Golspie's Townships 2

On Ardnamurchan, the vast majority of townships were what I termed 'clachans', settlements of some five or more families living in a community and holding their inbye, outfields and common grazings in common under the runrig system - William Roy's map, above, shows the clachan of Coiremhullin. In the Golspie area, when William Roy created his military map some time around 1750 - see earlier post here - the farming arrangements appear to have been much the same, but by the 1770s few of the townships were still organised in this way, though....

....Craigtown (above), seen in John Home's map of 1772, seems to have been been one of the exceptions. The other townships, such as Kirktown, right, had seen their randomly-shaped fields reorganised into neat rectangles and parcelled up into lots, with an average of about five lots to each township and each lot assigned to an individual small tenant farmer.

Craigtown shows all the features of a runrig settlement. A head dyke, a possible section of it marked at top left, would have surrounded the original settlement to keep animals off the arable land during the growing season. The township's land would have been held from the laird by a 'tacksman', a 'tac' being a farm. The tacksman would often be an ex-soldier on half pay, who would sublet the fields to 'tenants-at-will' who had no rights on the land and could, therefore, be turned off it at any time. The 'clachan' settlement is clearly visible at bottom right.

Compared to Ardnamurchan the fields are much bigger, as would be expected since the land here is richer while Ardnamurchan's fields were developed wherever there was even a tiny area of usable soil. The plough lines in the fields are typically sinuous, evidence that the plough was horse-drawn.