather brushwood. This was a co-operative system of farming, where communities would pool their resources and labour to farm the land together, normally at just above a subsistence level. It was a system where most people had access to land, even if it was only a plot big enough to graze a single cow.
A number of changes in Scottish society during the middle decades of the eighteenth century saw this communal way of life replaced by a much more individualistic, profit-driven system of farming. The first change was that Scottish aristocrats ceased to view their estates as passive sources of income which required little of their attention. Following the Treaty of Union in 1707, they started to spend more of their time in London, socialising with their wealthier English counterparts. Seeking to imitate this more lavish lifestyle, Scottish landowners started to view their estates as assets to be invested in to increase their income.
Their desire for profit was given some legitimacy by the new philosophy of ‘improvement’, born of the Scottish Enlightenment. There was a shift away from viewing the natural world as a divine creation to seeing it as something that could be ‘improved’ through human intervention and be made more productive. As a philosophy, it was both optimistic and exploitative, dictating that boggy land could be drained, rough grazing could be turned into lush pasture, and every acre of an estate could be made to turn a profit. However, to ‘improve’ the landscape was not just to make it more productive, but also more attractive, as the drive to create neat, rectilinear fields fed the neoclassical love of order and symmetry.
There was also a patriotic element to this farming revolution, as it was felt that Scotland needed to ‘catch up’ with her wealthier southern neighbour. The process of enclosing fields and dividing commons in England and Wales had been gradual, beginning in the Tudor period and continuing for the next two hundred years. The result was that by 1750, south-eastern England in particular was considered to be a model for the most advanced methods of farming across Europe. By contrast, most of Scotland remained unenclosed, and even as late as 1773, when Samuel Johnson made his famous journey through the highlands and islands of Scotland, he complained that the Scottish countryside was ‘barren’ and ‘naked’ with its total lack of trees.
The landowner’s desire to make their estate as profitable as possible was branded as a patriotic endeavour that would increase not only their private income, but also the wealth of the nation. Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, expressed the sentiment of the time when he stated that ‘Every gentleman-farmer must of course be a patriot’.
This mixture of patriotism, philosophy and unashamed desire for profit inspired landowners to begin improving the standard of farming on their estates. The first step in this process was enclosure, which demanded that they create two kinds of ‘borders’ on their properties. Firstly, they divided pieces of common ground to establish an agreed outer boundary of their estate with their neighbours. This enabled these pieces of marginal land to be brought under more intensive cultivation, and the landowner could derive an increased rental from them. Secondly, the landowner created a new system of fields, which were enclosed with hedges, fences, or stone walls. Accompanying this programme of enclosure, the old fermtouns were replaced by single-tenant with one tenant now farming land that had previously supported around ten families.
Scottish landowners were able to reshape the landscape in this manner because they wielded enormous legal and financial power over their tenants. In 1800, the Scottish population was around 1.6 million, yet there were fewer than 7,000 landowners. This meant that a tiny community owned a vast amount of land, and that the majority of the peasantry rented rather than owned the land they farmed. Scottish landowners also possessed greater legal power over their tenants under Scots law than their English counterparts. Tenants had no customary right to land they rented, and the landowner’s right to evict a tenant was relatively unimpeded, so long as notice was served within forty days of the termination of the lease.
This unequal balance of power between landowner and tenant enabled the former to impose new farming practices on the latter. The most common method of enclosing a farm involved the landowner paying for the building materials or thorns necessary to create the walls or hedges, while the tenant was expected to devote their time and manpower to constructing them. It became standard practice for the landowner to insert a clause in the lease stating that a tenant was responsible for keeping the hedges or stone walls on their farms in a ‘fencible condition’, with fines or possible eviction the consequence of noncompliance. The difficulty of making a legal challenge to the landowner meant that tenants became bound to making this enclosed field system a reality.
Enclosed fields were essential to increasing the productivity of an estate, which was the ultimate goal of every landowner. Hedges and stone walls sheltered crops and livestock from the worst of the wind and the rain. In the vocabulary of the time, they ‘warmed’ the soil, and created the ideal climatic conditions for increased crop yields and healthier livestock.
Newly enclosed fields also gave the farmer much greater control over the land that they farmed. Previously, when strips of land were divided among several families, the entire fermtoun was obliged to adopt the same cropping regime. It was not feasible for tenants to have several different crops growing in their individual strips, especially when the whole community shared their resources and labour. When the land was rented to an individual tenant, there was no requirement to listen to the needs of the wider community.
The subdivision of land into discrete blocks enabled the farmer to introduce a crop rotation for the first time. These were usually planned around five or six-year rotations, where ‘white crops’, such as oats and wheat, were intermingled with ‘green crops’, such as turnips, potatoes or beans. This was followed by prolonged periods of fallowing, when the land was sown with grass seed and allowed to rest for several years in order to recover its fertility. This rotation was only possible because hedges and walls divided the landscape and enabled different crops to be grown on different parts of the farm, and for the farmer to remember what had been grown where in previous years. This new cropping regime produced larger crop yields and lusher green fields that could support healthier livestock, both of which brought greater profit to the tenant farmer and to the landowner.
While these new enclosures enriched the wealthiest in rural society, they also acted as borders that kept out the rural populations who had previously had access to these common lands. When common lands were distributed among landowners and subdivided into tenant farms, the cottagers who had previously relied on them for access to brushwood and peat necessary to heat and build their homes were shut out. Their little patches of land were incorporated into large fields and their previous way of life was no longer tenable. They either remained on the land as landless farm servants, on a limited contract and receiving a regular wage, or were obliged to leave the countryside altogether and move to a nearby town, where they provided the manpower for the Scottish industrial revolution.
The enclosure of the Scottish countryside was achieved with remarkable speed. While in England, this was a gradual process lasting several centuries, in Scotland it was achieved in a little over fifty years, so that by 1820, most of the Scottish Lowlands was enclosed with hedges, fences, or stone walls. The countryside was changed so rapidly and so thoroughly that it wiped out any memory of the previous way of life. While the Highland Clearances live on in the popular imagination today, the similar process of landscape change and clearance in the Lowlands conjures up no such romantic or painful memories. Instead, it has been forgotten, and the ‘improvers’ were so successful that the landscape they created has taken on a timeless image, as though it has always looked that way.
In recent decades there has been a rebellion against the philosophy of the ‘improvers’. Calls for rewilding and a move away from intensive, environmentally damaging systems of farming are a reaction to the idea that the natural world must be made as productive as possible. As these debates around the future of farming and its relationship with the natural world are becoming fiercer, it is more important than ever to understand the forces that created our current system of farming. Looking at a longer timescale reminds us that the countryside has been moulded by each succeeding generation to fit its own set of priorities. While the romantic image of a lush, orderly rural landscape may seem timeless, it is not, and never has been, static.
Further reading:
Pete Aitchison, Pete and Andrew Cassell, The Lowland Clearances, Scotland's Silent Revolution: 1760–1830 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2003).
John R. Barrett, The Making of a Scottish Landscape: Moray’s Regular Revolution 1760-1840 (London: Fonthill, 2015).
Brian Bonnyman, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy 1660-1815 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1994).
Scott Macfie is a first year PhD student at the University of Glasgow examining agricultural improvement in west-central Scotland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
X (formerly Twitter): @ScottMacfie