Photograph shows the engineering department of the London Rubber Company, Lydney, Gloucestershire November 1978. I am third from the right in the front row, aged 20. In 1981 as result of the Thatcher governments economic policies, the factory  was closed with the loss of 1000 jobs.

Looking at UK opinion polls showing Labour and Conservative parties neck and neck reminds me of  the two general elections held in 1974. Back then I  was a 15 year old pupil at Kirkcudbright Academy and George Thompson, who was my French teacher, was the SNP candidate for the Galloway constituency. I my lunch hours I helped with the SNP campaign but in the February general election George Thompson only got  9038 votes- not enough to beat the sitting Conservative MP John Brewis who got 13 316. In the second general election, held in October, George Thompson won by a wafer thin majority of 30. Then in 1979, George lost the seat by 2922 votes to Conservative Ian Lang, now Baron Lang of Monkland.

In 1979 I had just moved to London to take up a job working for the London Rubber Company. I had started working  in one of their factories in Gloucestershire in 1977. In 1981 that factory was closed thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. In 1992 the London factory was also closed. By then I had moved on and in 1997 I returned to Scotland. But I sometimes wonder if  things had been different, would I still be living and working in London?

When I started working for London Rubber in 1977, the company was still expanding and growing. By the time I left at the end of 1983 it was contracting. Although I had  ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ plastered all over my schoolbag in 1974, it was not until I read an interview with Denis Healey in May 2013 that I made a connection with what happened to the London Rubber Company in the 1980s. This is what Healey said:

I think we did underplay the value of the oil to the country because of the threat of nationalism but that was mainly down to Thatcher. We didn’t actually see the rewards from oil in my period in office because we were investing in the infrastructure rather than getting the returns and really, Thatcher wouldn’t have been able to carry out any of her policies without that additional 5 per cent on GDP from oil. Incredible good luck she had from that.

The ‘underplaying’ of the value of the oil followed the suppression of the (in)famous McCrone Report in 1975. Digging a little deeper I found an interview from 1991 with Alan Budd, who had been an advisor to the Thatcher government in the 1980s.

Curtis: For some economists who were involved in this story, there is a further question: were their theories [ about monetarism] used to disguise political policies that would have otherwise been very difficult to implement in Britain?
Budd: The nightmare I sometimes have, about this whole experience, runs as follows. I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. Now, my worry is . . . that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions . . . who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation.
    They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes — if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since. Now again, I would not say I believe that story, but when I really worry about all this, I worry whether that indeed was really what was going on.

More recently, as support for the Labour party in Scotland has plummeted , I have wondered if the Labour party had been bolder back in 1975 and  published rather than suppressed the McCrone Report would it really have led to Scottish independence 40 years ago?

Realistically, it is an impossible question to answer since there are just too many ‘unknown, unknowns’ involved. On the other hand, researching the actual history of the 1974-79 Labour government has been an eye-opener. In particular, I have discovered just how difficult it is for left-radical policies to be put into practice in the UK. This is an important point for any attempt to understand the present (April 2015) situation where the Labour party in Scotland appears to be in meltdown. Is this due to a rise in Scottish nationalism, or is it down to a loss of faith in the Labour party’s left-radical credentials?

In the February 1974 general election the SNP gained 6 Scottish seats. This rose to eleven in the October election. However, nine of these eleven  SNP seats were in rural areas and at the expense of the Conservatives, not Labour. Looking at the results for the Galloway constituency, George Thompson’s win for the SNP in October 1974 seems to have been the result of anti-Conservative tactical voting by Liberal and Labour supporters rather than an increase in SNP support. More worrying for Labour were the 35 Labour held seats where the SNP came second.

At this point I was going to  suggest that the incoming Labour government elected in February 1974 kept quiet about the McCrone Report in case it boosted support for the SNP in the run up to an anticipated second general election. But according to wikipedia : ‘After discussions between St. Andrews House and the Cabinet Office in London, Prof. McCrone passed the report on to the new Labour government on 23 April 1975, along with a covering letter.’

If Labour were not aware of the McCrone Report until after the October election then its importance is  diminished. Unlike 2014 when the independence referendum brought into focus arguments about the economic viability of an independent Scotland, in 1974 when the SNP gained 30% of the vote in October, only 12% of Scots wanted independence. [Tom Devine, ‘The Scottish Nation 1707-2007’, Penguin 2006, p. 576] At general elections from 1979 to 2010, most Scottish voters remained loyal to the Labour party. Labour also managed to keep their vote up in Scottish parliament elections from 1999 to 2007 and only really lost out to the SNP in the 2011 election.

If the 1974-1979 Labour government did ‘downplay’ the value of North Sea oil as Denis Healey claimed in 2013, was that that entirely due to the nationalist threat? An alternative explanation is that the downplaying of oil wealth was also influenced by conflicts within the 1974-79 Labour government over economic policies. These conflicts arose because after Labour lost the 1970 election, a group on the left of the party reflected on the failure of the 1964-1970 Labour government to achieve radical change and came up with a series of proposals which they hoped a future Labour government would deliver on. These were set out in ‘Labour’s Programme 1973’ followed by ‘The Regeneration of British Industry’ which was a White paper published in August 1974.

Included in these radical proposals were the setting up of a National Enterprise Board and a National Oil Corporation. The aim was for the State in alliance with trade unions to take a leading strategic role  in pursuit of socialist economic policies as a way to counter the power of multi-national companies  to shift production across borders and avoid political control. ‘Regional regeneration’ was another aspect of these plans which aimed to ensure a redistribution of power and wealth. [John Medurst ‘That Option No Longer Exists-Britain 1974-76’, Zero books, 2014, pages 32-3].

Unfortunately, the proposals drew on theory developed by the Institute for Workers Control set up in 1968 following the almost revolution in France and the practice of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders 1971-2 occupation. Although they would have only led to the radical reform rather than the  revolutionary supersession  of capitalism, the proposals were too bold for Harold Wilson and other Labour party leaders. They also outraged the Conservative party, the right-wing press and elements of the UK’s ‘secret state’ who believed that the Labour party, from Harold Wilson down, had been infiltrated by communists.

As it turned out, the global economic crisis which followed the 400% rise in the price of oil from $3 dollars/barrel in 1973 to $12/barrel by March 1974 intervened, allowing Labour to water-down the plans.

But at the same time, the rise in the price of oil helped the development of North Sea oil. Extracting oil from under the North Sea was more expensive than extracting oil from under the deserts of the Middle East. So the higher the price of oil, the more valuable the North Sea reserves became. This brings us back to Denis Healey’s claim that  the 1974-79 Labour government underplayed the value of the oil through fear of Scottish nationalism. This may be true, but it is also true that underplaying  the value of North Sea oil would have helped Healey and Wilson in their internal struggle against the radical left of the Labour party.

If the Labour government had talked up the future value of North Sea oil this would have encouraged the radical left to argue that the profits from North Sea oil should be used to help regenerate British industry. On a ‘more jam tomorrow’ basis, it might also have helped the Labour government avoid the conflict with public sector workers ovr wage rises which led to the 1978-79 ‘Winter of Discontent’ which helped Margaret Thatcher win the May 1979 election. If labour could have squeezed a victory in 1979, then they rather than the Conservatives would have had the benefit of the ‘additional 5% on GDP’  Healey mentioned.

From a Scottish perspective, the talking up of the potential of North Sea oil might have seen a stronger Yes vote in the 1979 devolution referendum. However, such an outcome would not necessarily have led to an increase in support for Scottish independence in the 1980s. The majority of Scottish voters remained loyal to the Labour party from 1979 to 2010. Even in the 2014 independence referendum, a significant part of  support for a Yes vote came from Labour supporters who wanted an alternative to neoliberal austerity. And, it would appear, they still do. The hope now is that if Scotland can elect enough SNP MPs  this will pull a potential Labour government to the left, steering  the UK away from the neoliberal path it has followed since 1975.

But as Richard Seymour noted back in 2010, the  programme of the 1974 Labour government

was a utopian programme in the strict sense that no thought had been given to the range of social forces it would be necessary to assemble and mobilise in order that its goals could be achieved, and its accomplishments protected. It was simply assumed that an elected government could bring these changes about, and that once implemented the ruling class would have no alternative but to accept them.  

[ http://www.leninology.co.uk/2010/08/collapse-of-consensus-myth-of-popular.html ]

Over the past 40 years the UK has undergone a radical shift to the right. This means that the prospect of even a minimal attempt to veer left is provoking a perfect storm of apocalyptic headlines. These are similar to the prophecies of plague and pestilence which Scotland was warned would follow independence, but now the volume has been turned up to 11 since it is the rest of the UK which is under threat. Bizarrely,  it would seem that simply by voting SNP, Scots now endanger the future of the UK as a ‘democracy’. In the 1970s, a similar level of apocalyptic frenzy was directed against the 1974-79 Labour government. The one thing missing in comparison to the 1970s is the claim that the SNP has been infiltrated by communists.

Harold Wilson was not and never had been a member of the Communist party and the leadership of the Labour party were opposed to radical-left policies. But in the fevered atmosphere of the time, elements of the right wing fringe of the UK establishment contemplated the need for some form of military coup to restore ‘order’ in case Wilson’s socialist policies led to a general strike/ communist revolution. These plans faded away once Margaret Thatcher replaced Ted Heath as leader of the Conservative party in 1975. The focus then shifted to ensuring Thatcher’s election. The right-wing press played their part in this by relentlessly pursuing a narrative of economic chaos and industrial crisis, of a ‘broken Britain’ which could only be mended by electing Margaret Thatcher as a strong leader.

What did the UK‘s right-wing ‘ruling class’ expect from a Thatcher victory in 1979? The title of a book by Keith Robbins published in 1983 sums it up -‘The Eclipse of a Great Power, Modern Britain 1870-1975’. The hope and expectation was that the UK’s power and prestige would be restored. That somehow a combination of liberals and socialists had allowed Great Britain’s imperial splendour to fade, reducing the UK to second-rate status. While a restoration of the empire was impossible, a restoration of the UK’s economic fortunes seemed achievable- if the power of organised labour as ‘the enemy within’ could be crushed. Along with this nostalgic objective, there was a second more practical and ‘neoliberal’ [not a term used at the time] objective- the ending of restrictions on the UK’s finance sector.

In January 1970, Ted Heath’s Shadow Cabinet met at the Selsdon Park hotel in south London. The outcome of this meeting was set of right-radical free market policies which influenced the Heath government after the Conservatives won the June 1970 election. However these met with strong opposition from trade unions and led to an increase in unemployment to 1 million in January 1972. This forced Heath to make a ‘U turn’ and abandon the Selsdon policies in favour of more Keynesian policies. This was opposed by the Selsdon Group [formed in 1973] of right-wing Tories who later became supporters of Margaret Thatcher. They were determined that the next time a Conservative government was elected there would be no ‘U turn’. Defeating the National Union of Miners, who had humbled the Heath government was another aim.

Without the help of North Sea oil, the first Thatcher government would probably have suffered the same fate as the Heath government, collapsing into economic chaos by 1981. But it didn’t and with the patriotic boost provided by the 1982 Falklands war, Thatcher won the 1983 election. Labour finally got back into power in 1997, but by then the British form of neoliberalism first sketched out at the Selsdon Park hotel in January 1970 had been adopted by Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour party. The 1997 general election also saw the SNP gain 6 seats, including Galloway and Upper Nithsdale won by Alasdair Morgan. The same election saw the Conservatives wiped out in Scotland.

Unlike 1974, in 1997 Labour won on a landslide with 418 seats, giving them majority of 179. With 45.6% of the vote in Scotland and 56 MPs, Labour were confident enough of their strength in Scotland to hold a second Scottish devolution referendum which led to the establishment of a devolved Scottish parliament in 1999.

And now? For the Labour party and the UK establishment, all that once seemed so solid is melting into air. Their victory on 18 September last year is turning into ashes. William Blake’s prophetic cry ‘Rejoice, Empire is no more’ will be heard across the land. The partial eclipse of a great power will have become total. In an anti-democratic coup, soon after 7 May a sealed train will carry  a small group of Scottish nationalists to London where they will seize power, holding the Mother of Parliaments to ransom until their
outrageous demands are met. They will then depart, leaving a chaos of Biblical proportions in their wake.

Looking for some kind of more realistic conclusion I am going to re-quote Richard Seymour on the left-radical programme of the Labour government elected in 1974 -

It was a utopian programme in the strict sense that no thought had been given to the range of social forces it would be necessary to assemble and mobilise in order that its goals could be achieved, and its accomplishments protected. It was simply assumed that an elected government could bring these changes about, and that once implemented the ruling class would have no alternative but to accept them.  

If an anti-austerity alliance is to prevail after 7 May,  a UK wide range of social forces will have to be rapidly assembled and mobilised if the goal is to be achieved and its accomplishment protected .

There was a knock on my door the other night. When I opened the door I was surprised to find Richard Arkless, SNP candidate for Dumfries and Galloway. If I had more presence of mind I would have invited him in for a chat, but I didn’t. Instead we spent ten minutes rapidly going through the implications of a cohort of SNP MPs arriving at Westminster after 7 May.

What I tried to explain very briefly was that having lived in England for 20 years, my hope is that the SNP MPs will shake up the UK in a constructive way, opening the way for progressive change. This was a difficult point to get across in a short conversation.

Part of the difficulty is that the radical politics and culture of the England I know has always been viewed as a threat by the UK establishment. From the anti-nuclear protest movement of the 1980s to the current anti-fracking movement, England’s ‘culture of resistance’ has been physical suppressed by the UK state and marginalised by the UK the media.

My late wife was a founder member of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp so I was very aware of the role of the mainstream media in manufacturing consent for the status quo. But I was still taken aback by the full spectrum hostility directed against the Yes side during the Scottish independence  referendum  campaign. There was no neutral position, no hint that possibly the UK was an archaic institution in need of major reform. Or rather there wasn’t until couple of late opinion polls suggested that Yes might win when suddenly Scotland was promised major reform of the UK if there was a No vote…

Observing the intensity of opposition to Scottish independence also made me realise  how impossible the position of English radicalism has been. While English radicals have opposed the UK state, their opposition has always been fragmented and has never been able to cohere into an effective alternative. As the Labour party have moved to the right since the 1970s and without a proportional representation voting system,  English radicalism has also had to operate outside of parliamentary politics. The right-wing bias of UK media has further marginalised English radicalism, giving Ukip the oxygen of publicity while denying it to the English Green party.

I joined the Dumfries and Galloway Radical Independence Campaign in  March 2013. My hope then was that a Yes vote in September 2014 would rock the status quo in the  rest of the UK to the benefit of English radicalism. A strong element of RIC’s contribution to the independence debates was the need to break with the UK as a neoliberal state. We also pointed out that by working with the Conservative party in the No campaign, the Labour party in Scotland were nailing their colours to the neoliberal mast. At the local/regional level I worked out that for Yes to win in Dumfries and Galloway, virtually every Labour voter would have to vote Yes. Many did, but not enough. The No vote was 65.6%, one of the highest in Scotland.

Eight months later and the Labour vote is melting away here. Unless a significant number of Labour voters shift to the Tories, Richard Arkless will become our SNP MP, following in the footsteps of George Thompson (1974-1979) and Alasdair Morgan (1997-2001).

Significantly, even if Richard and 40 or more other SNP MPs are elected on 7 May, another independence referendum is not going to happen any time soon. Yet their election is still going to shock the status quo of the UK. Ironically, as an unintended consequences of last year’s  No vote, the  presence of this group of Scottish MPs at Westminster may do more to change the rest of the UK than independence would have done.      





   

Pushed to the margins over the past 40 years, the radical counterculture survives- but only just. But if we accept the reality of climate change, then we also have to accept  a radical restructuring of society away from ever increasing consumption of commodities -‘goods and services’- made and maintained by burning coal and oil but produced by our alienated labour. The radical counterculture  emerged out of the desire to end our alienation from the world we create, driven by psychedelic visions which broke down the boundary between self and world. Like Marx on acid, the result was a revolutionary movement which sought the negation of capitalist realism. The history of the radical counterculture shows that we already possess the consciousness needed to make a new reality. We must make a new reality because the old one is melting in the heat of climate change...

We took the wrong step years ago...

This year, 2015, marks the 250 anniversary of James Watt’s steam engine. A form of steam engine had been in use since 1712. Watt’s breakthrough in 1765 made the steam engine operate more efficiently so it needed less coal and was cheaper to run. Due to technical problems, it was not until 1776 that the first full size Watt engine began work pumping water from a coal mine. It took another 20 years of development before Watt’s engine could be used to directly power machinery in a cotton spinning factory. Even then, it was only after Richard Trevithick pioneered the use of smaller- high pressure- steam engines in 1800 that they became practical for use in factories, in steam locomotives and in steam ships.

So, although Watt’s invention was an essential step towards an industrial revolution, the full impact of the shift to a coal fuelled, steam powered  economy was not experienced until the nineteenth century. This is important since it meant that Watt’s eighteenth century Scottish contemporaries -James Steuart and Adam Smith -developed their theories of political economy (Steuart 1767, Smith 1776) based on a society and economy reliant on renewable sources of energy. In such an economy, sea transport relied on wind power and land transport by road or canal on horse power. The energy which drove manufacturing industries was water power and human labour.

The revolution which had most impact in eighteenth century Scotland was not an industrial revolution. It was an agricultural revolution. Across lowland Scotland, the heirs to the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture (set up in 1723) swept away a 600 year old system of subsistence farming. Its replacement was an improved system of enlightened agriculture based on rational if not always scientific principles. Although only a few members of the Scottish Enlightenment were directly involved in the agricultural revolution, they were all eye-witnesses to the transformation of a medieval landscape into  a modern one.

This had two significant impacts. Firstly, it led the Scots thinkers to develop dynamic theories of society in which early societies based on hunting gave way to pastoral societies based on livestock farming, then more advanced societies based on arable farming. The final stage in this process was a society based on commerce and trade. This ‘civil society’ was also more enlightened and better educated than earlier  societies ands so less warlike and superstitious than previous stages of society.

Secondly, it was believed that as the limits of agricultural improvement were reached, economic growth would begin to slow. The problem foreseen was  that as improvement was extended to more marginal/ less fertile land a law of diminishing returns would kick in. The cost of improvement would become greater than the profits from improvement. The growth in population which the first phase of improvement had encouraged- when food quantity had risen while food costs had fallen- would start to slow. At the same time wages would have to rise as food prices rose and this would act as a check on economic growth. The end point of the process would be the ‘stationary state’ beyond which further economic growth would be impossible.

In theory then, as the agricultural revolution reached its limits in the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of economy and population which had occurred in the eighteenth century would begin to tail away. This did not happen. Instead both the economy and the population of Scotland (and the UK) grew dramatically in the nineteenth century. One reason why this occurred is that the commercial class of the new civil society revolutionised the economy. Just as the agricultural improvers had applied enlightened rationality to farming, so the economic improvers applied enlightened rationality to industry and commerce.

However, while it was accepted that agricultural improvement was a long term process which could not show rapid results, investments in industry and commerce took place within a much more competitive environment. This led to a form of economic evolution in which capital invested in businesses which improved production was reproduced while capital invested in businesses which did not improve production was lost.

If this process had been confined to one country, problems of, for example, food and raw materials supply , would still have limited economic growth and the stationary state would still have been reached. But the UK was already a trading nation with overseas colonies so the problem of ’capitalism in ne country’ did not arise. At its simplest, the UK was able to exchange manufactured goods (produced cheaply via competition) with food and raw materials from other countries and its colonies. This exchange then had the effect of pushing other countries to improve their manufacturing industries or risk becoming economic colonies of the UK.

Could this revolutionary process have been achieved without a simultaneous shift from renewable energy sources to fossil fuels? Put another way, could capital have gone global without setting climate change in  motion?

The first question has been argued over by historians and economists in discussions about the importance of coal in the origins of the industrial revolution. The case for coal has been made by Tony Wrigley who has  estimated that English coal production in 1800 produced energy equivalent to 11 million acres of woodland against a total English land area of 32 million acres. [E A Wrigley ‘Energy and the English Industrial Revolution’, Cambridge  2010, p. 39]. The implication being that, in a variation on the stationary state theory, to fuel the English industrial revolution, land which was necessary for food production and animal fodder would have had to have been given over to timber production and that this would have created a conflict between economic growth and population growth.

The counter-argument is that cheap timber from around the Baltic or from north America could have been imported as a substitute for coal. While this might have worked if cost alone was the deciding factor in choosing between coal and wood as a fuel, the need to transport huge volumes of timber from sea-ports to end users would have been immense. When a railway from Liverpool to Manchester was proposed in 1825, a Liverpool timber importer supported the railway because the existing roads and canals could not cope with Manchester’s increasing demand for timber. In 1821 100 000 tons of Baltic and Canadian timber had arrived at Liverpool. By 1824 this had increased to 160 000 tons. This wood was not need for fuel so delays in transporting it were not critical. But if Manchester’s cotton mills had relied on timber for fuel, any delays would have forced the cotton mills to close. The railway opened in 1830 and solved the transportt problem-by using coal fuelled steam engines.

1830 also saw the beginnings of  a coal fuelled industrial revolution in Scotland. Here, the coal was used to produce iron. Wood, as charcoal, had been used 100 years earlier in iron furnaces in the Highlands where there were still extensive forests. But although there was wood, there was no iron ore in the Highlands so the industry had not taken off. In Lanarkshire and Ayrshire coal and iron ore were both present so the industry was able to expand rapidly. The use of coal (as coke) allowed the size of iron furnaces to grow, making iron production more efficient. By the 1860s, iron furnaces in north-east England were 100 feet tall. In theory, these furnaces could have used charcoal from Baltic timber but the charcoal furnaces would have had to be much smaller to stop the weight of iron ore crushing the charcoal. The economies of scale would therefore have been lost and millions of tons of wood would have had to be imported to replace the 3 millions tons of coal the north-east England iron industry consumed annually in the 1860s.

