The rural landscape we see today is largely a man-made creation. The Scottish countryside looked very different three hundred years ago. Then the landscape had a fragmented appearance, with numerous clusters of small farms scattered throughout. These were surrounded by narrow strips of cultivated ground in an otherwise bare landscape. Trees and hedges were scarce, but large areas of moorland and bog covered the countryside. There were few roads: many areas only had muddy tracks as a means of communication. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the appearance of the landscape changed dramatically. This was a time when agriculture developed from subsistence level to a commercial scale, when land ceased to be a symbol of power and became a source of income. New methods of agriculture, the enthusiasm of improving landowners and tenants, the development of rural industries and a revolution in transport all combined to bring about ‘a great change upon the face of the country’.

These are the words of John Forbes, factor on the Lovat estate in the 1760s. He was predicting how the landscape would be transformed when the old system of runrig cultivation ended. At the time ‘a barren muir of great extent’ had just been enclosed on the estate and was about to be planted with 200,000 fir trees. In Forbes’ opinion these would ensure‘a thriving Plantation, which will much beautify the Country, and turn out at last a great advantage to the Estate, & be a supply of wood & firing’.

His views on the aesthetic and commercial advantages of enclosing land and planting trees were widely held by landowners throughout Scotland. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries armies of labourers drained, enclosed and planted on estates across the country. The waving rigs and furrows of the old runrig cultivation vanished. So too did the clusters of buildings comprising the fermtoun, the centre of the jointly-run small farms that formed the backbone of the old system of agriculture. Architects constructed magnificent new homes for Scotland’s elites and gardeners laid out elegant designed landscapes around them.

The transformation of Scotland’s landscape did not occur overnight. Although the peak of improving activity, the agricultural revolution, took place in the sixty years from 1760 to 1820, change was under way from the later seventeenth century. Landowners began to experiment with their estates, mostly by planting trees around the house and in the enclosed ground known as policies, though sometimes, as at Yester in East Lothian, on a massive scale.

The basis for much later work was laid by several acts of the Scottish parliament in the period 1661–1695 which encouraged enclosure and the division of commonties and runrig lands. Even by 1700, multiple tenant farms were reducing in numbers, written leases were becoming more common and rents formerly paid in kind were starting to be commuted to money payments. In the years after the Union of Parliaments in 1707, the movement of Scottish elites to London required their estates to provide them with higher incomes. In many cases the need for higher rents drove the process of improvement. In 1723 the Society of Improvers was founded in Edinburgh to provide a method of disseminating information to landowners keen to modernise their estates. Improvement was very much part of the Scottish Enlightenment. Landowners were no longer content to accept what nature provided. In the interests of aesthetics and efficiency, barren landscapes should be both beautified and made productive.

The pace of agricultural change varied widely across Scotland. The south-east led the way, with the seeds of the agricultural revolution being sown there in the second half of the seventeenth century. Much depended on the income of the landowner as improvement was an expensive business. The fertility of the land and an estate’s proximity to markets provided by large population centres like Glasgow and Edinburgh were also crucial factors. As a result, modernising of estates in the Highlands did not take place till the nineteenth century and then with social upheavals largely avoided in the Lowlands. Even with committed owners, improving an estate often took decades and could result in bankruptcy.

The whole process of development was encouraged by Montgomery’s Act of 1770, which allowed owners of entailed estates to borrow a proportion of the cost of improvements against the estate. Estates were entailed to protect them from being sold or from passing to another family through marriage. The succession to such estates was restricted to certain heirs and the owner could not burden the estate with debt. At least a third of the estates in Scotland were entailed at this time, so the loosening of restrictions had a substantial effect on the scale of improvements as owners borrowed funds to build new houses, enclose and drain fields and plant trees. The Napoleonic Wars were an important external factor in the impetus for commercialisation, providing as they did increased demand and improved prices.

By 1850 or so, much of the Scottish lowland landscape had an ordered appearance. Larger farms had replaced the multiplicity of small units and sizeable fields were enclosed by hedges or dykes. Shelter belts of trees and plantations were growing and softening the contours of the landscape. Marshes had been drained and turned into productive land. New villages were springing up to provide employment and accommodation for workers who had become surplus to the requirements of the new system of agriculture. Improvements in rural housing had removed some of the blots on the landscape caused by old style cottages. Mining and textiles industries were now operating on a major scale and added some unsightly contributions to the new face of the country. Communications had improved with the building of a proper road system and by the end of the nineteenth century a network of canals, roads and railways criss-crossed the country. In the space of less than a century Lowland Scotland had developed from a rural society based on subsistence agriculture into an industrialised and urbanised economy.

Huge changes in the social and economic structure of the Highlands left their mark on the area, first with the clearance of townships to form sheep farms, then with the growth of sporting estates. By the late nineteenth century these attempts to make Highland estates economic had led to acute shortages of land in many crofting areas. A period of unrest and protest led to government intervention, first with the Crofters Act of 1886 which provided security of tenure, and then with land settlement programmes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which created new crofts in the Highlands and smallholdings in the Lowlands.

In the later nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the provision of piped water supplies and the advent of electricity brought great alterations to the landscape, both in the Highlands and the Lowlands. Reservoirs, power stations, pylons and hydro-electric dams made their appearance in previously undisturbed parts of the countryside. Though electricity brought immeasurable benefits to Scottish citizens, its physical manifestations caused great concern when they first appeared and continue to do so. Another twentieth century development which has not been universally welcomed is the blanket conifer cover which post-war forestry brought to many parts of Scotland.

Landscape change is a continuous process and now, early in the twentieth century and with enormous pressures on the countryside, a highly contentious subject. The eighteenth and nineteenth century improvers fashioned new landscapes without let or hindrance, but now any proposal to change the face of the country must be submitted to planning authorities, who have the unenviable task of juggling the competing claims of local communities, developers, visitors and conservationists. Developments such as new roads, superquarries, fish farms and wind farms are hotly debated and often vigorously opposed. Changed days from the 1840s, when Lord Cockburn, a high court judge, found himself ridiculed for protesting against the destruction of the countryside that railways brought:

 

. . . shares are actually up for a railway through Killiecrankie, and by Dalwhinnie and Aviemore! And any one who puts in a word for the preservation of scenery, or relics, or sacred haunts, is set down as a beast, hostile to the ‘poor man’s rights’, or ‘modern improvement’, and the ‘march of intellect’. (Cockburn, Circuit Journeys, 268).

 

This book has its origins in an exhibition in 1997 to publicise the unique plans collection of the National Archives of Scotland. We have used this remarkable resource to illustrate the transformation of the Scottish landscape between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. There are over 100,000 plans in the collection, relating to estates, buildings, industry and transport in all areas of Scotland. These plans, many of them magnificently illustrated, give a unique picture of Scotland’s past, providing snapshots of the Scottish countryside through almost three hundred years of change.

Picture from The National Archives of Scotland