Today's OS map of the area largely covered by Golspie parish shows a landscape of woodland, open moor and farm fields, the fields clustered around large farm steadings. The only urban area is Golspie itself, a small town which likes to call itself a village.
One of the pleasures of arriving in a new area is the gradual understanding of the history lying hidden under this modern cover. In the Golspie area human occupation goes back thousands of years - the village's name may derive from the Norse for 'gully village', presumably referring to the Golspie glen - but so far I have only stripped back the layers to see the human landscape which existed in the times before early 19th century and the reorganisation of the crop lands into the large farms, a process known as the clearances, in which....
....thirty-three small townships, each with five or more families, were emptied to create the new, 'improved' farms and the town of Golspie.
The change seems to have come in two stages. The above map, part of the extensive survey of the Highlands carried out by William Roy in the years following the Jacobite rebellion, courtesy National Library of Scotland, shows fields around each community organised in a random fashion, suggesting that they were worked by traditional
runrig methods. Within the short space of less than twenty years, much of this was to change.
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