To summarise, without coal the British industrial revolution which began in the late eighteenth century would have faltered in the nineteenth century instead of continuing to develop and expand. But the coal was used and its use allowed the British industrial revolution to continue. This in turn allowed the UK to become the dominant global power in the nineteenth century, compelling rival economies to adopt coal fuelled industrialisation. In the twentieth century another fossil fuel- oil- came into use. The cumulative impact of burning billions of tons of coal and oil has been to release enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to trigger global warming. Global warming in turn is now driving global climate change.

One of the impacts of global warming, which is already becoming apparent, is a gradual rise in sea levels which will at some point overwhelm the flood defences of cities like London . Meanwhile climate , through prolonged droughts and extreme floods , will impact on food production. Our ability to adapt to these impacts depends on how  quickly we can shift to renewable energy sources and make the decision to leave as yet unused resources of coal and oil in the ground rather than burning them.

If we lived in a rational and enlightened world, the accumulation of scientific research into the relationship  between global warming and climate change would by now see huge efforts being put into de-carbonising the global economy. There would be recognition that although burning coal and oil has delayed the onset of the stationary state for 200 years, there really are limits to economic growth and that we have now reached those limits.

Why then are there so few signs of transition to the stationary state? In ‘The Enigma of Capital’ (London, 2010)  David Harvey provides some clues to the answer. Using work done by Angus Maddison, Harvey notes that in 1820 ‘the total output of goods and services in the capitalist world economy was $694 billion’. By 1913 the figure was $2.7 trillion, by 1950 $5.3 trillion, 1973 $16 trillion, 2003 $41 trillion and by 2009 $56.2 trillion. Harvey goes on to state that ‘Throughout the history of capitalism, the annual compound growth rate has been close to 2.25%;’ and that to maintain the ‘health’ (profitability) of capitalism requires an annual growth rate of  3%. If the growth rate falls below 1%, capitalists make no profit. As Harvey goes on to explain

When capitalism was made up of activity within a fifty-mile radius of  Manchester and Birmingham  in England and a few other hotspots in 1750, then seemingly endless capital accumulation at a compound rate of 3%  posed no big problem.

But if we bring global warming into the equation, there was a big problem. As discussed above, for the English industrial revolution to take-off after 1750, a shift from renewable sources of energy to coal had to take place. If this shift had not taken place then ‘seemingly endless capital accumulation at compound rate of 3%’ would not have been possible. The growth rate would have fallen towards 1% - the stationary state again- and the early capitalists would have made no profit. No coal, no capitalism…no capitalism, no climate change.

This relationship between coal, capital and climate change helps to explain why it is proving so difficult, effectively impossible, to cut global carbon dioxide emissions. For the past 250 years, ever since James Watt invented the world’s first thermodynamically efficient steam engine, global economic growth has been intimately tied-up with the use of fossil fuels as an energy source. The social impact of this prolonged period of economic growth has been to embed the belief that the only practically possible way to organise society is on the basis of  ‘endless capital accumulation’ -what Mark Fisher has described as ‘capitalist realism’.

Under capitalist realism there is no alternative to business as usual. Under capitalist realise we have no choice but to keep burning coal and oil so capital can keep accumulating and the economy keep growing. Is this rational? With the possible exception of the theory of evolution, no branch of science has been subjected to the same level of sustained and vehement criticism as climate science has. Yet the science has survived these attacks and is now as certain as any part of scientific rationality can be. Climate change is real and it is rational. If so, then capitalist realism cannot be rational. If it is not rational than it is not real. If it is not real then it is a form of myth. An illusion, a delusion. If it is not true then it must be false, it must be a lie.

There is a savage irony at play here. As Donald Cardwell explains so lucidly, James Watt was aware that his steam engine would be more expensive to manufacture than Newcomen’s simpler atmospheric engines. Watt therefore had to ensure that his engine could save enough fuel (coal) to be an economically viable product. Unlike John Seaton (1724-1792) who dramatically increased the efficiency of the Newcomen engine through a lengthy process of trial and error, the need to maximise the economic efficiency of his engine made Watt the founder of a new science- thermodynamics.

In particular, Cardwell draws attention to the patent application Watt took out 4 January 1769 in which the steam cylinder is to be kept as hot as the steam entering it while the condensing cylinder is to be kept as cold as possible. ‘These ideas…constituted  the basis of thermodynamics; but nearly sixty years were to elapse  before cognate scientific knowledge and technological practice  had advanced sufficiently for Sadi Carnot (1796-1834) to present them  in one great synthesis.’ [ D. Cardwell ‘From Watt to Clausius-The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age’, Cornell University Press 1971, p. 55]

The science of thermodynamics is an essential foundation for the science of global warming and climate change. Furthermore, as Cardwell shows, there was a symbiotic relationship between the advance of thermodynamics as a science and the economically driven development of increasingly efficient heat-engines. The rational- thermodynamics- emerged out of the irrational- the pursuit of ‘seemingly endless’ economic growth.

From the 1840s onwards, as the new science of thermodynamics was being developed from the work of Watt and Carnot, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx developed their rational critique of capitalism.

In 1790, before steam power had been applied to cotton spinning, Manchester had a population of 40 000. By 1831, after steam power had been applied, the population had grown to 142 000. One of Manchester’s new inhabitants was Peter Ermen who arrived from Germany as a 23 year old in 1825. Ermen set up as a manufacturer of cotton thread and his two brothers Godfrey and Anthony later joined him there. In 1838 Peter Ermen decided to set up a new business and went into partnership with Friedrich Engels from Barmen in Prussian Germany. The new firm of Ermen and Engels shared its offices with the existing Ermen brothers firm. To keep an eye on his investment, in 1842 Friedrich Engels sent his 22 year old son, also called Friedrich, over to Manchester where he stayed for 2 years.

During these two years in Manchester, Friedrich Engels junior met Mary Burns, an Irish working class woman who was to become his partner until her death in 1861. Through Mary, Engels was able to ‘discover the proletariat’ as Stathis Kouvelakis puts it [ ‘Philosophy and Revolution From Kant To Marx‘, Verso 2003, Chapter 4]. Karl Marx published reports of Engels discovery in publications he was editing which then formed the basis for Engels book ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ published in 1845. In 1850 Engels returned to work for Ermen and Engels in Manchester where he stayed until 1870.

The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry. [Friedrich Engels ‘The Principles of Communism’, 1847, Part 4]

Although Engels mentions the steam engine here, it is listed along with other expensive ‘mechanical devices’. In 1847 (or even 1947) it was not possible to anticipate that by 2047 the industrial revolution which placed everything in the capitalists hands leaving nothing for the workers would have changed the world’s climate. This raises a question- with the climate change clock ticking away in the background, will the Proletariat be able to gain the upper hand over the Capitalists before 2 to 4 degrees Celsius of global warming becomes irreversible and we all become bit players in a Mad Max movie?

At the rate of current progress in the struggle between capital and labour, the answer is no. The cotton factories of Manchester have passed over into history but the capitalism they gave birth to continues to shape and reshape our world and our lives in its image. The workers of the world are still exploited and still in chains. As the Clash put it in 1976, all the power is [still] in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it.

1976 also saw the publication of a book which laid the foundations for what was to become the Green movement. Although  the science of climate change and global warming was not directly mentioned in the book, the ‘radical technology’ of its title focused on the need to develop renewable energy sources to deliver a sustainable ‘steady/stationary state’ economy. To achieve this goal a social or cultural revolution which would overturn capitalism was necessary.  However, as the authors explained in their Introduction, there was a problem.

Right from the beginning we were all socialists of one kind or another. We didn’t need any persuading that capitalism had to go. And yet, many of the things we felt were most wrong in capitalist society were heartily approved of by many others who called themselves socialists. We began to realise that there are two great streams of socialist thought. One, represented by Marxists and social democrats, however deep its disagreement with capitalism, at least shared its rational, materialist values of Progress, Science, Efficiency, Specialisation, Growth, Centralised Power, and fascination with the numbing achievements of smart-ass technology like Apollo and Concorde. And this was not all. They seemed to have a model of social development similar in many respects to the ideology of corporate liberalism.: that society should be organised for maximum production, with the products themselves being the principle rewards, offered as a compensation for the inevitable alienations of life and work in an industrial economy.

But the other great stream of socialist thought, represented by the anarchists and the utopians, looked at things quite differently. At first one could hardly take them seriously. They seemed to believe that subtle human satisfactions should be given priority over production requirements; that life should be satisfying in all its aspects; that power should flow from below; that the action is not all in the city; that production and consumption need not be segregated in the factory and the home, but could be fused in the community; that revolutions are born of hope not despair… What to do while waiting for the revolution? We let our imaginations off the leash and  get on with building parts of the post-revolutionary society where ever and whenever we can. [Radical Technology, 1976, p.8]

Tragically, by the time these words were written in 1976, the possibility of building another, greener UK had already slipped away. The 1974 Labour government had been elected on a manifesto promising radical change, including a commitment to industrial democracy and using revenue from North Sea oil to buy leading companies- social ownership of the means of production. But a combination of the conservatism of Labour party and trade union leaders, institutional resistance from the Treasury and a right-wing press already laying the foundations for Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 blocked the reforms. In the background there were also plots by elements of the security services and right-wing businessmen involving a military coup if the Labour government moved to far to the left under the influence  of ‘communist agents’. The plotters believed Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was one of these communist agents.

If the Labour government elected in 1974 had been able to push through radical reforms, could that really have made a difference? Possibly. If the economic/social/political direction of travel had been along lines more favourable to what the radical technologists called  ‘the other great steam of socialist thought represented by the anarchists and utopians’, instead of that great stream having to become a culture of resistance to the rightward shift we have seen since then, it would have become part of mainstream culture rather than remaining a counterculture.

As a consequence, when the evidence that the climate was warming started to build up in the 1980s, the creativity and dynamism of the counterculture would have been available as a collective resource for the social imagination. This would have facilitated the necessary shift towards a sustainable future.

Pushed to the margins over the past 40 years, the radical counterculture survives- but only just. But if we accept the reality of climate change, then we also have to accept  a radical restructuring of society away from ever increasing consumption of commodities -‘goods and services’- made and maintained by burning coal and oil but produced by our alienated labour. The radical counterculture  emerged out of the desire to end our alienation from the world we create, driven by psychedelic visions which broke down the boundary between self and world. Like Marx on acid, the result was a revolutionary movement which sought the negation of capitalist realism. The history of the radical counterculture shows that we already possess the consciousness needed to make a new reality. We must make a new reality because the old one is melting in the heat of climate change.

250 years ago James Watt acted in accordance with the rational reality of his time. These are different times and reality itself, thanks to Watt and his successors, has changed. The new reality creates a new rationality This new rationality is no less material, no less rooted in the physical world than the old. Indeed, since our scientific knowledge of the world is now greater than it was in Watt’s time, our new consciousness, the consciousness we must now aspire has to include a greater recognition of our being within the world.

A great change in the relationship between our lives and thought and the world we live in and influence has occurred over the past 250 years. Within the past 30 years knowledge that global warming and climate change are real events should have been influencing our collective understanding of that change in relationship. But because the knowledge of global warming and climate change has taken place within the same period as the rise of ‘neoliberalism’ the dominant culture of the economic elite has ignored and even disputed this knowledge since it cuts away the foundations on which their power is built.


The industrial revolution took off as the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment began to falter in response to political reaction against the French Revolution. Despite Engels initial belief that the conflict between an impoverished proletariat and super-rich capitalists would spark an ‘English Revolution’, increasing use of coal as an energy source created enough wealth to buy-off the threat of revolution. Instead the belief that endless economic growth was possible took hold. The abstract philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment, which involved progress through greater social rationality, were supposed to have achieved actual and concrete form in an endless industrial revolution.

By now the end of the endless revolution should be in sight and the awareness of that ending should be sending ripples through the collective consciousness of humanity. But it isn’t in any obvious way. Radical politics still seems more focussed on challenging the neoliberal turn to austerity on the grounds that austerity is limiting economic growth -even though growth under the present set up will require more coal and oil to be burnt…

What will it take to change that?

Ahead of the  launch of the Scottish Left Project’s electoral challenge for 2016 on 29 August 2015, ‘a people’s policy platform will tour the country, showing how the Left offers Scottish politics far more than a protest vote.’
One of the key themes to be debated will be ‘Our Greener Future’:

Capitalism is destroying our planet, and this is another reason for a clear left alternative. Pro-market forms of green politics are failing to challenge the roots of our ecological problems in the profit system. Only a different form of economic management can save humanity from the twin dangers of planetary crisis and authoritarian solutions to that crisis. [Scottish Left Project]

Can capitalism really destroy the planet? No, it can’t. But what it is destroying through global warming driven climate change is our future. Food shortages and famines, flooded cities and deadly heat-waves will be its legacy. The problem is that by 2018 there will be enough fossil fuel-burning commodities -cars, homes, factories, power plants, the new Forth road bridge-  to lock us in to such a future through a 2 degrees Celsius global temperature rise.

But while a ‘Greener Future’ may be possible for Scotland, it is necessary to remember that modern Scotland was built on coal and that today’s Scotland still has an important oil industry.


Scotland’s Coal 

Our earliest human ancestors, apes who walked upright, lived nearly three million years ago in what is now Africa. The first ‘modern’ (homo sapiens sapiens) humans also lived in Africa about 150 thousand years ago. The first humans to live in what is now Scotland arrived here at the end of the last ice age 12 000 years ago. For most of those 12 000 years wood from the forests which covered Scotland was the fuel they used. Then, beginning perhaps 5000 years ago, the first farmers started clearing the forests to make fields. Across most of Scotland this led to the substitution of peat for wood as fuel. However, in  in central Scotland coal was also used as fuel instead of wood. This innovation probably had a religious origin.

Starting in the twelfth century, Scottish kings encouraged monks from England to set up abbeys in Scotland. These monks, like the Cistercians, were agricultural and industrial pioneers. One of the industries they brought to Scotland involved using coal to make salt from sea water. In the sixteenth century, the Scottish Reformation allowed wealthy Scottish landowners to acquire the huge estates of the abbeys- including their coal mines and salt works. Most of the coal mines and salt works existed around the Firth of Forth. This encouraged the new owners to start supplying Edinburgh with coal for domestic consumption.

The coal produced by these mines contained energy from the sun absorbed  by trees 360 million years ago. Back then, what was to become central Scotland was part of a rift valley in a land mass which lay near the equator. Over the next 40 million years dense forests grew in this valley, their growth interrupted several times by the sea flooding in and drowning them. Over succeeding millions of years-through the later age of the dinosaurs for example- the forests were buried deeper and deeper beneath the ground, compressing the trees into layers of black organic rock; into  coal. The energy of the sun contained in the ancient forests was not lost. It was concentrated in the coal. Burning the coal released the stored solar energy as heat along with acrid smoke and carbon dioxide.

As the demand for coal grew in the seventeenth century, landowners found it difficult to find workers willing to be miners. In 1606, the Scottish parliament passed laws which turned mining into a form of bonded labour. These laws remained in force until the end of the eighteenth century.

The early mines were small scale and shallow. Some followed slanting seams of coal into hillsides. Others were bell-pits, where the miners dug down until they hit a seam of coal and then dug the coal out from around the shaft. When it became too dangerous to dig any further out from the shaft in case the roof collapsed, another pit would be made nearby. These mines were worked as family affairs with the male miner cutting the coal while his wife, daughters and sons carried the coal to the surface. It was only in 1842 that women and young children were banned by law from  working below ground in mines.

Apart from at Govan near Glasgow and some pits near Edinburgh, most early coal mines were in the countryside. However, the miners’ status as ‘bonded labourers’ and the specialised nature of their work set the miners and their families apart from the agricultural communities around them.

At the end of the seventeenth century there were only about 2000 miners in Scotland, producing about 100 000 tons of coal per year. By 1760 there were 4000 which had increased to 9000 in the census figures for 1801. Between 1801 and 1841, the number of miners increased to 18 000. These figures included the women and girls who worked as coal-carriers in the mines. By 1861 coal mining employed 36 000 men and boys, growing to  76 000 by 1874. This peak was not exceeded until 1891 when the numbers reached 81 000. By 1913, when Scottish coal production peaked at 43 million tons there were 147 000 coal miners in Scotland, equivalent to 10% of the entire population. This is equivalent to a Scottish coal industry employing 530 000 in Scotland today, producing 155 million tons of coal every year.

Why did coal mining become such a large and important industry in Scotland? The process started with the opening of the Carron iron works in 1759.  At Carron coke made from locally sourced coal was used to produce cast iron from locally sourced iron ore. The technology and many of the workers came from England. The workers included English miners who introduced the long-wall method of deep coal mining. The existing method of deep (pits more than 50 feet below the surface) mining involved leaving large pillars of coal in place to support the roof of the mine workings. The long-wall technique allowed all the coal in a seam to be extracted. The roof of the working face was supported by wooden props and the area behind the working face was backfilled with stone and small pieces of coal. As the working face moved forward, the roof props were  moved forward as well, allowing the rock above to gradually settle on the backfill. This often led to subsidence in the ground above.

As well as allowing more coal to be extracted, the long-wall technique reduced the skill-level required of miners. As more coke-fuelled iron furnaces were opened, mainly in Lanarkshire, the demand for coal increased. Until the technology was improved in 1830, each ton of cast iron needed 8 tons of coking coal. After 1830 only 3 tons of coal were needed, but the number of furnaces then grew rapidly. The furnaces were in production 24 hours a day, seven days a week requiring  the iron-masters to ensure a constant supply of coal so they opened their own long-wall mines. Since there were not enough existing miners to work the new pits, they recruited miners from the general population, including many from Ireland.

In 1755 only 14% (180 000) of the Scottish population lived in west central Scotland while 21% (326 000) lived in east central Scotland. By 1871 34% (1 242 000) lived in west central Scotland and 21% (690 000) lived in east central Scotland. This rise in the importance of west central Scotland was linked to growth of coal mining and the many industries like shipbuilding which used iron produced by coal.

Coal made the industrial revolution happen

Over the past 50 years, professor Tony Wrigley of Cambridge university has argued that access to and use of coal was the key driver of the nineteenth century industrial revolution. This may seem obvious, but some economic historians have argued that cheap wood from around the Baltic sea or from north America could have been substituted for coal without holding back the pace of industrialisation. Other s have argued that the key driver was the revolutionary impact of the European Enlightenment on industrial development. Now a recent (2014) paper analysing urban growth in Europe from 1300 to 1900 has shown that at least 60% of European urban growth between 1750 and 1900 can be attributed to ‘the coal effect’. The cities which grew most rapidly in that period were those situated on or near coal fields.
[Source : http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/13183/Coal%20-%20O'Rourke%20124.pdf ]

Unfortunately, most of Wrigley’s work has focused on England so, for example Wrigley has estimated that English coal production in 1800 yielded energy that would otherwise have required 11 million acres of woodland compared with a total English land area of 32 million acres. However, at the heart of Wrigley’s work is the wider argument that without the use of coal (later oil) economic growth through industrialisation would have been constrained by the limits of renewable energy sources.

In Scotland, the difference between the development of Galloway and Dumfriesshire and that of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire since 1755 illustrates Wrigley’s argument. For the first fifty years, both areas were transformed by the process of agricultural improvement. The pattern of a farmed landscape which had medieval origins was rationalised out of existence. New farms, new roads and bridges, new ports, new towns and villages were constructed for improving landowners and a whole class of rural workers- the cottars- vanished from history. Some of the improving landowners diversified into new industries  encouraging the construction of water- powered cotton mills -at Gatehouse of Fleet in Galloway for example.

Then during the nineteenth century, an accident of ancient geology intervened. A geological fault runs across the south of Scotland from Girvan in the west to Dunbar in the east. North of this Southern Uplands Fault there is coal. To the south, apart from an isolated pocket near Gretna on the border, there is no coal. By 1840, cotton spinning had ceased at Gatehouse of Fleet’s water-powered mills. Between 1841 and 1881, the population of Dumfries and Galloway grew by 4.7%. In the same period, the population of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire grew by 114%.
 
Since the Longannet mine in Fife closed in 2002, there has been no deep coal mining in Scotland. The last coal mine in Northern Ireland closed in 1970 and the last mine in the Irish Republic closed in 1990. In 2008, the last deep coal mine in Wales closed. In 2015, England’s three remaining deep mines, employing 2,000 miners will close. In contrast world-wide coal production hit a record peak of 7.8 billion tons in 2013.

The legacy of coal mining

What is the legacy of coal mining in Scotland? The most obvious legacy is the concentration of Scotland’s population in the central lowlands. In 1755 when Scotland was still an agricultural nation, 35% of Scots lived in the central lowlands. In 1801 this had risen to 41%, by 1871 to 55% and today its is 70 % (3.7 million people). Without coal and the industries which used coal this concentration of population would not have arisen. Although coalmining has ended, the towns and cities, the road and rail networks which are now in place mean it is unlikely that this will concentration will change in the future. So while the popular images of Scotland used to attract visitors focus on rural Scotland, the reality experienced by most Scots is that of urban Scotland.

The political legacy of coal mining was, until this year, that of Scotland’s labour movement as represented by the Labour party. Forged in a struggle which began 100 years before the Union of 1707, Scotland’s coal mining communities fought first to free themselves from legal servitude and then from economic servitude. While the stigma of serfdom was lifted in 1799 the economic and political struggle continued through nationalisation in 1947 to a bitter conclusion in 1984/5.

The human legacy of coal mining is marked by the thousands of miners killed in accidents and the shortening of thousands more lives through industrial diseases. The last of the miners raws which were hastily and shoddily thrown-up across still rural Lanarkshire and Ayrshire to meet the iron-furnaces insatiable demand for coal in the early nineteenth century survived into the 1950s. Fear of cholera, which struck down the rich as well as the poor, prompted Victorian reformers to equip Scottish towns and cities with clean water and sewage systems. The miners and their families did not benefit from these reforms. Instead they had to rely on often polluted wells for their water and a sewage system consisting of communal earth closets until political pressure from miners’ unions and the Labour and Communist parties saw the slow introduction of public (council) housing from the 1930s onwards and of pit-head baths from the 1920s onwards.

