Author Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE FARMING OF THE EAST AND NORTH-EASTERN DISTRICTS. In drawing up a Eeport on the present condition of the agriculture of Scotland, it is necessary to remind the reader that so recently as 120 years ago it was only beginning slowly to emerge from a state of utter rudeness and wastefulness. As our grandfathers saw it, the whole country, with the most trifling exceptions, was unenclosed; there was scarcely such a thing as a plantation of trees; in the total absence of roads and bridges there were no wheel-carriages, and no means of conveying commodities save on pack-horses; there was no artificial drainage, and what tillage existed was restricted to the naturally dry land; the hollow parts were full of bogs, marshes, and stagnant pools; the people suffered grievously from ague, and their sheep were destroyed by the rot. Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, the land, even in the most favoured southern counties, wan occupied by cultivators who lived together in townships, often in the immediate vicinity of the castellated house of the pro- prietor; the arable, or infield land, being apportioned among the tenants, on a system called run-rig, by which each in turn got a narrow strip or rig in regular sequence, until th whole town-land, in its varying qualities of soil, was thus distributed among them. The grazing of the outfield, or uncultivated portion, was allotted on a similar principle, each tenant being entitled to keep a certain fixed number of cattle or aheep in proportion to his share of the tillage land. Oats, here (Hor- deum vulgare), and peas were the only field crops; and the straw of these crops, with such rough herbage as they could find in the fields, the only winter food of the cattle, which, before th return of spring, were often so...