The geophysical legacy of Scotland’s coal is its historic contribution to global warming. While the direct contribution is minimal, since the most significant rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere has taken place over the last 50 years, when Scottish coal production was declining, the indirect legacy is significant. Unlike south Wales which developed an important coal-exporting industry, most Scottish coal was consumed close to where it was mined.  Many millions of tons were used to produce iron which required more coal to convert it into castings, into wrought iron and later steel to make ships and locomotives, steam engines, bridges and railway tracks. These were sold all over the world and through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries globalised the industrial revolution. Of particular importance in this process were the many thousands of steam locomotives exported from Glasgow to south America, India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and China from 1840s to the early 1960s.

It was Scotland's oil

Since the 1960s, oil rather than coal has been the fossil fuel which has been   revolutionising the means of production around the world. And since the 1970s it has been Scotland’s oil which has been our main contribution to global warming. But while the arguments about the legacy of Scotland’s coal are now historical arguments, arguments about Scotland’s oil are powerfully present.

During the independence referendum the economics and politics of Scotland’s oil were fiercely fought. However, the focus of the arguments was not on the potential contribution of Scotland’s oil to global warming. Rather the arguments were about how much oil remains, how much it might be worth and how critical oil revenues would be to the finances of an independent Scotland. Even the Scottish Green party, rather than calling for an immediate halt to oil production, talked about investing oil revenues in renewable energy developments.

Moving billions of tons of oil and coal from below the ground to above the ground is a very small part of the problem, although it does require energy to do so. The problem comes when the coal is burnt in power plants or used to produce steel or when the oil is burnt in the engines of ships, planes, trucks and cars. We can’t do anything about the coal and oil that have already been burnt, but we can do something about future use.

2018 deadline

Unfortunately, a Report by Steve Davis (University of California) and Robert Soochow (Princeton University)  ‘Commitment Accounting of CO2 Emissions’ published last year shows that today’s capital investments are locking us in to a high-carbon use future.
[The Report can be found here http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/8/084018/ ]

Based on the report’s findings, environmental journalist Stephen Leahy has calculated that

In only three years there will be enough fossil fuel-burning stuff—cars, homes, factories, power plants, etc.—built to blow through our carbon budget for a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise. Never mind staying below a safer, saner 1.5°C of global warming. The relentless laws of physics have given us a hard, non-negotiable deadline, making G7 statements about a fossil fuel-phase out by 2100 or a weak deal at the UN climate talks in Paris irrelevant. By 2018, no new cars, homes, schools, factories, or electrical power plants should be built anywhere in the world, ever again unless they’re either replacements for old ones or are carbon neutral…

Source http://theleap.thischangeseverything.org/a-hard-deadline-we-must-stop-building-new-carbon-infrastructure-by-2018/

According to scientific rationality then, to prevent global warming leading to a civilisation ending level of climate change, global growth must be halted within three years.  But although scientific rationality is supposed to be a founding principle of the modern world, the driving force of modernity has been the rationality of capitalism and its need for continuous economic growth. This in turn has influenced political rationality so that the competition between political parties for votes at elections usually comes down to offering slightly different routes to economic growth in the immediate future.

This means that however strong the scientific arguments for halting economic growth to mitigate the consequences of climate change might be, under the circumstances of actually existing capitalism, there is no political will to do so.  This should hardly come as a surprise. The social costs of capitalist rationality have been obvious for the past 250 years but this year the  UK (if not  Scotland)  still managed to elect a Conservative government with ‘welfare’ cutting  policies the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) would have applauded.

High carbon or low carbon capitalism?

But even if scientific rationality achieved a breakthrough leading to the adoption of  zero growth, low-carbon policies, profound challenges would still remain, as this quote from Neil Davidson illustrates-

A position that holds that it would have been better if capitalism had been avoided is understandable, given the daily disasters for which the system continues to be responsible. Marxists must nevertheless reject it. Without capitalism, we would have no possibility of developing the forces of production to the extent that will enable the whole of the world’s population to enjoy what is currently denied most of them - a fully human life. In fact without capitalism there would be no ‘us’ -in the sense of a working class-  to seriously consider  accomplishing such a goal in the first place. [Neil Davidson ‘How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?’ (Chicago, 2012) p. 651]

The economies and societies which existed before capitalism were very ‘Green’. They were low-carbon and had growth rates which were virtually zero.  Scotland when it was still an independent state had  a very pristine environment and apart from its tiny coal industry was powered by renewable energy sources- including human labour. While, as discussed above, the physical transformation of Scotland into a modern nation involved a shift to coal as an energy source, Neil Davidson has argued that the transformation of Scotland from a traditional to a modern nation also required a cultural or social revolution brought about by capitalism. [Neil Davidson ‘Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692-1746, London, 2003, pp. 298-301]

Tony Wrigley, however, makes a distinction between the ‘low carbon’ capitalism of Adam Smith and the ‘high-carbon’ capitalism of his less well known successor, John Ramsay McCulloch (1789-1864). Wrigley noted that although in ‘Wealth of Nations’ Smith connected the location of ‘manufactures’ in the UK with areas where coal was cheap, this was because coal was a low cost heat source ‘for the many sorts of workmen who work indoors’. Writing 54 years after Smith, it was the importance of coal as fuel for steam engines which was significant for McCulloch

It is not because the inhabitants of Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, &c. are more industrious or inventive than those of Canterbury, Winchester, Exeter, &c., that they have made such prodigious advances in manufactures, wealth, and population, while the latter have been comparatively stationary — but it is because the former are abundantly supplied with coal, while the latter are not. Since the invention of the steam engine, fire has become of infinitely more importance as a moving power than either water or wind ; and in the present state of the arts, those who cannot obtain abundant supplies of coal at a cheap rate, must submit to be outstripped by their neighbours in the career of improvement. [John McCulloch ‘Observations on the Duty on Sea-borne Coal’ [London, 1830, p.4]

Is Wrigley’s historic distinction between low and high carbon capitalism still relevant today? I suggest it is and that it reveals a critical difference between the ‘clear left alternative’ to capitalism of the Scottish Left Project  and the ‘pro-market forms of green politics’ advocated by the Scottish Green party.

While low-carbon capitalism may be ‘greener’ than high-carbon capitalism, it is still capitalism and so  leaves the vital means of producing a sustainable  future in private rather than public ownership.

1. Highland Clearances and Galloway Levellers
On 15 October 2002 the Herald newspaper  published an article by Neal Ascherson. Ascherson’s article was in response to an announcement that Michael Fry was to write a book on the Highland Clearances. Since Fry had already been accused of being a ‘Clearance denier’ having stated that he did not believe that the Highland Clearances had happened except occasionally and on a very small scale, Ascherson was expecting a ’major stushie’ to erupt.

I responded with a ‘Letter to the Editor’ which was published a couple of days later. In the letter I mentioned the Galloway Levellers resistance to the construction of cattle parks in 1724and hoped that Michael Fry would extend his history of the Highland Clearances to include the continuing de-population of rural Scotland.

Herald 15 October 2002

I was then contacted by a researcher for Lesley Riddoch’s  BBC Radio Scotland show to ask if I would like to take part in a discussion of Fry’s new book by telephone. This I was very happy to do, but on the day a previous item over-ran so my contribution was dropped. However, I was told that the producer of Lesley’s show was working on a new radio series about the Lowland Clearances. This was Peter Aitchison. I contacted Peter and sent him some background material on the Galloway Levellers.

As a result, in early 2003, Peter and Andrew Cassell came down to Castle Douglas and recorded and interview with me at the back of Threave Gardens where the local laird  had managed to save a dyke from being levelled. In the book ‘The Lowland Clearances which followed the radio series, Peter and Andrew dedicated a whole chapter to the Galloway Levellers.

I continued researching the Levellers and after meeting with Professor Ted Cowan, an eminent Scottish historian and Director of Glasgow University’s Dumfries campus, I was able to turn the research into a 50 000 word thesis for which I was awarded the title ’Master of Philosophy’ in 2009.


2. The Galloway Levellers  and the Glenkens
Geographical note: Galloway is in the  deep south-west of Scotland, facing the north of Ireland on the west and Cumbria/ the far north-west of England to the south. The Glenkens is the northern most district of Galloway and takes in part of the Southern Uplands of Scotland.

Although most of the Galloway Levellers actions took place in the south and central Stewartry, there was one outbreak of levelling in the Glenkens when dykes at Airds of Kells were levelled on 2 June 1724.

Although the Gordons of Earlston owned the farms of High, Upper, Middle and Nether Airds, in September 1718, Alexander Gordon and his son Thomas leased the farms to Patrick Murdoch of Cumloden in Minnigaff for 25 years for £785-12-4  Scots. Murdoch then enclosed the lands as a cattle park with dykes, which were levelled in 1724.

What is interesting is that both Patrick Murdoch and the Gordons were attempting to rebuild their family fortunes after the disruption of the Covenanting period in the late seventeenth century.  Patrick Murdoch’s grandfather had been involved in the battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679 and as a result his lands of Cumloden were forfeited to Colonel James Douglas.

Airds of Kells, Boat of Rhone and Duchrae: Roy's map, 1755

Although the Murdoch  family regained their lands after 1689, by the time Patrick inherited in 1697 they were burdened with debt. Murdoch’s neighbours in Minnigaff were the Heron family of Kirroughtrie. The Heron family had been involved in the cattle trade since 1682 when Patrick Heron I had taken up a lease of David Dunbar’s cattle parks at Baldoon in Wigtownshire. By 1689, Patrick Dunbar I was sending 1000 cattle per year to England. The Heron’s used their income from the cattle trade to buy or rent farms in Minnigaff which they used to raise more cattle for export.

Patrick Murdoch would therefore have seen the cattle trade as a way to restore his family’s fortunes. However, the venture was not successful and Patrick Murdoch’s son Thomas was forced to sell Cumloden and its lands to the earl of Galloway in 1737.

The Gordons of  Earlston faced similar problems. William Gordon and his son Alexander had also fought on the Covenanter side at the battle of Bothwell bridge in 1679 where William was killed. Alexander escaped but was tried in his absence, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. His estates were also forfeit. He was captured in 1683, tortured and then imprisoned until June 1689. In 1708 Alexander assigned his lands, worth £300 sterling/ year and his debts, £1687 sterling, to his son Thomas. Although Thomas married an heiress, he was unable to clear the debts he had inherited and was declared bankrupt in 1737.

To understand the uprising of  Galloway Levellers then, it is necessary to bear in mind that the traumatic events of the seventeenth century were still within living memory in 1724 and that the impact of fines and forfeitures imposed  then continued to have an economic impact on the region.

In the even more recent past, the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 had revived memories of the Killing Times and created another set of land owners struggling with fines and forfeitures. In the Glenkens, William Gordon of Kenmure was executed in 1716 for his role as leader of the local Jacobite forces. Basil Hamilton who had lands around Kirkcudbright had also joined the Jacobites in 1715. However, thanks to his grandmother Anne, duchess  of Hamilton and his youth- he was only 18 at the time- his life was spared.

So although the first outbreak of levelling occurred in March 1724, against dykes around a cattle park at Netherlaw which had been built before 1688, the largest Leveller action took place in May against a cattle enclosure built for Basil Hamilton in 1723. Over 1000 Levellers took part and 2 miles of dyke were demolished between the 12 and 16 May.

As a former Jacobite, his fellow land-owners had little sympathy for Hamilton personally. However, perhaps anticipating the course of events,  Hamilton was able to persuade Thomas Gordon of Earlston to ride with him to Edinburgh on 2 May to ask John Dalrymple, the 2nd earl of Stair for assistance. Stair was commander of a regiment of dragoons and was also a Wigtownshire landowner with an interest in the cattle trade. That Thomas Gordon and Basil Hamilton were able to work together against the Levellers is interesting since in October 1715 Gordon had led a group of 300 volunteers from Kirkcudbright to Dumfries to help defend the town against Hamilton and his fellow Jacobites.

By 29 May, the whole of Stair’s regiment - two troops of horse and four troops of  foot-soldiers had arrived in Kirkcudbright. On 31 May, the Levellers asked their supporters to assemble at the Boat of Rhone on 2 June. In response, Stair’s regiment set off from Kirkcudbright at 3 am, arriving at the Boat of Rhone  by 8 am. However no Levellers appeared. The troops then set off back to Kirkcudbright but as soon as they had gone, the Levellers, who must have been lurking nearby, emerged to level the dykes at Airds of  Kells. They then moved on to Kilquhanity and McCartney (now Milton Park) in Kirkpatrick Durham to level more of Murdoch’s dykes. Murdoch had bought these farm in 1723 and as landowner rather than tenant, had then evicted 16 families to create another cattle park.

On 20 June, Patrick Murdoch pursued a claim for damages against some of those involved in Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court. One of the Levellers is named as John Charters who was a tenant or cottar in Drumglass farm in Balmaghie. In January 1725, Basil Hamilton took 23 named Levellers to court and was awarded damages against them for the destruction of his dykes in may 1724.

The presence of  Stair’s regiment in the Stewartry made levelling more difficult, but the fear of further outbreaks combined with an expression for the evicted tenants plight from king George 1 himself -probably influenced  by the Levellers anti-Jacobite rhetoric persuaded the duke of Roxburghe as Secretary of State for Scotland to call for a public enquiry into the Levellers grievances. This was held in August by John McDowall, Stewart-Depute of Kirkcudbright. Basil Hamilton then complained that McDowall  was too sympathetic to the Levellers…

Although there is no record to confirm it, Hamilton can hardly have been pleased when major James Gardiner took control of Stair’s regiment in July 1724. Gardiner’s military career began when he was 14 in 1702, fighting under the duke of Malborough against the French in Holland. In 1715 he was aide-de-camp to the 2nd earl of Stair who was then involved in anti-Jacobite diplomacy at the French court. Later that year, Gardiner took part in the battle of Preston where northern English and southern Scottish Jacobites -including Basil Hamilton - were defeated. In 1719, Gardiner had a religious experience which transformed him into a committed Christian soldier. During 1724 he seems to have spent more time conversing with local ministers than pursuing the Levellers.

As a deeply religious soldier, Gardiner would have found a soul mate in lieutenant-colonel William Maxwell of Cardoness. Maxwell’s father had been the Covenant supporting minister of Minnigaff parish from the 1630s until his death shortly before his son’s birth in 1663. William’s mother was  Elizabeth Murdoch of Cumloden. In June 1685, Maxwell made a rather public expression of his politics by embracing Archibald Campbell, earl of Argyll shortly before his execution for treason against James VII and II in Edinburgh. Maxwell then became a medical student but was arrested and imprisoned for attending a conventicle in 1687. After his release from prison in early 1688 he wisely decided to continue his studies at Leyden in Holland.

However, instead of becoming a doctor, Maxwell joined William of Orange’s army and  sailed with William’s invasion fleet to England in November 1688. He fought for William at the battles of Killiecrankie and the Boyne and then in Europe. While still on active service in 1697, he married Nicolas Stewart, a niece of the earl of Galloway and heiress to Cardoness estate. In 1702, while still a commissioned officer he was elected to represent the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in the Scottish parliament. In 1706 he was decommissioned for voting against several of the Articles of Union.

Then, in 1715, he was called back to the army and given command of the militia in the south of Scotland. In October 1715 he was made Governor of Glasgow to help defend the city against the Jacobites. From his diaries  which have been published, it is clear that Maxwell was a deeply religious man. Unfortunately the diaries only cover the period 1685-1697. However it is known that he negotiated with the Levellers in 1724.

It is therefore likely that  bloodless conclusion to the Levellers uprising in the Stewartry was negotiated with the Levellers by Maxwell and major Gardiner. In late October a group of over 200 Levellers assembled at Duchrae in Balmaghie close to the Boat of Rhone and Airds of Kells. Unlike the similar assembly in June, this time  the Levellers waited for Gardiner and his troops to arrive. Gardiner had ordered his troops to use minimal force against the Levellers and the Levellers put up minimal resistance. Two hundred Levellers were captured but nearly all were allowed to escape before they reached Kirkcudbright.

As an aside, it can be noted that major Gardiner, by then a colonel, died fighting the Jacobites at Prestonpans in 1745 and is mentioned in Walter Scott’s novel ‘Waverley’.

In January 1725, when Basil Hamilton had his day in court against the Levellers, William Maxwell was the presiding magistrate. Although damages were awarded against the Levellers, since most were poor cottars it is unlikely that Basil Hamilton received much in the way of compensation from them.

One of the Levellers brought to court by Basil Hamilton was John Martin. In 1724 he was only 14 but John went on to become a clock maker, living to the ripe old age of 91. He is buried in Kirkcudbright and sometime before his death in 1801, John Nicholson, a Kirkcudbright printer and publisher, interviewed him. Nicholson’s interview, along with a wealth of other details about the events of 1724 is contained in a hand written book in the Hornel Library at Broughton House in Kirkcudbright.

Nicholson ‘s book also contains the original account of a story which made its way into Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell’s radio series and book on the Lowland Clearance. Nicholson got the story from Samuel Geddes of Keltonhill farm who had heard it from his grandfather. According to Geddes, in the summer of 1724, probably around the time of the Kelton Hill fair in June, a group of Levellers threatened to demolish dykes on Robert Johnston’s Kelton (now Threave) estate. Johnston, along with William Falconer, minister of Kelton managed to persuade the Levellers- with the aid of a wagon load of bread and beer -not to demolish the dykes. As recounted by Malcolm Harper in his ‘Rambles in Galloway’, while waiting for the bread and beer to arrive, one of the Levellers carved the date ‘1724’ a stone in the wall of the dyke and that this stone was still visible 140 years later.

Unfortunately, although there are at least two stones with dates carved on them in the vicinity, the dates are not 1724.

On the other hand, William Falconer was the minister of Kelton in 1724 and Robert Johnston was laird of Kelton. Falconer is commemorated by a :Latin inscription carved into a stone on the wall of the remains of the old kirk in Kelton graveyard. Johnston is commemorated in an even more imposing Latin inscription on his grave in St Michael’s kirk in Dumfries.

Robert Johnston's gravestone, St Michael's, Dumfries

Johnston was buried in Dumfries because  had had been a provost of the burgh and represented the burgh in the Scottish parliament of 1702-7. Roughly translated, the Latin inscription on Johnston’s grave claims that he defended Scotland’s liberty by strongly opposing the Union, although, as with William Maxwell, the records of the Scottish parliament show that Johnston voted against some but not all of the Articles of Union. Again, like William Maxwell, when the local Jacobites threatened Dumfries in 1715, Johnston helped to raise a volunteer militia to defend the town.

Another opponent of the 1707 Union  was John Hepburn, minister of Urr. In November 1706, Hepburn and a group of his armed supporters burnt the Articles of Union at the Mercat Cross in Dumfries. In 1715, Hepburn and around 300 of his armed followers marched to Dumfries to offer their support against the Jacobites. Hepburn was a veteran of the seventeenth century struggle against the Stuarts. Although he died in 1723, contemporary accounts suggest that the hardcore of armed Levellers in 1724 were Hebronites, as Hepburn’s followers were called. The Hebronites were probably responsible for several acts of ‘unauthorised levelling’  directed against Roman Catholic landowners including the Jacobite Maxwells of Munches near Dalbeattie  and Robert Neilson of Barncailzie near Crocketford.

On the other hand, a good Presbyterian, Scottish patriot and anti-Jacobite like  Robert Johnston of Kelton would have been viewed positively by the Hebronite levellers. It would therefore not have been very difficult for him to save his march dyke. It may also be significant that Johnston’s brother in law, William Craik II, was the laird of Duchrae. William Craik I has been provost of Dumfries in the 1670s but was removed from office for his Covenanting sympathies. In December 1688, when news reached Dumfries that James VII and II had fled London rather face William of Orange’s army, William Craik  I was re-elected provost and in January Dumfries was the first town in Britain to accept William of Orange as their new king.

To conclude, although the Galloway Levellers uprising of 1724 was primarily a reaction against the clearance of tenant farmers and cottars to make way for cattle parks, a whole range of other factors were involved. In particular, although short-lived, the local Jacobite rebellion in 1715 revived bitter memories of not just of the Killing Times, but also the fifty years of struggle which began with the  National Covenant in 1638 and only ended with Glorious Revolution of 1688. It could even be argued that it was only with the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746 that the fear of a second Stuart restoration was ended.


3.The Upland and Lowland Clearances
In one of their printed tracts justifying their actions, the Galloway Levellers  made it clear that they were not opposed to enclosures. This is rather confusing, since their uprising is often seen as being part of a wider movement of futile resistance to the process of enclosure which drove ‘peasants’ from the and into the first factories of the capitalist industrial revolution.

For example, Tom Johnston in his ‘History of the Working Classes in Scotland’ published in 1920, claimed that the 'the ruthless clearances and ejectments of the peasantry which began in Galloway soon became a general feature in Lowland agricultural economies.’ As a result ‘From the Lowland hamlets came to the industrial towns a steady stream of destitutes owning no capital but their muscles, destined to the miserable half-starved drudgery from which an unregulated capitalism wrung fabulous profits'.

In the Glenkens however, the situation was, to put it mildly, more complicated.

To go back to 1724, the Levellers advice to land-owners was that

the Gentlemen should enclose their grounds in such parcels that each may be sufficient for a good tenant and that the Heritors lay as much rent on each of these enclosures as will give him double the interest of the money laid out on the enclosures. If he cannot get this enclosure set to a tenant whom he may judge sufficient, he may then lawfully keep that ground in his own hand till he finds a sufficient tenant, taking care that the tenant’s house be kept up and that it may be let with the first opportunity and that a lease of twenty-one years be offered. This will considerably augment the yearly rent of the lands and the tenant will hereby be capable and encouraged to improve the breed of sheep and black cattle and the ground, which without enclosures is impossible.

However, even twenty years later, when William Roy extended his Military Survey of  Scotland from the Highlands to the Lowlands, there are very few signs of enclosure in Galloway. On Roy’s map, enclosures are shown as thin red lines, usually rectangular or square,  concentrated around the houses of larger landowners owners and  larger settlements. More widely distributed are patches of cross-hatching which represent the rig and furrow of areas where oats and barley (bere) were cultivated.

One of these patches of arable land is shown on Roy’s map beside Kilnair above Lochinvar loch in Dalry parish. Although Roy does not show this as being enclosed, the surviving area  (now grassland) of arable land at Kilnair is surrounded and divided by the remains of rough dykes. These seem to have been built from stones turned up by ploughing which were then used to construct an irregular enclosure.

Kilnair above Lochinvar today

That there was arable land at Kilnair is confirmed by a tack or lease from 25 May 1669 which details the livestock permitted to be kept -16 cattle with calves, 16 score of sheep and two horses ‘for labouring on the arable ground’. The cows and the sheep were to be milked to make cheese as part of the rent. Kilnair is a Gaelic farm name which Herbert Maxwell suggested could either mean ‘the corner of the battle‘ or, more likely, ‘the corner of the ploughing’, which fits its location as area of better quality land still standing out from the rough grazing land around it.

Tack (lease ) of Kilnair from 1669

In his Victorian study ‘The Lands and their Owners in Galloway’ Peter McKerlie includes Kilnair within the estate of Lochinvar or Gordonstoun. The Gordons acquired the estate in the early fifteenth century during the Douglas lordship of Galloway (1369-1455). Control passed to the Maxwell family during the sixteenth century but passed back to the Gordons in the seventeenth century. However sometime before his death in 1784, Richard Oswald of Auchincruive in Ayrshire had possession. The Oswald family still owned the 10 000 acre estate in 1871.

Unfortunately, although David Hancock in ‘Citizens of the World’ (Cambridge, 1995) discusses Richard Oswald’s role as an improving landowner in Kirkbean parish, where he bought Cavens estate in 1759, he makes no mention of Oswald’s lands in Dalry parish. Hancock does provide a link to the Galloway Levellers however, via John Maxwell who was Oswald’s factor. As child, Maxwell had seen the Levellers in action at Munches near Dalbeattie. Hancock noted that in his dealings with Oswald’s tenants, Maxwell adopted a cautious policy which avoided wholesale clearance.

Oswald’s neighbour in Kirkbean was William Craik III of Arbigland. Craik had in inherited Arbigland in 1739 and set about improving it. The fertile soil no doubt facilitated the process and Craik, through his friendship with Henry Home, Lord Kames became well known as an improver.

In contrast, the soil of the Craik family’s other estate, Duchrae in Balmaghie, was of poorer quality and was still in need of improvement when it was bought by William Cuninghame, a wealthy Glasgow tobacco merchant, in 1786. In his book ‘Raiderland’ published in 1904, S R Crockett included extracts from Cunninghame’s diary which provide a fascinating glimpse of the Stewartry in the age of improvement.

In the seventeenth century, there were 15 farms on Duchrae estate, but by 1786 these had been combined into three large and one small farm. As Crockett noted, what the Leveller movement had feared had come to pass with the smallholdings swept away and the cottars and crofters either  forced to emigrate or reduced to the status of hired labourers on larger farms.

One of the local landowners Cuninghame mentions in his diary is Alexander Gordon of Greenlaw. In 1765, Gordon had had  a short canal cut through marshland on his estate to the river Dee. This canal to allowed barges to carry marl from Carlingwark loch up the Ken/Dee river system. In the absence of local source of limestone, marl was used as a substitute fertiliser. Writing for the Statistical Account of Scotland in the early 1790s, John Gillespie, minister of Kells parish praised Gordon for his exertions and notes that some of the barges can carry up to 400 cubic feet of marl, carrying timber from the parish on their return trips.

One sign of the improvement of the parish was the construction of new houses. However Gillespie cautioned that were  no proof of an increase in population since ‘farmers are encouraged by landlords to combine several farms into one so that more houses in the parish have gone to ruin than have been built or rebuilt’. Gillespie calculated that one tenant in the parish now rented 5 farms which previously had supported 14 families but now supported only ten.

In 1765, the English ban on the import of Irish cattle which had been imposed in 1666 was lifted. By 1790, over 17 000 Irish cattle were passing through Portpatrick harbour annually. By 1800 this had risen to over 20 000. Since Galloway’s cattle trade had developed in response to the English ban on the import of Irish cattle and in the absence of major competition from the Highlands and the north of Scotland, by the beginning of the nineteenth century rearing cattle for the English market was declining in importance.

The cattle trade was still important, but as William Cuninghame’s 1786 diary reveals, cattle had become a commodity which the tenantry speculated on, with cattle at times remaining ‘for no more than two weeks upon the Estate’ before being sold on again. Cuninghame also noted that his tenants kept very few sheep.

In the mainly upland parish of Minnigaff, the Heron family had made their fortune through rearing cattle for export to England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However, by the 1790, when the Old Statistical Account for Minnigaff was written, the 30 000 sheep kept on the hills had become as important as the black cattle. By 1842, The New Statistical Account gives a figure of 33 500 sheep, with only 2000 black cattle kept. In Carsphairn parish, the Old Statistical Account gives a figure of 30 000 sheep and 1200 black cattle, with similar numbers given in the New Statistical Account. The Old Statistical Account for Dalry gives 13 000 and 1650 cattle. The New Statistical Account does not give any figures for livestock. For Kells, the Old Account gives 17 400 sheep and 1550 black cattle. The New Account gives 17 040 sheep and 1300 cattle. For Balmaclellan the Old Account gives 8200 sheep and 1340 black cattle, but the New Account does not provide any figures.

Altogether, by the 1790s, the upland parishes of the Glenkens plus Minngaff carried over 98 000 sheep but only 6000 black cattle. From the 1790s through until the 1960s, sheep farming was the main land use of the uplands. Since the 1960s, trees have replaced sheep in the Galloway hills.

In their book ‘The Lowland Clearances’, Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell draw attention to the way that the same process of agricultural rationalisation in the Lowlands is called ‘improvement’ but in the Highlands  ‘clearance’. The underlying difference was one of geology. Across the Lowlands there were extensive areas of traditional arable farming which could be ‘improved’ to increase crop yields. In the Highlands, most of the land was rough grazing land which could not be improved in the same way. Instead, landowners wanting to increase the economic return on their lands turned their estates over to sheep farming.

Across Galloway and the south of Scotland, the Southern Uplands proved a similar obstacle to the extension of arable improvement. As a result, with the indigenous cattle trade now facing increased competition from Ireland, improving landowners adopted sheep farming as the best way to increase the value of their upland estates.

In the Glenkens, William Forbes of Callendar bought up traditional farms in Kells and Dalry parish to create sheep farms. Born in Aberdeen in 1743, in the 1770s Forbes began amassing a huge fortune by supplying and fitting Royal Navy and East India Company ships with copper plates which protected them from damage by marine worms. His main landholding was the Callendar estate near Falkirk which he bought in 1783. It was probably through his first wife, Margaret McAdam of Craigengillan near Dalmellington, that Forbes became interested in buying lands in Galloway as well.  In Dalry parish he acquired Earlston estate from the Gordon family and in Kells he bought Barskeoch estate in 1787.

4. The Glenkens and the Industrial Revolution
In 1456, Barskeoch and its farms, including Drumbuie, was among the lands forfeited to the Crown by William Douglas, 9th earl of Douglas and the last Douglas lord of Galloway. After passing to the Gordons, by 1660, the Newall family had possession of Barskeoch and its lands, remaining in possession until 1787. In the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds there are two tacks for Drumbuie from the 1670s which give an insight into farming practice of the time since they both require the tenants of Drumbuie to return any cattle pasturing on the west side of Miekle Millyea ‘in the summer half of the year’ to the heft. In other words, before sheep farming came to dominate the hills, cattle were grazed on the Rhinns of Kells.

By 1741, when Samuel McConnell and his son John were the Newalls’ tenants in Drumbuie and nearby Hannaston, this requirement had been dropped. Samuel and John’s tack was for 19 years, paying £33 sterling rent annually. In 1760, John’s James took over the tenancy for another 19 years, paying £26 sterling annually. However, when the next renewal came in 1779, the annual rent had risen to £52. James struggled with this increase and gave up his tenancy in 1782.

Tack of Hannaston, 1741

In early 1781, James McConnell’s 19 year old son also called James decided to leave Hannaston and the Stewartry to take up an apprenticeship with his uncle, William Canaan (or Cannon) now Lancashire but originally from Knocknairling in Kells. William Canaan, after serving his apprenticeship as a carpenter had left the Stewartry in the 1760s, first for Whitehaven, then Liverpool before finally settling in Chowbent near Bolton where he began making textile manufacturing equipment.

Between 1780 and 1786, Adam and George Murray, sons of a New Galloway shopkeeper and John Kennedy from Knocknalling in Kells also moved  south to take up apprenticeships with Canaan. After serving their time with Canaan, they moved on to Manchester where their skills as machine makers were in demand.

None of these young men fit Tom Johnstone’s description of destitute peasants driven by clearance and enclosure from the land into industrial cities. On the other hand, if they had stayed in a Glenkens about to be transformed by incoming landowners like William Forbes and Richard Oswald into a vast sheep walk, they could never have achieved the wealth and status they were to gain in Manchester.

Writing in 1844, based on his experience of Manchester in 1842/3, Friedrich Engels claimed that

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognised. England is the classic soil of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is, therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat. Only in England can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and from all sides.

In the early 1790s, when James McConnell and John Kennedy along with Adam and George Murray first arrived in Manchester, the problem of how to apply steam power to the spinning of cotton had not yet been solved. Steam power was used, but indirectly to pump water back into reservoirs which fed water-powered cotton mills. Of the four from the Glenkens, it was John Kennedy who had the best mechanical skills and so made the vital breakthrough, directly connecting a steam engine to the spinning machines.

By 1815, the two firms of McConnell and Kennedy and A and G Murray were the largest in Manchester, each employing over 1000 workers on their adjacent factory sites at Ancoats. With the average Manchester cotton spinning factory employing only 250 workers, the Glenkens cotton spinners works powered by steam and lit by gas were the archetype of the industrial revolution’s ‘dark Satanic mills’.



While John Kennedy went on to promote a transport revolution as one of the judges at the 1829 Rainhill locomotive trials won by his friend George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’, his business partner James McConnell’s brother in law Henry Houldsworth took their revolution to Scotland.

In 1799, Henry  Houldsworth became manager of a cotton spinning factory in Glasgow. In 1801, using machinery supplied by McConnell and Kennedy he established his own steam powered cotton factory in the city. As McConnell and Kennedy’s cotton spinning enterprise prospered, they gave up their machine making business. This led Houldsworth set up his own foundry and machine works at Anderston in Glasgow in 1823.

Henry Houdsworth’s brother Thomas  had stayed in Manchester and built up his own successful cotton spinning business. By the 1830s, Henry realised that the Scottish cotton industry was losing out to competition from Manchester and Lancashire. Henry was also aware, through his Anderston foundry, that the iron industry in Scotland was booming. As a result and with his brother Thomas’ backing, he set up the Coltness Iron Works in Lanarkshire in 1836. This venture proved to be highly profitable..

Looking to repeat the success of the Coltness works, in 1846, Henry Houldsworth decided that the combination of ironstone and coal around Dalmellington in Ayrshire made it a suitable location for a new iron works.

Unfortunately, although an ambitious plan to build a railway from Ayr up to Damellington and the down through the Glenkens to the coast at Balcary Bay existed in 1846, the line was never built. It was not until 1856 that a less ambitious railway was constructed from Ayr to Dalmellington. Until the railway was completed, all the pig iron from the Dalmellington works had to be transported by road down to Ayr. The additional cost of road transport along toll-roads threatened the new iron company with bankruptcy.

Luckily, Henry’s son in law James Murray stepped in with a loan of £50 000 which kept the iron company solvent until the railway was completed. James Murray went on to become the Dalmellington company’s largest investor and a Director.

Dalmellington Iron Company works, 1858

James Murray was able to make his investment in the Dalmellington company as heir to his father George Murray’s share of the prosperous Manchester cotton spinning firm of A and G Murray…

James Murray’s brother Benjamin used his share of A and G Murray to buy Parton estate where he lived after leaving Manchester. The row of attractive ‘Arts and Crafts’ style houses in Parton and the village hall were built by Benjamin Murray.

John Kennedy’s Manchester residence was the imposing Ardwick Hall, but after his brother David died in 1836, he also became owner of the family farm which he improved  with erection of Knocknalling House. In 1906, John Kennedy’s granddaughter Violet, who had inherited Knocknalling,  married Archibald St Clair, later lord Sinclair. The Sinclair family still own Knocknalling.

In 1827, John Kennedy wrote a short account of his early life for his children. In this he explains that although a Kennedy family had owned Knocknalling for about 300 years, his branch of the family were only distantly related to them. Instead, his great-grandfather had moved to New Galloway in the 1650s where he became a shop-keeper. John Kennedy’s grandfather was also a shop-keeper and Baillie in New Galloway. Kennedy’s describes his grandfather as a careful man who managed to save enough from his business to buy Knocknalling in 1740. After his marriage in 1763, Kennedy’s father took over the running of Knocknalling. John Kennedy was born at Knocknalling in July 1769. John had an elder brother David, three younger brothers and two sisters. His father died young, leaving his mother to bring up the family. Since David would inherit the farm, John knew from an early age he would have to find some other way to make his living, perhaps as a travelling carpenter. He says

I used to long to see something beyond the still valley and blue mountains of the place of my birth…These natural objects used to produce in me sometimes the deepest melancholy; and a singular lonely feeling would be excited by the external silence all around us…

Significantly, John also describes ‘seeing the wooden plough arrested in the furrow from the inclemency of the weather…exposed to the splashing showers. And then after all this toil and turmoil, to see such poor, scanty, miserable crops.’

From the mention of the wooden plough ‘arrested in the furrow’ above as well as a reference to black oats, it is clear that Knocknalling was a farm which had not been improved. The earliest reference to Knocknalling (as Knockallen) is from 1481 when it belonged to James Campbell of Corswell in Wigtownshire who had inherited it from his father Alexander. So 300 years before John Kennedy’s time, the ‘old Scots’ or wooden plough would have been familiar to James Campbell and the arable land would have been growing black oats.

If John Kennedy’s father had been wealthy enough to improve Knocknalling, would this have made John more enthusiastic for farming as a career? Possibly not. He mentions the Newalls of Barskeoch and the Griersons of Garroch as neighbouring farmers. In the Old Statistical Account for Kells, ‘Mr Newall of Barskeoch’ is described as the first landowner in the parish to improve his lands with lime and that 20 years later the effect was still remarkable.

However, as we know from Kennedy’s future business partner James McConnell, the improvement of Barskeoch and its farms went along with a doubling of the rent which forced McConnell’s father to give up Hannaston in 1782  and persuaded James McConnell to leave for Lancashire in 1781. By 1787, despite the remarkable effect of his improvements on land his family had owned for 130 years, William Newall decided to sell Barskeoch and its farms to William Forbes.



5. Conclusion- history as irony.
Looking back over the history of the Glenkens and the Stewartry in the era of the Lowland Clearances, it is difficult not to do so without recognising an almost tragic irony in so much of  what happened.

While the Galloway Levellers tried to distinguish between the depopulating enclosures which they opposed and the improving enclosures which they supported, the rational approach to agricultural improvement promoted by the Scottish Enlightenment made no similar distinction. Across Galloway, scarcely a trace remains of the medieval farmed landscape that had been familiar to the Levellers.

In 1670, James McKnaught was recorded as a cottar living in the Meadow Isle croft on Airieland farm near Gelston. In 1725, John McKnaught in Meadow Isle on Airieland  was one of the Levellers pursued for damages by Basil Hamilton. Meadow Isle croft is still shown on Roy‘s Military Survey of 1755. According to the Wright family of Airieland, Meadow Isle was last occupied by a group of dykers around 1800. The dykers last act was to demolish Meadow Isle and use its stones to complete the dyke around the field which before they left. The field is still called Meadow Isle.

Slightly later, around 1820 according to McConnell family history, the thatched farmhouse of Hannastoun where James McConnell had been born was demolished and replaced by the present farm higher up the hill. Nearby the original Drumbuie was abandoned about the same time and replaced by present day Drumbuie. The site of old Drumbuie, dating back to at least 1456, is shown on the first Ordnance Survey map of Kells which was survey in the 1840s. Modern satellite maps show that traces of old Drumbuie, its fields and patches of rig and furrow still survive.

The modernisation of Galloway and Dumfriesshire which gathered pace through the eighteenth century saw the construction of 81 planned towns and villages. One of the most successful of these new towns was Gatehouse   of Fleet, planned by James Murray complete with water-powered cotton mills designed to provide employment for agricultural workers displaced by his improvement of Girthon parish. In 1724, the dykes of his father at Cally had been levelled and James did not want a repeat performance. But within 30 years of their construction, Gatehouse’s  cotton mills had been superseded by an industrial revolution pioneered by a small group of economic migrants from the Glenkens.

There is an important point here. The physical landscape of the Stewartry even today still reflects the philosophical landscape of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is an actualisation of the Age of Reason as envisaged by Adam Smith, Henry Home and their contemporaries. It is also an example of what Tony Wrigley has described as ‘an advanced organic economy’.

Over the past 40 years in numerous articles and books, Wrigley has argued that the industrial revolution marked a step-change from economies based on sustainable and renewable energy sources- human and animal labour, wind and water power, wood for construction and fuel- to mineral economies which rely on coal, natural gas and oil as energy sources.

As an example, while Manchester had developed as a textile trading centre through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its phenomenal growth in the first half of the nineteenth century was only made possible by the use of coal as an energy source in its cotton factories. A development facilitated by John Kennedy, James McConnell, Adam and George Murray.

In Galloway, if not Dumfriesshire, there is no coal. Before losing most of his money when the Douglas and Heron / Ayr Bank failed in 1772, Alexander Gordon of Greenlaw had proposed a canal which would have connected  Loch Ken to Loch Doon and the Dalmellington coal fields. In 1803, when a canal to link the Glenkens with the sea at Kirkcudbright was proposed, Gordon revived the idea. The Ayrshire and Galloway railway of 1845 would also have given the Glenkens and the Stewartry access to the Dalmellington coal field.

If either the canal or the railway had been built, the Glenkens and the Stewartry might have made the transition to Wrigley’s mineral economy.

On the other hand, although the Glenkens today struggles with the problem of rural depopulation and lack of employment opportunities, the Doon Valley provides a salutary reminder of the cost of industrialisation. From 1848 to 1921, the Dalmellington Iron Company’s furnaces provided employment for thousands of  workers. Even after iron production ended, the deep coal mines built to fuel the iron furnaces survived until  1978. These were then replaced by open cast coal mines, although they provided only a fraction of the employment the iron works and deep coal mines had supported.

So while a nineteenth industrial revolution might have boosted the population and economy of the Glenkens and the Stewartry, the long term impact would have been an intractable legacy of environmental degradation, social deprivation and economic desperation.

6. And finally… a new town for the Glenkens? 
An unintended consequence of the shift from the type of advanced organic and sustainable  economy represented by the Glenkens to the type of mineral and unsustainable economy represented by the Doon Valley is the advent of global climate change. Climate change is driven by global warming which is the result of burning billions of tons of coal and oil which has released carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere.



In 2010, the UK Government Office For Science produced a report ‘Land use Futures: Making the Most of Land in the 21st Century’. This report included a series of scenarios for the future which took the impact of climate change into account. Tucked away on page 284 of the 325 page long report is the following scenario for the year 2030.

London and the South East of England is under significant water stress. A new 1800 acre reservoir built to the west of the city has improved the short term situation, but continuing population growth means that this may be a short lived solution. Accordingly, the government is considering plans to disperse citizens to three new towns in Dumfries and Galloway, Northumberland and Powys – now engines of innovation and growth at the centre of the UK’s land based industries.

Back in 1851, the population Dumfries and Galloway reached  a peak of  just over 150 000. In 1851, this was 5.5 % of Scotland’s population. Today, Dumfries and Galloway has only 2.8 %  of Scotland’s population. If the region still had 5.5 % of Scotland’s population, instead of having only        24 000 inhabitants, there would be around 70 000 people living here.

Since one of the most damaging effects of climate change is going to be the loss of productive farmland, it would be foolish to build a new town on high or medium quality farm land. It would be more sensible to look for locations on poorer quality land.  An area like the Glenkens, on the boundary between better and poorer quality farm land would therefore be a possible option if a new town is to be located in Dumfries and Galloway.

If, thanks to rural de-population, about 50 000 people are missing from the Stewartry, why not think big and go for a new town of about that size, located in the Glenkens?  Or even two new towns, one in the Doon Valley and one in the Glenkens, linked by railway to Ayr and Dumfries?

While some of  today‘s inhabitants of the Glenkens might not agree, I am sure Alexander Gordon, John Kennedy and their compatriots would have approved  of such a bold plan…

Coal mine near Dalmellington 1937

For nearly 20 years now I have been mining the history of Galloway for hidden gems which can illuminate the past and reflect the present. Of all the treasures discovered, two short seventeenth century documents are the most dazzling.

The full texts are pasted below, but to understand their importance requires a we bit of interpretation and explanation.

My starting part was a question- was the uprising of the Galloway Levellers in 1724 a response to the Union of 1707 as local historian John Roberston had suggested in his book ‘The Story of Galloway’ in 1963?

I soon found out that the answer was ‘No’, since the export of cattle from Galloway to England had begun 40 years before 1707, after the English parliament banned the import of Irish cattle in 1666. Before 1666, up to 10 000 Irish cattle from the north of Ireland had travelled through Galloway to English markets. Most probably came from the 60 000 acres of Donegal owned by the Murray family of Broughton on in Wigtownshire. The Murrays had acquired the land in Donegal after the Plantation of Ulster in 1606. Another Galloway family, the Maxwells of Orchardton also had lands in Ulster, inherited by marriage from the McLellans of Kirkcudbright. (Confusingly, the Maxwells of Orchardton were Roman Catholics, while the McLellans were strongly Presbyterian Protestants.)

I then wondered how important cattle had been in the local economy before 1666. This involved going through the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds 1623-1700. The deds were found in several sacks in the loft of Kirkcudbright Court House in 1933, transcribed and then published in 1939 and 1950. There are over 6000 entries in the Deeds, of which about 500 mention the crops and livestock kept on farms during the period. Most only mention arable crops grown on farms in lowland parishes, but a very few refer to upland farms and mention sheep and cattle.

The two tacks (leases of farms) I found most fascinating were for Drumbuie near New Galloway in Kells parish.  These make it clear that cattle were being grazed on the Rhins of Kells during the summer, on Staverron Hill on the west side of Miekle Millyea, which 2457 feet high. Drumbuie is on the east side of the hill.

Here are the two tacks, from 1678 and 1686 respectively. Staverron is variously spelled in the tacks.

Entry 1052TACK (15 July 1686) by Adam Newal of Barskeoch, heritable proprietor of the lands under-written, to William and Andrew McClamrochs, lawful Sons to John McClamroch of Craginbay, of the 4 merkland of Drumbuy, with the pertinents, presently possessed by William Calwel and Andrew Irland, for 9 years from Whitsunday 1679, (with the option to both parties of ending this Tack after 5 years) for the payment of £120, the usual teind, prebendar and feu duties, public burdens, work and casualties for the first year, and after Whitsunday 1680 they are to pay 200 merks yearly with the foresaid duties, 2 stone of good butter or 10 merks, 1 dozen poultry fowls and 2 "fasterinevine henns;" and " to pay and lay in the work and service" of 40 loads of peats, providing sacks for carrying them, and 2 barrows with bearers to peat casting, 4 "naigs" one day yearly to harrowing, 2 men and 2 horses one day to the hay-stack making, and 4 shearers yearly, paying £3 in satisfaction of other work and service of men and horses paid by the present possessors ; the said Adam is to give timber, great and small, for the upkeep of the houses which the said William and Andrew are to keep wind and water tight; should any of the said Adam’s cattle pasturing in Staiverran the summer half year come home through the said "rowme," the tenants promise not to molest them but either to put them back to the "heft" or allow them to pass peaceably homeward ; they are to pay all public burdens, maintenance taxations and levies of foot or horse and will be allowed the half of all discharges for such which they produce. At Clauchen of Dalry 2 December 1678 witnesses Robert Greirsone of Mylmark, John McNaght in Overtoune, James Chalmer of Wattersyd, and William Hunter in Midtowne of Clauchen.

Entry 1420TACK (2 December 1689) by Adam Newall of Barskeoch, heritable proprietor of the lands under-written, to James McCutchine, lawful son to the deceased Alexander McCutchine in Drumbuy, of the half of the 4 merkland of Drumbuy and the piece called the Lumpe between the burns, with the pertinents, presently possessed by the said James, for five years from Whitsunday 1686, for the yearly payment of 160 merks, 1 stone of good salt butter in the summer time or 5 merks as the price thereof, 6 poultry fowls, and a fasteneven hen, with the work of 25 loads of peats, providing good sacks to carry them, with a man and a horse, a man and a spade and 2 bearers a day to the casting of them, a man and a horse to hay-stacking, "with a man and sheirs to the cliping off Straveran," and a man and a horse to fetch a load of lime or free stone; the said Adam promises to give timber, great and small, for upholding the houses and the said James is to keep them wind and water tight and leave them in good condition, and he is to leave " ryll trees and soil trees and staiks and doors and the lyk" which Andrew McClemeroch, present tenant, leaves in the houses ; should any of the said Adam’s cattle pasturing in Strauveran the summer and harvest half year come to the Braidside or through his ground, the said James promises to put them back to the "heff" again; he is to pay all public burdens and be allowed for the same in his rent. At the Watersid 26 May 1686 ; witnesses Thomas Macaw in Garroch, Robert Macaw, his son, John Paisla, schoolmaster in Barskeoch. and John Makill there.

Points of Interest

1. Drumbuie and Barskeoch are  first recorded in 1456 among a list of lands (farms) which had belonged to the Black Douglas lords of Galloway since 1369, but now belonged to king James II of Scotland. This was because William Douglas, the 9th earl of Douglas had rebelled against the Crown. In the summer of 1455, James II had laid siege to Threave castle in Galloway. Threave had been built for Archibald the Grim in 1369. Archibald was the first Douglas lord of Galloway and became the 3rd earl of Douglas in 1388.

Archibald the Grim became lord of Galloway after the death of Edward Balliol in 1365. Edward Balliol was the son of King John Balliol, Robert the Bruce’s rival for the Scottish throne. After Robert died in 1329, Edward Balliol tried to seize the Scottish Crown in 1332, when Robert’s son David was still an infant.

Edward’s attempt ultimately failed and he gave up his claim to the throne in 1356.  While Edward Balliol had little support in most of Scotland, he did have strong support in Galloway. This was not because of his title as king, but because he was the great-grandson of Alan of Galloway (died 1234). Alan’s great grandfather was Fergus of Galloway (died 1161) who had ruled Galloway as an independent kingdom.

In November 1352, at Buittle castle (built for his grandfather) Edward Balliol granted the barony of Kells in the Glenken to his valet, William de Aldeburgh.

If, and it is a speculative if, the lands held by the Douglas lords of Galloway and documented in 1456 were those lands previously held directly by Edward Balliol, then Drumbuie and its neighbouring farms may have begun life under Galloway’s Gaelic speaking lords or even king.

2.Summer pastures
Drumbuie is a Gaelic farm name- Druim buidhe, the yellow ridge. Between Drumbuie and the Rhinns of Kells is Clenrie, which was recorded as ‘Clunaree’ in 1456. This is another Gaelic farm name, ‘Claon airigh’ which means the sloping pasture, or more accurately, the sloping summer pasture, since airigh means the sheiling or summer pasture- the upland pasture were livestock were grazed in the summer. From the present cottage of Clenrie, the Rig of Clenrie slopes up to the Clints of Clenrie and the summit of Miekle Millyea.

So it is probable that the tradition of pasturing cattle during the summer on the Rhinns of Kells was 500 years old  by the time Adam Newall’s cattle were summer- pastured on Staverron Hill in the 1670s and 80s.

Further evidence of this traditional form of farming is found immediately to the south-west of Drumbuie and Clenrie where the farms of Craigenbay and ‘Garwere’ were also listed in 1456. ‘Garwere’ is now Garrary -which is either ‘garbh airigh’ - rough summer pasture land or ‘gar airigh’ -near summer pasture land.

There is an Airie farm near New Galloway and between this farm and Craignebay/ Garrary is Airie Bennan Hill. There is another Airie farm to the south, on the Balmaghie side of Loch Stroan.

Taken altogether, it seems likely that about 1000 years ago, gaelic speaking farmers were using the better quality land along the Ken and Dee as winter pasture for cattle they pastured in the summer on the ‘airigh’ lands on the hills above.

3.Sheep farming

Describing the Galloway hills in his book ‘Merrick and the Neighbouring Hills’ (Ayr, 1929), James McBain explained that within the 250 square mile region -

The whole of this domain is given over to the breeding and rearing of sheep, and in all there are about 40 farms within its borders, and to each farm is attached a shepherd’s cottage. Beyond the shepherds’ potato patches there is no cultivation; all is as nature has made it, a labyrinth of steep hills, peat moss, bogs, lochs and streams. [p. 14]

But as seventeenth and early eighteenth century tacks show, the upland farms of Galloway kept cattle as well as sheep and every farm had an area of arable ground where oats and barley (bere) were grown.

As discussed in my previous post, we can date the shift from mixed  upland farming to sheep farming to the late eighteenth century. As I explained, the Newall family of Barskeoch, who had owned Drumbuie and the neighbouring farms from the mid -seventeenth century, tried to improve their lands using lime around 1770 and also doubled the rent on their farms.

In 1741, Samuel McConnell and his son were tenants of the Newall farms of Hannaston and Drumbuie. By 1760, Samuel’s grandson James McConnel was the tenant of Hannaston. In 1779 he renewed the tenancy, but the rent had doubled so in 1782 he gave up Hannaston. In 1787, William Forbes of Callendar bought Barnskeoch and its farms from the Newall family.

Meanwhile the tenancy of Drumbuie had been taken by Thomas Cannan, born in 1736. We don’t know when he became tenant of Drumbuie, but from the records of William Forbes of Callendar, we know that he gave up the tenancy in December 1796. Possibly, like James McConnell he was struggling to pay the rent.

Was Drumbuie a sheep farm by 1796? We don’t know. However, a McConnell family history written in 1861 says that the old thatched farm house of Hannaston was demolished and a new farm house  built ‘about 40 years ago’, so around 1820. In 1818, the Forbes papers show that a new house was built at Garrary. The first Ordnance Survey map of Galloway was surveyed in the 1840s and shows two Drumbuies- an old one ‘in ruins’ and a new one about a mile away.

This evidence suggests that it was roughly between 1790 and 1820 that the last vestiges of the medieval pattern of upland farming gave way to sheep farming. William Forbes senior died in 1815, when his son William Forbes junior was only 9. His mother, two uncles and a cousin acted as Trustees of the Forbes estates until 1831. It is possible that the decision to focus on sheep farming was taken by the Trustees as a way to maximise William junior’s income.

4. Cotton and iron.
In 1760, while he was still tenant of Hannaston, James McConnell married Thomas Cannan’s sister Mary. Thomas Cannan may already have been the tenant of Drumbuie by then. Meanwhile Thomas and Mary’s brother William Cannan left the Glenkens in the 1760s and- as recounted in my previous blog, became a textile machine maker at Chowbent near Bolton in Lancashire. Thomas, Mary and William were all born at Sheil farm between New Galloway and Dalry.

Here he was joined in 1781 by his nephew James McConnell, Adam and gorge Murray from New Galloway and in 1784, John Kennedy from Knocknalling. And, as also previously recounted this group of young men completed their apprenticeships just as Manchester’s cotton industry was about to explode with the power of steam.

While James McConnell married Margret Houldsworth (her brothers Tom and Henry were also cotton manufactures) George Murray married William Cannan’s daughter Mary. George and Mary had two sons, Benjamin and James. Benjamin became the owner of Parton estate in Galloway. Meanwhile James Murray married Henry Houldsworth’s daughter Anne in Glasgow in 1830.

In 1850 James became an investor in the Dalmellington Iron Company which his father-in-law had established in 1846. James became the ‘driving force’ behind the company and increased his shareholdings to become the largest investor of the company and its director.

James Murray’s  drive almost brought the iron industry to the Glenkens. In the 1850s, the Dalmellington Iron Company made some trial diggings on the Loch Doon side of Coran of Portmark and Black Craig, which overlook the lead mines of Garryhorn to the east. Here they found some rich veins of ironstone and dug out several hundred tons. To transport the ironstone to their furnaces would have required a building seven or eight miles of mountain railway. James Murray decided that the cost would be too great, so the railway was never built and most of the iron still lies deep beneath the Rhinns of Kells.

Since there is still coal around Dalmellington, some time in the distant future the iron and the coal might again be combined to forge a second industrial revolution.

Graphic by Beth Livingston

It was the greyest of grey days in grey Galloway.  It was January 2003. I was standing in the dreich drizzle on the Old Military Road on Kelton Hill just outside Castle Douglas, trying to describe what the landscape would have looked like on the same spot in 1724 for Andrew Cassell and Peter Aitchison.

There would have been none of the trees, none of the houses, none of the neat rectangular fields, not even the road, which wasn’t built until 1764. There would have been a newly built  dry-stane dyke though, since in the summer of 1724, the laird of Kelton and the minister of Kelton managed to save it from being demolished by the Galloway Levellers.

Andrew and Peter were interviewing me for a BBC Scotland radio series they were making on the Lowland Clearances. Most of what I said that cold, damp day didn‘t make the final cut, but the saving of the dyke was included as a dramatisation, along with my answer to Andrew’s question ‘But was what happened in Galloway back then clearance?’. Yes, I said, yes it was. The people, the families, who were evicted from their homes to make way for cattle farms were cleared from the land. As a ballad written at the time put it

The lords and lairds they drive us out
From mailings (crofts) where we dwell
The poor man says ‘Where shall we go?’
The rich says ‘Go to Hell!’

However, although the people of Galloway rose up in armed resistance against the first of the Lowland Clearances, when the main wave of clearance took place between 1760 and 1830, there was no repeat performance. The Lowland Clearances were a silent revolution, evoking none of the passion and outrage which still mark the Highland Clearances. What happened in the Highlands has never been forgotten. What happened in the Lowlands has never been remembered.

This difference between what is remembered and what is forgotten is now deeply embedded in Scotland’s historical consciousness. Along with the Gaelic language and the Jacobite rebellions, ‘the  Clearances’ are taken as marks of a historical as well as geographical division between Lowland and Highland Scotland.
Yet Gaelic was once spoken across virtually all of Scotland and support for the Jacobites was found where ever the Episcopalian church of Scotland resisted its Presbyterian twin.

If there is a difference between Highland and Lowland experience of what was called at the time ‘improvement’ it can be found in the soil.

On the brink of war in 1939, the reality the U-boats could starve  the UK into submission hit home. The Ordnance Survey quickly produced maps showing ‘land-quality’, ranging from Grade 1 -high quality land capable of growing a wide range of crops to Grade III -low quality land only fit for low intensity livestock grazing. The poorest quality land was shaded yellow on the maps.

For Scotland, the map is dominated by a huge block of yellow across the Highlands  and western islands, with another smaller block extending across the Southern Uplands. The better quality land, shown brown and green, extends from around the Moray Firth and  down the east coast where it expands inland to meet up with a broad band across the central Lowlands.

In the Borders, there is a eastern block  extending in land from Berwick and another centred on Carlisle, but extending along the north Solway coast into Galloway where the yellow of the Southrn Uplands separates the fertile lands of Wigtownshire from those of Ayrshire.

The ebb and flow of Scotland’s history can be traced across the colours on the map. North of the Forth, the fertile lands to the east where  the Kingdom of the Picts grew and flourished. The estimated population of Pictland is between 80 000 to100 000.To the west the Gaels of Dalriada possessed only a little good quality land. The estimated population of Dalriada is 10 000. When the two kingdoms joined to become Alba, expanding into the Lothians at the expense of the Northumbrian Kingdom was the next step. By the early twelfth century, David I of Scotland was able to make Carlisle his capital for a few years.

David is usually associated with the introduction of feudalism to Scotland, for example granting Annandale to a ‘Robert Bruce’ in 1124. But the deal with feudalism was that in exchange for grants of land, the new lords had to provide the king with an armed and mounted knight plus foot soldiers. This was an expensive- suits of armour did not come cheap.

So along with feudal grants of land- usually good quality land- came an agricultural revolution- the heavy plough. Made of wood but with an iron tipped cutting edge, these ploughs took a team of 6 or more oxen to pull. With these new ploughs, it was possible to grow more oats and barley. The trick was to build up the ploughed soil into long, wide raised beds called rigs, separated by drainage channels called furrows.

To manage the ploughs and their oxen took a whole team of workers who lived in new fermtouns, some of which still survive as modern day farms. Although it took more workers to manage the new ploughs than the old ‘Celtic’ foot ploughs and light ploughs, the new system provided enough oats to feed them and their families and a surplus for their feudal lord. The male farm workers also doubled up as the lord’s foot soldiers as required.

The new system worked fairly well in the more fertile areas, but not so well in upland and highland areas where there were only small patches of potential arable land. In these areas, cattle, sheep, horses (pony sized) and goats were grazed  extensively on the poorer soils while the patches of better land were worked intensively to grow oats and barley. As a result, the upland and highland areas had a lower overall population  density. In Galloway, the most mountainous area of about 100 square miles had farms around its edges, but none in its granite and raised bog heartland. It was probably only ever visited by deer-hunting expeditions.

The basic pattern of land use which emerged in the twelfth century continued for the next 500 years. It is possible that the population of Scotland reached one million before the impact of the Black Death in the mid fourteenth century knocked it back to only half  a million and it took until the end of the seventeenth century to reach a  million again.

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Bombie Muir-the red line shows dykes levelled in 1724

The Scottish Clearances -Part Two Galloway

The basic pattern of land use which emerged in the twelfth century continued for the next 500 years. It is possible that the population of Scotland reached one million before the impact of the Black Death in the mid fourteenth century knocked it back to only half  a million and it took until the end of the seventeenth century to reach a  million again.

By 1755 the population  was about 1 250 000, with roughly 1/3 living in the Highlands and 2/3 in the Lowlands. But within 100 years, the census of 1851 showed that  the population had doubled to 2 888 742. For such rapid growth to occur, something must have changed.

The medieval pattern of land use was able to sustain a population of up to one million, but only just. If the Black Death is discounted as a one-off, the limiting factor on population growth then becomes the medieval farming system itself. It produced just enough food to feed the farm workers and a small surplus for the feudal land owners.

While these landowners may have been better fed and wealthier than the farm labourers, as they discovered after the Union of Crowns in 1603 and again after the Union of Parliaments in 1707, compared to English landowners they were little more than ragged beggars.

As is very well known, virtually every Scottish landowner became convinced that the infamous Darien project would magically make them as rich as English landowners without having to do any more than invest a bit of money in it. What is less well known is that many of the landowners in Galloway had already found a way to become wealthy by using their land in a different way.

This was because in 1666, English landowners were able to get a law passed in the English parliament banning the import of Irish cattle. Before the law was passed, about 100 000 Irish cattle were imported into England every year. Most of these went to feed London which already had a population of 500 000.

From customs records of cattle crossing from Scotland to England at Gretna, about 10 000 of these Irish cattle had originated in the Plantation of Ulster and crossed over to Portpatrick in Galloway before being driven south. Some of these cattle came from Donegal where the Murray family of Broughton in Wigtownshire owned 60 000 acres of Plantation land.

After 1666, Galloway landowners began sending their cattle to England, although from evidence of fines and seizures of cattle in Galloway and in England, at least some of the  cattle were originally Irish but had become ‘Scottish’ after a few weeks grazing in Galloway. This forced the landowners to start rearing authentically Scottish cattle in Galloway.

There was, however, a small problem.  Between 1666 and 1688, Galloway along with most of southern and western Scotland was caught up in a low-intensity civil and religious war with Charles II and then James VII and II. During this period, only landowners who were Stuart loyalists could sell cattle to England. But if they wanted to increase the supply of cattle, they would have to clear both upland farms-where the cattle were grazed in summer- and lowland farms -where they were kept over winter. But if they tried to do this, they risked provoking a major conflict.

But after 1689, it became possible for landowners loyal to the new regime of William of Orange to begin clearing their lands to make way for cattle. Leading this move  were the firmly Presbyterian and loyal Williamites the Herons of Kirroughtrie in Minnigaff parish. The Herons were able to export 1000 cattle year from their upland and lowland farms in the 1690s.

By selling their cattle in England, the Herons were able to earn hard cash- English gold guineas- with which they could buy up more farms where they could breed and fatten more cattle. From owning one small farm in the 1660s, by the Union of 1707 they owned 1/3 of all the land in Minngaff parish which, at 120 squares miles, was the largest in Galloway. However, as the Galloway Levellers pointed out in 1724, the Herons’ cattle herds had depopulated the parish and reduced the town (village) of Minnigaff to a ‘nest of beggars’.

That the Levellers had a point can be seen from a list of the inhabitants of Minngaff parish complied in 1684. This shows that while upland livestock farms in the parish supported only one or two families, arable farms along the fertile flood plain of the river Cree supported one tenant farmer and between five and ten cottar/ sub-tenant families. As the Herons bought up these farms and converted them from arable to pasture land for their cattle, most of the sub-tenant/ cottar families became  redundant. Working a traditional arable farm needed a large workforce. Managing a herd of cattle did not.

Unlike most of Scotland, where land ownership was concentrated into a few hands, land ownership in Galloway had  been fragmented into lots of small estates and even individual farms ever since the forfeiture of Douglas Lordship of Galloway to the Crown (James II) in 1455. Since then no one landowner had  managed to acquire more than a small portion of the region. This  led to a constant ‘churn’ of land ownership as the fortunes of several hundred minor lairds rose and fell.

The example of the Herons rise from small to large landowners on the back of the cattle trade was not lost on those Galloway landowners who were struggling to hang on to their estates. While their more successful peers could afford to stick with tradition, the fear of losing their lands persuaded some of the strugglers to have a go at the cattle trade and turn their arable farm into cattle pastures.

By 1724, what had begun as a trickle of evictions and clearance from the arable lands of Kirkcudbrightshire threatened to become a flood. The fear that their landlord might decide to enter the cattle trade and clear them from his lands united tenants and cottars across the county. What gave their uprising a militant edge  was a recent event.

By 1714, the ‘Killing Times’ of the 1680s were beginning to fade into the background of everyday life in Galloway. But then in late 1715, a small group of local Jacobites joined a larger group of northern English Jacobites and two thousand Highlanders in an attempt to capture Dumfries. The focus of the Hanovrai9n government was on the main Jacobite rebellion in the north of Scotland, so the defence of Dumfries was left to a locally raised volunteer militia. Some 3000 volunteers were raised and armed. This level of resistance persuaded the Jacobites to turn south where they were defeated at the Battle of Preston in November 1715.

As a side-effect, it also meant that in 1724 there were a lot of folk in Galloway with a wee bit of military training. And muskets. And a grievance.

Although other landowners were involved, the grievance focused on Sir Basil Hamilton of Baldoon and St Mary’s Isle. In Hamilton’s case it was a triple grievance.

1. In 1723 he cleared several families of his land near Kirkcudbright to create a large cattle enclosure.
2. The 400 cattle in his enclosure were illegally imported Irish cattle.
3. In 1715, he was one of the local Jacobites who tried to capture Dumfries.

On point 3, by rights he should have had his head chopped off at the Tower of London and forfeited all his lands. However, Hamilton was only 18 at the time and his mother Mary Dunbar, and his grandmother, Duchess Anne of Hamilton managed to save both his lands and his head. His fellow Jacobite William Gordon, Lord Kenmure had been executed and William Maxwell, earl of Nithsdale’s wife had smuggled him out often tower of London dressed as her female servant…

On point 2, his great-great grandfather David Dunbar I of Baldoon had been fined as early as 1669 for trying to pass off Irish cattle as his own. In 1682, he was still at it when an English magistrate seized 100 of Dunbar’s cattle, having declared them Irish rather than Scottish. What made this a grievance is that by smuggling in cheap Irish cattle and then passing them off as his own, Basil Hamilton was undercutting the legitimate local cattle trade -which was a threat to the Herons of Kirroughtrie amongst others.

On point 1, when the future king James II and VII was living in Scotland in the early 1680s, his wife Mary of Modena had become exasperated by Galloway and its rebellious Whigs (Covenanters). The whole district she declared, should be cleared of its revolting inhabitants and turned into a great hunting park. Her husband was  very keen on hunting. The Galloway Levellers quoted this in their (printed) propaganda broadsheets. Having failed in 1715, they said, the Jacobites (ie Hamilton) were now taking Mary of Modena’s advice and clearing King George I’s loyal subjects from the land so that they would face no local opposition when they next rebelled.

If the Galloway Levellers uprising had been a simple peasants revolt, the regiment of dragoons which arrived in June 1724 would have made short shrift of them. In a straight fight they would have been slaughtered. If they managed to avoid a direct confrontation, it would have been easy enough to capture a few ring-leaders and hang them.

None of this happened. Instead, in October 1724, the dragoons confronted a group of several hundred Levellers, but had been told by their commander to use ’only the flats of their swords’ against them. There were no fatalities and 200 Levellers were captured, but most were allowed to escape on the march back to Kirkcudbright.

A few Levellers did stand trial, but in a civil not a criminal case. The case was brought in January 1725 by Basil Hamilton who pursued a small group (25 out of the  1000 who had taken part) for damages to his cattle park dykes. He did win, but is unlikely to have received much in the way of damages from the Levellers, since only two owned any property and one was a 14 year old boy.


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The subtitle of Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell’s book on the Lowland Clearances is ‘Scotland’s Silent Revolution-1760 to 1830. But if the first clearances began in Galloway in the 1720s, why was the main phase of clearance delayed for forty years?

Part of the reason is that the main Lowland Clearances took place in arable farming areas and were almost a side-effect of attempts to boost production of oats, barley and wheat. In Galloway and later the Highlands, the clearances were a direct effect of replacing people with cattle and sheep. The new style of livestock farming only needed a few cowherds and shepherds, but the new style of arable farming still needed at least some farm labourers.

The market for Galloway cattle in the 1720s was England, but at that time there was no equivalent English demand for Scottish oats. As Dr Johnson noted in his Dictionary (1755) ‘Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' The traditional (medieval) system of arable farming produced just enough grain to feed the farmers and their workforce, pay the landowners the rent and leave enough to sow to produce the next year’s crop. As an old Scots saying put it ‘Ane to saw, and ane to gnaw, and ane to pay the Laird witha'.

In a good harvest year, this system could produce a surplus of grain, but this was balanced out by bad harvest years when hunger compelled people to start eating the seed corn, which reduced the next year’s crop. This vicious cycle acted as a limit on Scotland’s population growth. Another effect was to limit the growth of Scotland’s urban population since they depended on buying rather than producing their own food. Periodic harvest failures pushed the cost of their food up and a major harvest failure risked cutting it off altogether.

After the failure of the Darien Scheme, many influential Scots landowners and merchants became persuaded that the Union with England would stimulate the Scottish economy so it could break out of this vicious cycle. But it soon became obvious that the Union was not delivering on this hope. Scots would somehow have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. This led to the foundation in 1723 of the ‘Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture’. As its title suggests the Honourable Society’s main aim was to modernise Scottish farming. However it also planned to develop the Scottish linen industry. This was achieved in 1727 with the establishment of the ’Board of Trustees for Improvement in Manufactures’ which the Society of Improvers helped set up.

The Society’s attempts to modernise Scottish framing were less immediately successful. Robert Maxwell of Arkland in Galloway was the Society’s Secretary. In 1723 Maxwell had taken a 19 year lease of Cliftonhall farm near Edinburgh and set about trying to improve it. He succeeded in increasing crop production, but bankrupted himself in the process. He inherited Arkland in1745 but to cover his debts was forced to sell the farm in 1749 for £ 10 304 Scots (£857 sterling). Another leading member of the Society of Improvers, John Cockburn of Ormiston was also ruined by improvement and had to sell his estate to the earl of Hopetoun.

The difficulty these early improvers faced was that levelling the medieval raised rigs, enclosing the fields with new dykes and hedges, cutting drains and fertilising the new fields with lime was an expensive and labour intensive process. Once the new system was in place, labour costs could be cut by clearing the cottars from the land and re-employing a few as day labourers, but so long as demand and hence the price of grain remained static there was little profit to be made from their expensive improvements.

Although Robert Maxwell managed to produce a weighty 450 page long  ‘Select Transactions of the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture  in 1743, the Society faded away after 1745/6.Politics as well as economics played a part in its decline. Among its 400 members were several Jacobite landowners. These included James Steuart (1713-1780) of Coltness who was forced into exile in 1746 as a Jacobite supporter. After returning from exile in 1763, Steuart published ‘An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy’. Although overshadowed by Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (1776), Steuart’s was the first Scottish book on political economy.

This where things started to get complicated, with a whole combination of factors overlapping and interlocking feeding in to what were to become the Lowland Clearances.

One factor is that after 50 years, the Union of 1707 had started to pay off- but only for a few Scots. To the west, the Atlantic trade in slaves, sugar and tobacco made some merchants, especially in Glasgow, very, very rich. To the east, other Scots were able to make huge fortunes in India. But although they were now very rich, these merchants lacked an essential requirement if they were to become ‘gentlemen’. They were not landowners and so could not become part of ‘society’.

To raise their social standing, the newly rich elite had to buy land, the more the better. At the same time, as Henry Home /lord Kames made clear in his book ‘The Gentleman Farmer’ (1776), as landowners the new Scottish elite had a moral and patriotic duty to increase the wealth and strength of the nation by improving their new lands.

Another factor which came into play had its origins in Adam Smith’s theory of economic and social development. Smith, along with Kames and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers believed that there were four historical stages of social and economic development. The first was the hunting stage, the second the pasturage or livestock farming stage, the third the arable farming stage and the fourth the commerce or merchant trading stage.

Critically, Smith believed that while England and France had reached this the fourth stage, Scotland wasn’t there yet. Scotland was still in the process of transition from the second to the third stages of development. To reach the fourth stage, Scotland would have to increase the surplus produced by its arable farms so that towns manufacturing goods for trade could be developed. This is the gist of this quote from ‘Wealth of Nations’

As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, so the industry which procures the former, must necessarily be prior to that which ministers to the latter. The cultivation and improvement of the country, therefore, which affords subsistence, must, necessarily, be prior to the increase of the town, which furnishes only the means of conveniency and luxury. It is the surplus produce of the country only, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, that constitutes the subsistence of the town, which can therefore increase only with the increase of this surplus produce. [Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol 1, page 402]

Between 1764 and 1766, Adam Smith was tutor to Henry Scott, 3rd duke of Buccleuch. As one of Scotland’s largest and wealthiest landowners, Scott’s step-father had expected him to live in London and become a British politician. But under Smith’s influence, Scott decided to live in Scotland and start improving his lands.

A final factor which influenced the Lowland Clearances can be traced back to the Society of Improvers and their promotion of the Board of Trustees for Improvement of Manufactures. In 1728, the Scottish linen industry produced 2.2 million yards of finished cloth. Supported and encouraged by the Board of Trustees, by 1768 this had risen to 11.8 million yards and by 1798 output reached 21.3 million yards. Although output then declined, this was partly due to the rapid rise of the Scottish cotton industry after 1780.

In 1780 there were 25 000 linen hand-loom weavers in Scotland. By 1800 there were 58 000 cotton and linen hand-loom weavers. These weavers and other textile workers needed to be fed. So did the population of Glasgow. Between 1700 and 1750, Glasgow’s population only grew by 10 000, but in the next 50 years it grew by 54 000.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, there was little reward for any landowner or their tenants for improving the land. In the second half of the century there was, as demand for food grew and prices increased.

What drove the Lowland Clearances from the 1760s onwards then, was this combination of new super-rich landowners able to afford to improve their lands, an Enlightened economic theory which called for improvement and, most importantly, the prospect of financial reward which encouraged even the most cautious and conservative of landowners to get involved.


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Without context, history becomes part of mythology. Taking a past event, polishing away all traces of context and then holding it up as a mirror to the present is not history. It is an exercise in idiocy.

As an example of the ‘Idiotic Interpretation of History’, it is difficult to beat an article by Chris Bambery recently published in a Scottish newspaper- ‘A  caliphate… for Calvinists : Were Presbyterian fundamentalists the Daesh of Scotland ?’

Among its many crimes against history, the article manages to equate the 1666 uprising of the Dalry (Galloway) Covenanters with events in Syria today. This is beyond ridiculous. It is simply impossible to understand the Scottish Covenanters of the seventeenth century without locating their struggle with the wider context of the  sixteenth century political and economic struggles which followed the Reformation.

What follows is a brief outline of how the Reformation shaped the Covenanters political resistance to the  Stuart state. Then by taking a Bambery style approach to the Covenanters the conclusion is that the birth of radical punk occurred in Dalry in 1666 rather than in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s as previously thought.




While the Reformation began as an attempt by Martin Luther to reform the Christian church of his time, by challenging the authority of the church, Luther was also challenging the structure of political and economic power as it existed at the time. The feudal system of the time resembled a pyramid with kings at the top, but above the kings was the God from whom the kings supposedly derived their right to rule. The church added an extra level to this by placing the Pope in Rome above kings in the feudal hierarchy.

The Reformation had the effect of flattening the religious version of the feudal pyramid, in theory making a king, queen, archbishop or pope equal with the humblest commoner in the eyes of God.

In England, the Reformation came in handy for Henry VIII in his attempt to father a male heir. Henry wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled so he could marry Anne Boleyn, but he needed Pope Clement VII to agree. Clement refused so Henry got the English parliament to pass an Act of Supremacy in 1534 which made him ‘supreme head on earth of the Church of England’. This allowed him to marry Anne Boleyn and also transferred all the lands and wealth of the English church to its new supreme head.

England’s great rival France, however, remained loyal to the un-reformed church, as did Scotland. Henry wanted his nephew James V to break with Rome and France by pushing through a similar reformation of the Scottish church, but James refused. After James’ death in 1542, Henry then had the bright idea of marrying his infant son Edward to James’ infant daughter Mary. Instead Mary married Francis, the heir to the French throne in 1558. Francis became king of France in 1559 but died in 1560. Mary then returned to Scotland to rule as a Catholic rather then Protestant queen.

As result of this mix of politics and religion, the Scottish Reformation did not follow the same path as the English Reformation. It was a bottom-up, or rather a middle-up rather than a top-down process. It became the focus for a political struggle between Crown and Parliament and an economic struggle in which landowners tried to get their hands on church lands.

If  James V had taken his uncle’s advice and made himself supreme head  on earth of  the Church of Scotland in the 1530s, the conflict which gave birth to the Covenanters a hundred years later might never have happened.

Because so many Scottish kings and queens had spent their childhoods more or less as hostages to different noble families, it had become a tradition that between the ages of 21 and 25 a king or queen of Scots could revoke any grants of lands made when they were minors. Charles I became king in March 1625 and would reach the age of 25 in November that year. To avoid going to the English parliament for money, Charles came up with a cunning plan- he as Kings of Scots would pass an Act of Revocation, but one backdated to the death of James V in 1542.

By a stroke of his royal pen, all the Crown lands in Scotland- including former Church lands and the teinds, a tenth share of the produce of the lands- disposed of since 1542 would revert to Charles. His plan seems to have been to then re-grant them, for a fee, to their current owners, but this was not made clear at the time. Instead, by this demonstration of his absolute power, Charles infuriated the most powerful land owners in Scotland and the Church of Scotland. The landowners were outraged by the prospect of losing huge tracts of ‘their’ land and the Church was convinced that Charles would use the teind money to pay the salaries of bishops rather than parish ministers and parish school teachers.

As it turned out, Charles was unable to enforce the Revocation Act. But fatally for him, by managing to unite Scottish landowners and the Scottish church in opposition to his rule, expressed in the National Covenant of 1638, Charles laid the ground for the Bishops Wars of 1639 and 1640 which in turn led to what is sometimes still called the English Civil War, but is more correctly described as the War of the Three Kingdoms.

The National Covenant of 1638 was followed by the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. This was in effect a treaty between the English Parliament and Scotland for the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland and the reformation of religion in England along Calvinist ad Presbyterian lines.

Sadly for Charles, God turned out to be a parliamentarian and Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649.  After he had faithfully promised to uphold the Solemn League and Covenant, Charles II was proclaimed King of Scots at Scone in 1651. But then in September 1651, Oliver Cromwell defeated the English and Scots Royalist armies at the battle of Worcester and Charles had to wait until 1660 before he was restored to the English and Scottish thrones.

One of the first acts of the Parliament of Scotland after Charles II was safely established in London was to summon the Reverend Samuel Rutherford to appear before it on a charge of High Treason. Rutherford’s crime was to have written a book called Lex Rex- the Law of the Prince, published in London in 1644.

Here I will throw in a snippet of movie history. Between 1627 and 1638, Rutherford was minister of Anwoth parish in the Kirkcubrightshire and remains of his church feature in the classic horror film the Wicker Man.

Lex Rex is a complex and deeply learned text, drawing on aspects of classical philosophy as well as theology. Remarkably for a Calvinist Presbyterian, Rutherford even quoted approvingly from Jesuit sources in developing his argument. So what was Rutherford’s argument? It is that although God in his wisdom, acting through natural law, requires that people, ‘being reasonable creatures united in society’ should have a system of government, the exact form such a government takes is not specified by God so may be a republic rather than a kingdom. If the form of government is a kingdom, the people limit the power of their king measuring out ‘by ounce weights, so much royal power, and no more and no less.’ Royal power measured out in this way is also conditional and the people ‘may take back to themselves what they gave out‘ if the king breaks his agreement or covenant with the people by becoming tyrannical.

For Charles II and his new regime, the philosophical and theological complexities of ‘Lex Rex’ were irrelevant, all that mattered was that Rutherford’s book provided a justification for the rebellion which led to the death of Charles I. Only Rutherford’s natural death in March 1660 saved him from the likely fate of public execution for High Treason.

Most Scots were quite happy to see the back of Oliver Cromwell
who had imposed a republican union of parliaments on Scotland. If Charles II had let sleeping dogs lie, the revival of the Covenants would probably not have occurred.

Unfortunately, Charles thought it would be a good idea to bring back the bishops. All ministers who been selected by their congregations since 1649 then had to be approved by the relevant bishop. In the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway, 270 ministers refused to do so. To encourage compliance, in 1663 it was announced that any minister lacking his bishop’s approval would be removed from his parish. As a result, by 1666, 34 out of 37 ministers in the Synod of Galloway had been forced out from their parishes.

The outed ministers retained the loyalty of their parishioners however. Boycotting the parish churches, the people gathered in private houses and in the open air to hear their former minsters preach. These conventicles were then banned, but the people continued to attend. Fines were imposed on anyone attending a conventicle but the people refused to pay.

To enforce the law and disrupt the conventicles in Kirkcudbrightshire, in March 1666, Sir James Turner and 160 foot soldiers were dispatched to the county. Turner was supposed to have used the fines to line his own pockets and his troops, quartered on suspected conventiclers, acted so roughly the bishop of Galloway was moved to appeal for leniency.

Turner ignored the bishop and continued to milk actual or alleged conventiclers for fines until a few brave souls in St Hon’s Town of Dalry fought back in November 1666.

But was the uprising which began in Dalry and continued on and off for the next 22 years a religious or a political struggle? Hector MacPherson who studied the Covenanters religious and ethical thought was in no doubt.

The persecution of the later Covenanters was essentially a political persecution. It is a profound mistake to contend that the struggle was a religious one or even an ecclesiastical one in its essence. The Government did not wage it out of a disinterested zeal for Episcopalian form of Church government… Charles II and his Scottish advisers, who had in their day been Covenanters from political motives, cared little or nothing for Church government. But the Episcopal form was useful to them, because it is essentially bureaucratic, because the royal headship was easily grafted on to it, and because bishops- a few men appointed by the Crown and dependent on the royal favour- were much more easily managed than annual assemblies, in which every clergyman and elder had an equal vote.

In other words religion, as it had been for Henry VIII, was simply a tool to be used for political ends. The varieties of religious belief were ideologies to be enforced where they supported the Stuart state and suppressed where they opposed it.

In their political struggle against Stuart Absolutism,- the ‘divine right of kings to rule’ advocated by James VI and I-  the Covenanters’ Calvinist ideology became an advantage to them. Ulike Lutherism, which relied on princes to carry through its ecclesiastical revolution, the ‘Reformed Church’ first established by Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich and then by John Calvin in Geneva was from its beginning in rebellion against both the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Absolutist State. Zwingli was the citizen not of a monarchy but a small Swiss republic and Calvin  a convert to a church in full opposition to the State- the Huguenot church in France.

This cultural heritage of resistance to State power sustained the Covenanters of the later seventeenth century in their 28 year long rebellion. As fugitives under sentence of death if captured, the rhetorical vehemence of their many ‘declarations’ are violent and extreme examples of this heritage. The apocalyptical Biblical quotes Chris Bambery used from James Renwick’s speech on the scaffold seem to confirm his argument that the Covenanters were violent  religious extremists.

In contrast, here is the same James Renwick describing his lying on the open moor lands ‘when others were sleeping’ after a conventicle in 1685-

when the curtains of heaven have been drawn, when the quietness of all things, in the silent watches of the night, has brought to my mind the duty of admiring the deep, silent, and inexpressible ocean of joy and wonder, wherein the whole family of the higher house are everlastingly drowned, each star leading me out to wonder what He must be who is the Star of Jacob, the bright and morning Star, who maketh all his own to shine as stars in the firmament.

Even Richard Cameron, who declared war on Charles II and his brother James in June 1680 and was killed in July 1680 for so doing, saw in nature a divine revelation.

When you look to the moon and stars, to the rivers and brooks, do you see the hand of God in them? When you look to the very corn ridges, do you see the hand of God in them and every pile of grass?

Driven into the hills and moors of the Southern Uplands of Scotland by  state persecution, the Covenanters’ rigid Bible based Calvinism  began to soften and mutate into an agnostic or even atheist ‘natural theology’. Finding the divine in nature is more usually associated with eighteenth century romantics like William Wordsworth and twentieth century hippies than the Islamic/ religious fundamentalists Chris Bambery equates the Covenanters with.

On the other hand, unlike their contemporaries the Quakers, the Covenanters were not pacifists. They had muskets and knew how to use them. If the peace loving Quakers were proto-hippies, the Covenanters were proto-punks.

To conclude.

In his article Chris Bambery extracts the 1666 uprising of the Dalry Covenanters from its  historical context and presents those involved as equivalent to the Daesh in Syria. In fact, what began in Dalry was not the beginnings of a Calvinist caliphate, but the first stirrings of a radical punk culture of resistance. The seeds sown in 1666 briefly flourished but then lay dormant in the dustbin of  history until they flowered again in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.

Before the Lowland Clearances began, Robert Bruce and William Wallace would have had little difficulty recognising the Lowland landscape as Scotland. After the Clearances it would have seemed like a foreign country to them. Everything had changed, changed utterly.

Some changes had occurred since the Middle Ages, but these were invisible and not marked in the landscape. Fpr example, there is a rental-roll from 1375 for Buittle parish in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright which lists the tenants on each of 12 farms. Most have 3 or 4 tenants but the larger farm of Almorness has 9 and one, Breoch,  has 11. However, by the seventeenth century in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright most farms had only one tenant, although a few had two (often father and son).

The farms didn’t need a smaller workforce, but a new rural class of cottars had been formed. They lived in cots (cottages) and had the use of a small parcel of land, their croft, on which they could grow their own food and/or graze cow or a few sheep. In exchange they provided the tenant farmer with labour on the farm as required- in the winter and autumn ploughing and thrashing grain, in the spring and summer planting, peat-cutting, harvesting and hay-making.

When the physical transformation of the landscape began, the cottars’ small plots of land were swept away. An example of what the rationalisation of the traditional farms involved was given by Andrew Wight, writing in 1782. This example of improvement was drawn up by Henry Home, lord Kames. In 1761, his daughter Jean had married Patrick Heron IV (1736-1803). Heron’s family had grown wealthy through Galloway’s cattle trade, but the farms to be improved were arable farms near Dumfries. Heron’s tenant was James Rome, described by Andrew Wight as ‘the most remarkable man in Scotland for enterprise and expedition’.

As Rome explained to Wight ‘I entered to these improvements at Whitsunday 1763, upon a thirty years lease, in partnership with the proprietor, Mr Heron of Heron. The plan was formed by Lord Kames…’
Rome then gave Wight a detailed description of the immense effort such improvement required. To improve the 144 acres of Ingleston Hill, 90 horses and 24 workers laboured for 32 days to carry and spread 48 346 bags of shell-marl. The hill was then ploughed, first with a team of 6 oxen led by 3 men followed by a team of 4 horses. The 200 acres of Clouden-park were similarly improved and planted with turnips. Kames monitored the progress of Rome’s improvements and in 1770 commented that he had never seen better work.

Part of  James Rome’s work involved removing the existing broad rigs from Ingleston. Wight then discussed the improvement of  Baldoon in Kirkinner parish, Wigtownshire. A hundred years earlier, Baldoon had been owned by the Dunbar family who had a cattle park built there covering 1.5 square miles and which could hold 1000 cattle. Through his mother, Mary Dunbar, the Galloway Leveller’s bête noire Basil Hamilton inherited Baldoon. By 1760, Hamilton’s son Dunbar Hamilton had become the 4th earl of Selkirk and a Mr Jeffray managed the lands for the earl.

As Jeffray explained in a letter to Wight, beginning in 1760 it took 3 years to level 300 acres of old crooked rig and replace them with narrower straight rigs. In 1455, Baldoon had been one of the Douglas lords of Galloway’s grange, that is arable, lands so these ‘old crooked rigs’ were definitely medieval. The new narrow rigs were needed because undersoil drainage by tile drains did not come into use until the early nineteenth century.

Once the old crooked rigs had been done away with and the soil fertilised with shell-marl or lime, new square or rectangular fields enclosed with dykes or hedges were made and new farm buildings built of mortared stones with slate roofs were constructed. Networks of estate roads were built, linked to the growing network of substantially built turnpike roads, along which new villages and towns were built. In Dumfries and Galloway alone, 81 new towns and villages were built between 1750 and 1830.

The new villages were built to accommodate the cottars and tnant farmers who had lost their farms. This was a lesson Lowland landowners had been taught by the Galloway Levellers. But it also meant that there was a workforce close to the land but no longer living on it available at harvest time. Getting the harvest in as quickly as possible in case it was damaged by wet weather or storms was a vital and still labour intensive process.

The new towns had an additional function. With their larger population, fed by the new farming system, the landowners who planned them hoped they would become centres of commerce as Adam Smith proposed. The growth of Airdrie in Lanarkshire was encouraged by the Hamilton family who owned the surrounding lands. As early as 1695, they set up a market in Airdrie. First a village of 300 people developed and then it became a centre for linen weaving.

Weaving was a skill which could be transferred from the traditional to the new economy. By the first census of 1801 the population of Airdrie had grown to 4631 as it absorbed  rural workers cleared from the land. Agriculture in Lanarkshire benefited from the growth of Glasgow, but this had the effect of encouraging landowners to step up the process of improvement, pushing more people off the land. The Hamilton family had a private act passed in 1821 giving ‘their’ town the legal status of a burgh. By this time Airdie’s population was 7362. This had doubled to 14 435 by 1851.However this growth was due to the ‘pull’ of the new iron industry and its associated coal mines industrialisation rather than the ‘push’ or Lowland clearance.

The new fields, farms, roads, villages and towns were also part of a new economy. After the Union of 1707, all the old Scots money circulating in Scotland was collected in Edinburgh ahead of the conversion to sterling. When this was done, it was discovered that 35% of the coins collected were not Scots at all. Some were English, but 30% were not even British but came from France, Holland, Spain and other countries.

The amount of foreign currency was high because apart from merchants trading with Europe, most Scots had little need for cash. They lived in a ‘self-provisioning’ countryside where they provided food, clothing and shelter for themselves rather than having to buy these basic essentials.

But in the new economy, farms were now focused on producing food for sale in a commercial system. Now rent had to be paid on the new farm cottages and the new houses in the new villages. Food, clothing and shelter were now commodities to be bought and sold. Tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar and clothes made from cotton had to be purchased. Gradually, everything in this new economy had to be paid for.

The other side of the new coin was that there was now a demand for carpenters and cobblers, brewers and tailors, road-menders and cart-builders, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. This was very different from the situation in Galloway a generation before when the Galloway Levellers claimed that -

Every year several tenants are exposed to the mountains and know not where to go or get any place; nay it is known that some years ago that some of these poor distressed people have, from despair, put hands in themselves and have been found hanged in their own houses about the term time when they were obliged to go away and did not know where to go…

In the old economy and society, to lose your place on the land was to lose the security of your place in the world. In the new society and economy, it was the old world that had lost its security. As a result hundreds of thousands of Scots had to find a new place in a world which was no longer their land.

Yellow on map shows poor quality land.

Why has the clearance of the Highlands been remembered when the clearance of the Lowlands as not. One reason is that the Highlands were still being cleared in the 1850s and attracted the attention of Karl Marx.

The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a former chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland.
This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart  and James Anderson.  In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. As an example of the method obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.

As well as Marx, newspapers like the Inverness Courier, the Scotsman and the pre-Rupert Murdoch Times reported on the more dramatic, that is traumatic, incidents of  clearance. But while there were expressions of public sympathy for the victims and outrage against the landowners, the absolute right of property owners to clear their lands of people remained. It was not until the 1880s, a hundred years since the process of clearance began in the Highlands and Islands that the ‘Crofters’ War’ brought it to an end.

The root of the problem in the Highlands was that there was very little arable land but a lot of rough grazing land. In the summer, the rough grazing land could be used to feed cattle and small  flocks of sheep. The people, however, needed the arable land to grow enough oats to feed themselves through the winter. This limited the numbers of cattle and sheep the land could support. But if the arable land was used as pasture for cattle or sheep, larger herds of cattle or flocks of sheep could be kept. The livestock could be over wintered on the better quality land and then allowed to graze on the poorer quality land in the spring and summer.

On the other hand, any growth in the human population would be difficult to sustain without the risk of a bad harvest leading to starvation. Growing potatoes rather than oats as the staple crop was a way to support a larger population but a failure of the potato crop would also lead to starvation.

Alongside this problem of how the people who lived on the land were to be fed as their population grew was another one. This was the wider shift from an economy based on subsistence to an economy based on money.  This was a gradual change in the Highlands. It was possible for landowners who saw themselves, and were seen by their tenants, as successors to the ceann-fine or ‘head of the clan’ to maintain traditional land-use practices and the traditional economy. In good  harvest years their tenants would pay their rent, in bad harvest years they would not. In very bad years, the landowners would provide food to keep the tenants from starving.
However a series of poor harvest years combined with population growth could lead to an accumulation of rent arrears. This reduced the landowners income from the land/people. If there was then a harvest failure and the landowners had to buy food to keep the people from starving, debts rapidly mounted. This either bankrupted the landowners, forcing the sale of the land or pushed the landowner into the new economy. In either case the result was the same- the new landowners or the existing landowner would start clearing the people from the land to make way for sheep.

The advantages of replacing people with sheep were two-fold. Firstly, from the end of the eighteenth century until wool started arriving from Australia in the later nineteenth century, the price of wool remained high. This was a result of greater demand as the industrial revolution was applied to the woollen industry. This made sheep farming a profitable form of land use.

Secondly, in the new economy, poor people who were at risk of starvation were seen as a financial burden on landowners. Either the landowners had to buy food directly for their starving tenants or indirectly via parish poor rates. Overseas or internal emigration relived the wealthy of this oppressive burden and made their lands more valuable. Thanks to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, it could also be argued that landowners who allowed their tenants to multiply beyond the ability of the land to support them were immoral if not outright criminals.

The new economy acted like a slowly tightening vice on the Highlands and Islands. In its iron grip, the old world and its Gaelic culture was year by year, eviction by eviction, township by township forced to the brink of extinction.

Was there an alternative? Was clearance inevitable?

 In terms of land-use, there were alternatives. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were six iron furnaces working in the Highlands. They were fuelled by charcoal made from wood  felled from trees up and down the west coast of the Highlands and on many of the islands. Keeping a charcoal based iron industry going would have been difficult, but its existence does show that there were areas of forest and woodland in the Highlands and Islands.

If the areas of forest had been extended through new plantations combined with improvement through liming and drainage of the arable areas along with a more mixed (cattle and sheep) form of livestock farming, the  ecology of the region would have benefited in the long term. Small scale industrial developments -wood-working, boat-building, leather-making, woollen mills and the like- could have provided sources of employment and income.

This would have required adopting and pursuing a region-wide economic development strategy, alien to the spirit of the times. Landowners would have had to agree to forgo the instant profits generated by sheep-farming. And, as the Lowland Clearances showed, the necessary social and economic changes would still have led to the loss of traditional ways of life and culture.

As the later nineteenth century experience of the Lowlands, especially the rural south showed, the increasing tempo of the industrial revolution had the effect of undermining the viability of the non-farming rural economy. The tanneries, small cotton mills, breweries, brickworks, slate-quarries and other rural industries could not compete with the cheaper costs of larger scale rivals once the railway system cut transport costs.

But even in the Highlands scattered signs of the industrial revolution were present. The photograph shows a coal mine at Brora in Sutherland.

Airdrie, Lanarkshire 1780

Helmsdale, Sutherland, 1830

Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbrightshire, 1797

By 1830, the Lowland Clearances were over. The countryside had been transformed. Apart from the spread of dairy farming in the south west which followed the growth of the railway network, the  farmed landscape has changed very little since then. In the Southern Uplands, especially in Galloway, since the 1960s forestry has replaced sheep farming which is a striking change of land use and appearance.

In the Highlands, the clearances continued into the 1850s.

In both the rural south and rural north, despite the clearances, it was only after 1851 that the overall population began to decline. This seems puzzling. The explanation is that in the Highlands, many of the people cleared were re-settled around the coast while in the Lowlands they were re-settled in new towns and villages. The new coastal settlements in the Highlands were supposed to prosper through fishing, but most failed to do so. The new towns and villages in the Lowlands were more successful to begin with, but then lost out as growth became more concentrated in industrial areas.

Today, Helmsdale in Sutherland, Gatehouse of Fleet in Galloway and Airdrie in Lanarkshire have populations of 640, 990 and 42 000 respectively.

Helmsdale was developed from 1812 onwards to provide housing and employment for people cleared from the land. Gatehouse was likewise developed as a planned town from 1766 onwards. About the same time, the existing village of Airdrie was developed as a centre for the linen weaving industry, becoming a Burgh in 1821. Gatehouse had become a Burgh in 1795. Helmsdale did not become a Burgh.

Helmsdale’s main industry was herring fishing, but in 1790 a cotton spinning mill was built at Spinningdale about 30 miles away. This burnt down in 1808 and was nor rebuilt. Closer to Helmsdale, at Brora 11 miles away, there was a coal mine. Coal had been mined there on a small scale since the late sixteenth century and used for salt making. Between  1812 and 1820, in an attempt to provide employment for people cleared from his lands, the 2nd Duke of Sutherland spent £31 000 in an attempt to revive the mine. The attempt failed in 1825, but another was made in 1872 after the railway reached Sutherland. This was more successful and the mine survived for 100 years until it closed in 1974.

In 1724,  the dykes of Alexander Murray’s cattle park at Cally in Kirkcudbrightshire were thrown down by the Galloway Levellers. Forty years later, when his son James was busy improving Cally estate, he made sure that history would not repeat itself by planning a new town called Gatehouse of Fleet. Within 30 years, as well as two cotton mills, the new town had a tannery, a brewery, a brickworks and a brass  foundry. From zero the population had grown to 1150 and reached 1370 by 1841.

By 1850 however, the water-powered cotton mills had closed, unable to compete with their steam-powered rivals. Then, despite the best efforts of local landowners, the railway from Castle Douglas to Stranraer by-passed the town when it was opened in 1861. ‘Gatehouse station’ on the line was 6 miles from the town it claimed to serve.

For the next 100 years, from being the very model of a modern minor general commercial community at the heart of an improved (and cleared) agricultural landscape, Gatehouse slowly fossilised. By 1974, the Open University were able to use this once thriving town for an educational  film ‘Gatehouse of Fleet - a study in industrial archaeology’.

If Lanarkshire had followed the pattern of Sutherland and Galloway, then Airdrie’s growth would have petered-out in the 1840s once the mechanisation of weaving had been perfected. That Airdrie continued to grow through the nineteenth century was in part due to an accident of geology. As well as coal, beneath the fields around the town there was also ironstone.

In 1769, ownership of Airdrie and the lands around it passed from the Hamilton family, who had begun the towns development, to John Aitchison. After his death, his daughters continued to live at Airdrie House and encourage the development of the town into a Burgh, which it became in 1821.

In 1816, Alexander Baird, a tenant farmer who had prospered as the crops on his improved land fetched record prices during the Napoleonic wars, decided to diversify into the coal industry. He persuaded the Miss Atchison’s to lease the Rosolloch coal field near Airdrie to his son William. His son John continued as a farmer, but another son, Alexander was sent to Glasgow to sell the coal from Rosolloch. Later Alexander’s fourth son James was put in charge of another mine at Merrystown.

In 1826, the Baird family leased the coal fields of Gartsherrie estate to the west of Airdrie. In 1828 they leased an ironstone mine nearby. Their next step was to build an iron furnace at Gartsherrie which was completed in May 1830. This was built using a new system which replaced the ‘cold blast’ of traditional iron furnaces with superheated air. Under the old system it had taken 8 tons of coal to produce  1 ton of iron. Under the new system it took only 3 tons of coal. This cut the cost of the iron produced. By 1839, the Bairds had 8 furnaces in blast. By 1843 there were 16 and Gartsherrie was the largest iron works in the world.

To keep the furnaces blazing required a constant flow of coal from the Bairds coal mines. To keep their profits up, the Bairds also had to keep  the cost of coal down. In April 1837 there was a downturn in the Lanarkshire coal trade. Since their wages were based on the price of coal, the miners in Lanarkshire started working a three-day week to reduce coal supplies so the price and their wages would rise. The Bairds responded by sacking all their miners and evicting them from their company houses. The strike last 15 weeks, during which the Bairds sent surface workers down the mines to keep the iron furnaces going.  This is James Baird’s version of the events.

In April 1837 the colliers were receiving five shillings a day, but as trade was looking rather unfavourable, they took it into their heads that they would be able to keep up their wages by working only three days in the week, and they continued to do this for some time. The other coal masters took no steps to resist it ; but we resolved that we would not, if we could help it, have our output limited in this way, and we accordingly gave every man notice to quit in fourteen days…This strike taught the poor men a lesson which they did not soon forget. It was as determined and prolonged a strike as any we have ever had at Gartsherrie. Many of the wives and children suffered greatly during the fifteen weeks of their foolish idleness. When they returned their condition was sadly changed. The best their furniture was gone. Most of the people who returned were in squalid wretchedness, and some of those who had left us had succumbed to their sufferings, and were in their graves. All the time I remained about Gartsherrie—down to 1851 or 1852—I never again saw the colliers up to the same mark of health and comfort as that in which they were before this strike. [From 'The Bairds of Gartsherrie’ 1879, pp 67-69.]

Of the miners forced to return to work by hunger, only some were re-hired since the Bairds had already filled most of the miners’ former houses with new workers. What James Baird does not mention is that it was only after troops were brought in, stationed in Airdrie, that order was restored and the strike physically broken.

Altogether, between 1816 and 1874 there were 23 strikes in the Lanarkshire coal field. most of which affected the iron industry as well. As these realted industries grew, so did employment and output. By 1913 Scotland produced 43.2 million tonnes of coal and 140 000 people or 10% of the Scottish population were employed in the industry. In the same year, Scotland produced 1.3 million tons of pig iron and 1.4 million tons of steel. On the Clyde, 756 973 tons of shipping were launched equal to 1/3 of UK production and 18% of world wide production.

But along with locomotive building for export, another Scottish speciality, this industrial growth was frequently interrupted by periods when trade was ‘depressed’. This led to lay-offs and wage cuts. While one response to this roller-coast ride of good times and bad times was the growth of trade unions and then a Labour party, another was emigration. Over the course of the nineteenth century, 1. 9 million Scots left the country. This figure includes those directly forced from the land by the Highland Clearances, but most came from the Lowlands.

Of the Lowland emigrants, some left directly as a result of the Lowland Clearances in the early part of the century. But most of those who left later were a generation or more removed from the land. Even as late as the period 1951-1960 which was an ‘interlude of comparative prosperity’ for the west of Scotland, 127 000 people emigrated from the region. As  Anthony Slaven put it ‘The region failed to generate enough jobs to offer the economically-active age groups.’ [The Development of the West of Scotland 1750-1960’ (London, 1975)]

While the term ‘the Industrial Clearances’ has been used to describe the loss of Scotland’s  heavy industries in the 1980s and 1990s, this period marked the end rather than the beginning of the Scottish Clearances.

Scotland's  Industrial Clearances 1931

The problem at the end of this rapid run through of the Scottish Clearances remains the same as it was at the beginning. As far as most people in Scotland and wherever Scots have emigrated to around the world, the only clearances they know about are the Highland Clearances.

To talk about the Lowland Clearances let alone the Industrial Clearances is therefore quite confusing. To bring in these other clearances cannot help but make what happened in the Highlands (and Islands) less unique. If the Highland Clearances were not a unique event, then, while their injustice remains, their significance as part of Scotland’s history is diminished.

If history was a neutral subject, such rebalancing of the relative importance of past events would not be controversial. But in Scotland history has become a mirror in which the ghostly presences of Independence Past and Independence Future are reflected.

In this mirror, the Highland Clearances have become part of a ‘Jacobite Interpretation of History’. In this, the rejection of James VII as Scotland’s rightful king in 1689 set in motion a string of disasters which included the loss of Scotland’s independence in 1707 and a Highland Clearances which were driven not by economics but by politics. After the Jacobites almost managed a second Stuart Restoration in 1745, their defeat at Culloden in 1746 was followed by a decision to destroy the last vestiges of Scotland’s independence by clearing the Highlands of their Gaelic people and culture.

This is a very powerful story with deep roots. The Roman historian Tacitus quoted Calgacus, leader of Caledonian resistance to the Roman Empire, as saying

there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.

But this powerful story of the Highland Clearances starts to lose its strength if what happened in Galloway a century earlier is examined. Here a very similar process of clearing people from the land began before the Union of 1707. In Galloway the people were cleared from the land to make way for cattle as landowners took advantage of the 1666 English ban on Irish cattle.

The people cleared from the land were not Gaelic speakers nor were they Jacobites, if anything they were anti-Jacobites who supported king George I in 1715. Although the immediate trigger for Galloway Levellers uprising in 1724 was fresh wave of clearance, some of the dykes levelled that year had been built around cattle parks 30 or 40 years earlier.

While what happened in Galloway can be seen as a one-off event, the later Lowland Clearances cannot. The Lowland Clearances saw the disappearance of a  whole class of rural workers, roughly a third of the workforce, from the land. These were the cottars and along with the cottars their cots and croft lands also disappeared. But unlike what had happened earlier in Galloway and later in the Highlands and Islands, the cottars were not driven from the land by cattle and sheep.

The cottars lost their place on the land because the new system of arable farming was based on ’enlightened improvement’. This combined a rational or early scientific approach to land-management with the economic theories of Adam Smith and his contemporaries. The aim was to increase both the quantity and quality of arable crops and thus the economic value of the land.

The expectation was that this would modernise the Scottish economy so it could catch up with the English economy.  The cottars and traditional tenant farmers were part of pre-modern (medieval or feudal) Scotland and so had to be eliminated along with their ‘superstitious’ rather than enlightened methods of farming.

According to Adam Smith’s theory, increasing the surplus produced by the land while reducing the number of  farm workers would cut the cost of food. This would encourage the growth of ‘manufactures’ by cutting the cost of labour- since cheaper food meant wages could be lower. With lower labour costs, Scottish manufactures would be more competitive, stimulating Scotland’s commercial economy.

In the Lowlands Smith’s theory worked. Improving the physical quality of the soil while rationalising the management of the land increased crop production. The ‘surplus’ people cleared from the land found new occupations in Lowland towns and villages, many of which were themselves the creation of improving landowners. The new economy began to grow and was then given extra impetus by the industrial revolution. At first the industrial revolution was powered by water. Then coal became its fuel source, creating yet more jobs in mining and the production of steam engines.

In the Highlands and Islands however, the virtuous cycle of economic growth which offset the impact of the Lowland Clearances did not happen. Instead a vicious circle of economic decline set in. With only enough good quality land available to feed the existing population in good harvest years, attempts to modernise the region’s economy focused on livestock grazing inland and fishing around the coast. Neither activity provided sufficient employment for the existing population, let alone a growing one.

So while the region’s economy could become part of the new economy by providing wool for mechanised factories and fish to help feed the new industrial workforce, most of the people could not. Even after Thomas Telford oversaw the construction of 1200 miles of roads in the Highlands between 1803 and 1827 and the construction of the Caledonian Canal at a cost of £1 million, clearance continued into the 1850s and emigration into the second half of the twentieth century.  However over the past 30 years the population of the Highlands and Islands has recovered. At 448 392 (2011 census) it is approaching its 1831 level of 504 955. [Note- this figure includes the Northern Isles.]

But even in the rural south of Scotland- South Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders- where the Lowland Clearances were over by 1831, a similar pattern of population loss  followed by recent recovery can be seen. In Dumfries and Galloway, there was a population peak in 1851 of 158 890. The population then declined but by 2011 had recovered to 151 324.

What such region wide figures miss is the fine detail. In 1851, the population of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway was just over 44 000. It is now only 24 000. In Wigtownshire the population was 39 000 in 1851, today it is 29 000, with 10 000 living in the (former) ferry-port of Stranraer. In other words, even where there may appear to be a recovery of rural population, the reality is that the growth has mainly been concentrated towns like Inverness in the rural north or Dumfries in the rural south.

For at least some of the Scots cleared from the land in the Highlands and many of those cleared in the Lowlands, the growth of industry in west central Scotland provided an alternative to overseas migration.

In Lanarkshire, north Ayrshire and Renfrewshire between 1825 and 1840, iron production grew by 2000% from 25 000 tons to 500 000 tons. 15% of the iron was exported to the USA while the other main markets were the rapidly expanding shipbuilding and railway industries. By 1913, west  central Scotland produced half of the UK’s marine steam engines, a third of all steam locomotives and a third of all ships built in the UK. The shipyards on the Clyde were able to build more ships than all the shipyards in Germany combined. This growth in industrial production was matched by a rapid increase in Scotland’s overall population.

Between 1830 and 1911, the population of Scotland doubled from 2.3 million to 4.8 million. But during the same period, 2 million Scots emigrated overseas and 750 000 moved to England. If the economy was booming, why did so many Scots decide to leave? Part of the answer is that in Scotland wages were 10% lower than in England. Since as much as two thirds of the cost of building a ship were labour costs, this gave Scottish shipbuilders an advantage. But at the same time food and housing costs were higher than in the industrial areas of England. In 1911, over 50% of the Scottish population could afford only one or two room dwellings, compared with 7 % in England.

In the 1830s and 40s, apart from England and Wales, Scotland was the only industrialised country in the world. By the end of the 19th century most European countries as well as the USA and Japan were producing iron and steel, ships and locomotives. Faced with this competition, Scottish industrialists tried to keep their costs down by reducing wages. The 19th century global economy was also subject to booms and slumps leading to surges in unemployment. So while the few Scots who owned the coal mines, iron works, shipyards and locomotive works became millionaires, millions of ordinary Scots voted with their feet, abandoning the industrial hell that was North Britain to make new lives in new lands.

The two world wars of the 20th century and the recovery from them provided some respite from the decline of Scotland’s Victorian industries. Yet even during the post war boom of the 1950s, half a million Scots left the country. Despite nationalisation of the coal, railway and steel industries and state led attempts to diversify the economy, through the 1960s and 1970s all that had once seemed so solid continued to melt into air. The Industrial Clearances of the 1980s and 1990s marked the (almost) final withering away of Scotland’s Victorian industries.

To conclude: when placed in a wider context which includes both the Lowlands Clearances which came before and the Industrial Clearances which came after, the Highland Clearances lose their uniqueness. They become part of the Scottish Clearances.

The Scottish Clearances were initially an attempt by Scotland’s landowning and intellectual (Enlightened) elite to catch up with England by modernising Scotland’s economy. The aim was to transform Scotland’s economy and society by boot-strapping the country from an agricultural to a commercial nation. In the arable Lowlands this worked. In the pastoral Highlands and Southern Uplands it failed, creating huge swathes of depopulated ‘wilderness’  which remain empty of people to this day.

However, even before the process of Enlightened improvement was completed in the Lowlands with the clearance of the cottars from the land, it had already been superseded by an even more revolutionary revolution- the Industrial Revolution.  This revolution was not the commercial revolution anticipated by Adam Smith and his fellows. It was an energy revolution.

To meet the demands of this revolution, the newly improved fields of central Scotland were dug up to gain access to the coal and iron ore which lay beneath them. First canals and then railways were constructed across the corn fields linking mines, iron works and industrial towns in a dense network which all but erased the Enlightened landscape.

It was within this darkened industrial landscape, not the Highlands, that the real tragedy of Scotland’s history was played out. A tragedy that embraced  not only Scots who had been cleared from the land, but over 200 000 Irish people who had been cleared from their land by famine as well as landlords.

Over successive generations, children, women and men laboured in the factories and coal mines, shipyards  and iron works. But only a fraction of the wealth their labour created was ever returned to them. In despair, millions left Scotland- clearance on an industrial scale.

What drove Scotland’s industrial clearances was not just the appalling physical conditions Scotland’s working class had to endure. Through the power of their trade unions, the condition of the working class in Scotland was slowly improved. What helped drive the later industrial clearances was the conservatism of Scotland’s capitalist class. This class failed to heed the advice of the Communist Manifesto : ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production’.

Instead, Scotland’s industrial capitalists tried to preserve their early Victorian instruments of production even as Scotland entered the twentieth century. As a consequence, from the 1920s onwards their economic role was replaced by that of the State until they were ultimately extinguished by nationalisation. But although nationalisation did bring new investment, it could not reverse the decay of Scotland’s Victorian industrial infrastructure and an economy built on coal. Long before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, coal mines were being closed, railway lines ripped up and steel furnaces blown-out.

If the wealth from North Sea oil had not been squandered by Margaret Thatcher and her successors in pursuit of their neoliberal fantasies, it could have been used to help build a new Scotland. But it wasn’t and now, after the failure of the 2014 independence referendum and the failure of neoliberalism, Scotland’s future is as bleak as it has ever been.

In the past, the prospect of a future of endless austerity would have led to a wave of migration, of economic clearance. Will things be different this time?

Tata Steel- Industrial Clearance

Introduction

Henry Ford once famously said ‘History is bunk’. Or rather in 1916 he said  ‘History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.’

In 2014, present day Scotland almost made history by voting to become independent. Almost, but not quite. Interestingly, while the Yes campaign talked mostly about Scotland’s possible future, the No campaign talked more about the past. The main thrust of the No campaign emphasised the security and stability of the Union and the risks and uncertainties of independence.

The result was that 55% of voters in Scotland chose tradition over the chance to make history on the day.  On the other hand, a few months later voters in Scotland did make history by electing 56 SNP MPs  to the ’Mother of Parliaments’. This was a huge blow to the Labour party in Scotland which was reduced to one MP.  It was their worst result in over 100 years.

1918 Labour 6 MPs 22.1% of vote
1922 Labour 29 MPs 32.2 % * Largest party
1924 Labour 34 MPs 35.9% * Largest party
1929 Labour 36 MPs 42.3% * Largest party
1931 Labour 7 MPs 32.6%
1935 Labour 20 MPs 36.9%
1945 Labour 37 MPs 47.9 %* Largest party
1950 Labour 37 MPs 46.2% * Largest party
1951 Labour 35 MPs 47.8 % * Largest single party (Unionists 29 MPs, National Liberal 6)
1955 Labour 34 MPs 46.7 % * Largest single party (Unionists 30 MPs, National Liberal 6)
1959 until wiped out in 2015, Labour always largest party in Scotland.

The Labour party’s ability to dominate Scottish politics for so long is an indication of how profoundly Scotland had been transformed by the Industrial Revolution. But without the Lowland Clearances, Scotland could not have had an industrial revolution.

The traditional system of farming had been developed in the middle ages. It involved most of the population working on the land to produce just enough food to feed themselves. For an industrial revolution to happen, a way to produce more food with fewer people had to be found. Only then would there be enough people to work in factories and coalmines who then used their wages to buy food rather than have to grow their own.

Improving the quality of the soil and rationalising the way the land was farmed increased agricultural output. But to make farming more efficient, a whole class of rural workers- the cottars- had to be cleared from the land. But without a place on the land and without any alternative employment  was a recipe for rural unrest. In Galloway in 1724 there were no factories or other forms of alternative employment. So when people were cleared from the land to make way for cattle there was an armed uprising and the Galloway Clearances which took a regiment of troops several months to subdue.

However, when the main wave of the Lowland Clearances began from the 1760s onwards, it was a more gradual process. Landowners also started building new villages and towns where the people cleared from the land  could live and find work. By the 1780s, the first stages of the industrial revolution were underway, water-powered cotton m ills for example. By 1800, the steam-powered industrial revolution was underway. As it developed, it drew in more and more people. By the 1850s, Scotland was on its way to becoming an urban and industrial nation rather than a rural and agricultural one.

But the conditions the new working class in Scotland lived and worked in were extreme. Through the nineteenth century this led to the growth of trade unions and then, as working class men became able to vote in elections, to the birth of the Labour party.

In the Highlands very little of the land was arable. So when the same process of improvement was applied, large scale sheep farming was introduced. But in the Highlands, like Galloway in 1724, there were no factories or other alternative employment apart from fishing arounf the coast. In the Highlands, the clearances destroyed the traditional way of life but offered nothing in its place. This left a still powerful and bitter legacy. While some of the people cleared from the Highlands moved south to become  workers in the industrial Lowlands, many more emigrated overseas.

The harsh reality of industrial Scotland also led to emigration. While the new system of agriculture in the Lowlands no longer meant that a bad harvest year would lead to hunger, a downturn in trade did. To keep up their profits during economic slumps and depressions, the new industrial capitalists would cut wages and lay-off workers. If the workers went on strike, they faced eviction and starvation.

So while in theory, nineteenth and early twentieth century Scotland  was a far more wealthy and prosperous country than it had ever been before, in reality life for most Scots was as hard as it had ever been. The result was mass migration. Some 2 million Scots emigrated overseas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and another 700 000 moved to England. Even during the post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s, half a million Scots emigrated.

Although the phrase ‘ Industrial Clearances’ has been used to describe the Margaret Thatcher’s devastation of Scottish industry in the 1980s, to describe the loss of population from industrial Scotland as ‘the Industrial Clearances’ is more appropriate.

Taken altogether, the Lowland, Highland and Industrial Clearances make up the Scottish Clearances. They are a central part of Scotland’s history.  As history, they cannot be changed. But as Henry Ford said, what matters is the history we make today.  That is the history that we can change.


Part One

It was the greyest of grey days in grey Galloway.  It was January 2003. I was standing in the dreich drizzle on the Old Military Road on Kelton Hill just outside Castle Douglas, trying to describe what the landscape would have looked like on the same spot in 1724 for Andrew Cassell and Peter Aitchison.

There would have been none of the trees, none of the houses, none of the neat rectangular fields, not even the road, which wasn’t built until 1764. There would have been a newly built  dry-stane dyke though, since in the summer of 1724, the laird of Kelton and the minister of Kelton managed to save it from being demolished by the Galloway Levellers.

Andrew and Peter were interviewing me for a BBC Scotland radio series they were making on the Lowland Clearances. Most of what I said that cold, damp day didn‘t make the final cut, but the saving of the dyke was included as a dramatisation, along with my answer to Andrew’s question ‘But was what happened in Galloway back then clearance?’. Yes, I said, yes it was. The people, the families, who were evicted from their homes to make way for cattle farms were cleared from the land. As a ballad written at the time put it

The lords and lairds they drive us out
From mailings (crofts) where we dwell
The poor man says ‘Where shall we go?’
The rich says ‘Go to Hell!’

However, although the people of Galloway rose up in armed resistance against the first of the Lowland Clearances, when the main wave of clearance took place between 1760 and 1830, there was no repeat performance. The Lowland Clearances were a silent revolution, evoking none of the passion and outrage which still mark the Highland Clearances. What happened in the Highlands has never been forgotten. What happened in the Lowlands has never been remembered.

This difference between what is remembered and what is forgotten is now deeply embedded in Scotland’s historical consciousness. Along with the Gaelic language and the Jacobite rebellions, ‘the  Clearances’ are taken as marks of a historical as well as geographical division between Lowland and Highland Scotland.
Yet Gaelic was once spoken across virtually all of Scotland and support for the Jacobites was found where ever the Episcopalian church of Scotland resisted its Presbyterian twin.

If there is a difference between Highland and Lowland experience of what was called at the time ‘improvement’ it can be found in the soil.

On the brink of war in 1939, the reality the U-boats could starve  the UK into submission hit home. The Ordnance Survey quickly produced maps showing ‘land-quality’, ranging from Grade 1 -high quality land capable of growing a wide range of crops to Grade III -low quality land only fit for low intensity livestock grazing. The poorest quality land was shaded yellow on the maps.

For Scotland, the map is dominated by a huge block of yellow across the Highlands  and western islands, with another smaller block extending across the Southern Uplands. The better quality land, shown brown and green, extends from around the Moray Firth and  down the east coast where it expands inland to meet up with a broad band across the central Lowlands.

In the Borders, there is a eastern block  extending in land from Berwick and another centred on Carlisle, but extending along the north Solway coast into Galloway where the yellow of the Southrn Uplands separates the fertile lands of Wigtownshire from those of Ayrshire.

The ebb and flow of Scotland’s history can be traced across the colours on the map. North of the Forth, the fertile lands to the east where  the Kingdom of the Picts grew and flourished. The estimated population of Pictland is between 80 000 to100 000.To the west the Gaels of Dalriada possessed only a little good quality land. The estimated population of Dalriada is 10 000. When the two kingdoms joined to become Alba, expanding into the Lothians at the expense of the Northumbrian Kingdom was the next step. By the early twelfth century, David I of Scotland was able to make Carlisle his capital for a few years.

David is usually associated with the introduction of feudalism to Scotland, for example granting Annandale to a ‘Robert Bruce’ in 1124. But the deal with feudalism was that in exchange for grants of land, the new lords had to provide the king with an armed and mounted knight plus foot soldiers. This was an expensive- suits of armour did not come cheap.

So along with feudal grants of land- usually good quality land- came an agricultural revolution- the heavy plough. Made of wood but with an iron tipped cutting edge, these ploughs took a team of 6 or more oxen to pull. With these new ploughs, it was possible to grow more oats and barley. The trick was to build up the ploughed soil into long, wide raised beds called rigs, separated by drainage channels called furrows.

To manage the ploughs and their oxen took a whole team of workers who lived in new fermtouns, some of which still survive as modern day farms. Although it took more workers to manage the new ploughs than the old ‘Celtic’ foot ploughs and light ploughs, the new system provided enough oats to feed them and their families and a surplus for their feudal lord. The male farm workers also doubled up as the lord’s foot soldiers as required.

The new system worked fairly well in the more fertile areas, but not so well in upland and highland areas where there were only small patches of potential arable land. In these areas, cattle, sheep, horses (pony sized) and goats were grazed  extensively on the poorer soils while the patches of better land were worked intensively to grow oats and barley. As a result, the upland and highland areas had a lower overall population  density. In Galloway, the most mountainous area of about 100 square miles had farms around its edges, but none in its granite and raised bog heartland. It was probably only ever visited by deer-hunting expeditions.


Part Two


The basic pattern of land use which emerged in the twelfth century continued for the next 500 years. It is possible that the population of Scotland reached one million before the impact of the Black Death in the mid fourteenth century knocked it back to only half  a million and it took until the end of the seventeenth century to reach a  million again.

By 1755 the population  was about 1 250 000, with roughly 1/3 living in the Highlands and 2/3 in the Lowlands. But within 100 years, the census of 1851 showed that  the population had doubled to 2 888 742. For such rapid growth to occur, something must have changed.

The medieval pattern of land use was able to sustain a population of up to one million, but only just. If the Black Death is discounted as a one-off, the limiting factor on population growth then becomes the medieval farming system itself. It produced just enough food to feed the farm workers and a small surplus for the feudal land owners.

While these landowners may have been better fed and wealthier than the farm labourers, as they discovered after the Union of Crowns in 1603 and again after the Union of Parliaments in 1707, compared to English landowners they were little more than ragged beggars.

As is very well known, virtually every Scottish landowner became convinced that the infamous Darien project would magically make them as rich as English landowners without having to do any more than invest a bit of money in it. What is less well known is that many of the landowners in Galloway had already found a way to become wealthy by using their land in a different way.

This was because in 1666, English landowners were able to get a law passed in the English parliament banning the import of Irish cattle. Before the law was passed, about 100 000 Irish cattle were imported into England every year. Most of these went to feed London which already had a population of 500 000.

From customs records of cattle crossing from Scotland to England at Gretna, about 10 000 of these Irish cattle had originated in the Plantation of Ulster and crossed over to Portpatrick in Galloway before being driven south. Some of these cattle came from Donegal where the Murray family of Broughton in Wigtownshire owned 60 000 acres of Plantation land.

After 1666, Galloway landowners began sending their cattle to England, although from evidence of fines and seizures of cattle in Galloway and in England, at least some of the  cattle were originally Irish but had become ‘Scottish’ after a few weeks grazing in Galloway. This forced the landowners to start rearing authentically Scottish cattle in Galloway.

There was, however, a small problem.  Between 1666 and 1688, Galloway along with most of southern and western Scotland was caught up in a low-intensity civil and religious war with Charles II and then James VII and II. During this period, only landowners who were Stuart loyalists could sell cattle to England. But if they wanted to increase the supply of cattle, they would have to clear both upland farms-where the cattle were grazed in summer- and lowland farms -where they were kept over winter. But if they tried to do this, they risked provoking a major conflict.

But after 1689, it became possible for landowners loyal to the new regime of William of Orange to begin clearing their lands to make way for cattle. Leading this move  were the firmly Presbyterian and loyal Williamites the Herons of Kirroughtrie in Minnigaff parish. The Herons were able to export 1000 cattle year from their upland and lowland farms in the 1690s.

By selling their cattle in England, the Herons were able to earn hard cash- English gold guineas- with which they could buy up more farms where they could breed and fatten more cattle. From owning one small farm in the 1660s, by the Union of 1707 they owned 1/3 of all the land in Minngaff parish which, at 120 squares miles, was the largest in Galloway. However, as the Galloway Levellers pointed out in 1724, the Herons’ cattle herds had depopulated the parish and reduced the town (village) of Minnigaff to a ‘nest of beggars’.

That the Levellers had a point can be seen from a list of the inhabitants of Minngaff parish complied in 1684. This shows that while upland livestock farms in the parish supported only one or two families, arable farms along the fertile flood plain of the river Cree supported one tenant farmer and between five and ten cottar/ sub-tenant families. As the Herons bought up these farms and converted them from arable to pasture land for their cattle, most of the sub-tenant/ cottar families became  redundant. Working a traditional arable farm needed a large workforce. Managing a herd of cattle did not.

Unlike most of Scotland, where land ownership was concentrated into a few hands, land ownership in Galloway had  been fragmented into lots of small estates and even individual farms ever since the forfeiture of Douglas Lordship of Galloway to the Crown (James II) in 1455. Since then no one landowner had  managed to acquire more than a small portion of the region. This  led to a constant ‘churn’ of land ownership as the fortunes of several hundred minor lairds rose and fell.

The example of the Herons rise from small to large landowners on the back of the cattle trade was not lost on those Galloway landowners who were struggling to hang on to their estates. While their more successful peers could afford to stick with tradition, the fear of losing their lands persuaded some of the strugglers to have a go at the cattle trade and turn their arable farm into cattle pastures.

By 1724, what had begun as a trickle of evictions and clearance from the arable lands of Kirkcudbrightshire threatened to become a flood. The fear that their landlord might decide to enter the cattle trade and clear them from his lands united tenants and cottars across the county. What gave their uprising a militant edge  was a recent event.

By 1714, the ‘Killing Times’ of the 1680s were beginning to fade into the background of everyday life in Galloway. But then in late 1715, a small group of local Jacobites joined a larger group of northern English Jacobites and two thousand Highlanders in an attempt to capture Dumfries. The focus of the Hanovrai9n government was on the main Jacobite rebellion in the north of Scotland, so the defence of Dumfries was left to a locally raised volunteer militia. Some 3000 volunteers were raised and armed. This level of resistance persuaded the Jacobites to turn south where they were defeated at the Battle of Preston in November 1715.

As a side-effect, it also meant that in 1724 there were a lot of folk in Galloway with a wee bit of military training. And muskets. And a grievance.

Although other landowners were involved, the grievance focused on Sir Basil Hamilton of Baldoon and St Mary’s Isle. In Hamilton’s case it was a triple grievance.

1. In 1723 he cleared several families of his land near Kirkcudbright to create a large cattle enclosure.
2. The 400 cattle in his enclosure were illegally imported Irish cattle.
3. In 1715, he was one of the local Jacobites who tried to capture Dumfries.

On point 3, by rights he should have had his head chopped off at the Tower of London and forfeited all his lands. However, Hamilton was only 18 at the time and his mother Mary Dunbar, and his grandmother, Duchess Anne of Hamilton managed to save both his lands and his head. His fellow Jacobite William Gordon, Lord Kenmure had been executed and William Maxwell, earl of Nithsdale’s wife had smuggled him out often tower of London dressed as her female servant…

On point 2, his great-great grandfather David Dunbar I of Baldoon had been fined as early as 1669 for trying to pass off Irish cattle as his own. In 1682, he was still at it when an English magistrate seized 100 of Dunbar’s cattle, having declared them Irish rather than Scottish. What made this a grievance is that by smuggling in cheap Irish cattle and then passing them off as his own, Basil Hamilton was undercutting the legitimate local cattle trade -which was a threat to the Herons of Kirroughtrie amongst others.

On point 1, when the future king James II and VII was living in Scotland in the early 1680s, his wife Mary of Modena had become exasperated by Galloway and its rebellious Whigs (Covenanters). The whole district she declared, should be cleared of its revolting inhabitants and turned into a great hunting park. Her husband was  very keen on hunting. The Galloway Levellers quoted this in their (printed) propaganda broadsheets. Having failed in 1715, they said, the Jacobites (ie Hamilton) were now taking Mary of Modena’s advice and clearing King George I’s loyal subjects from the land so that they would face no local opposition when they next rebelled.

If the Galloway Levellers uprising had been a simple peasants revolt, the regiment of dragoons which arrived in June 1724 would have made short shrift of them. In a straight fight they would have been slaughtered. If they managed to avoid a direct confrontation, it would have been easy enough to capture a few ring-leaders and hang them.

None of this happened. Instead, in October 1724, the dragoons confronted a group of several hundred Levellers, but had been told by their commander to use ’only the flats of their swords’ against them. There were no fatalities and 200 Levellers were captured, but most were allowed to escape on the march back to Kirkcudbright.

A few Levellers did stand trial, but in a civil not a criminal case. The case was brought in January 1725 by Basil Hamilton who pursued a small group (25 out of the  1000 who had taken part) for damages to his cattle park dykes. He did win, but is unlikely to have received much in the way of damages from the Levellers, since only two owned any property and one was a 14 year old boy.

Part Three


The subtitle of Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell’s book on the Lowland Clearances is ‘Scotland’s Silent Revolution-1760 to 1830. But if the first clearances began in Galloway in the 1720s, why was the main phase of clearance delayed for forty years?

Part of the reason is that the main Lowland Clearances took place in arable farming areas and were almost a side-effect of attempts to boost production of oats, barley and wheat. In Galloway and later the Highlands, the clearances were a direct effect of replacing people with cattle and sheep. The new style of livestock farming only needed a few cowherds and shepherds, but the new style of arable farming still needed at least some farm labourers.

The market for Galloway cattle in the 1720s was England, but at that time there was no equivalent English demand for Scottish oats. As Dr Johnson noted in his Dictionary (1755) ‘Oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' The traditional (medieval) system of arable farming produced just enough grain to feed the farmers and their workforce, pay the landowners the rent and leave enough to sow to produce the next year’s crop. As an old Scots saying put it ‘Ane to saw, and ane to gnaw, and ane to pay the Laird witha'.

In a good harvest year, this system could produce a surplus of grain, but this was balanced out by bad harvest years when hunger compelled people to start eating the seed corn, which reduced the next year’s crop. This vicious cycle acted as a limit on Scotland’s population growth. Another effect was to limit the growth of Scotland’s urban population since they depended on buying rather than producing their own food. Periodic harvest failures pushed the cost of their food up and a major harvest failure risked cutting it off altogether.

After the failure of the Darien Scheme, many influential Scots landowners and merchants became persuaded that the Union with England would stimulate the Scottish economy so it could break out of this vicious cycle. But it soon became obvious that the Union was not delivering on this hope. Scots would somehow have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. This led to the foundation in 1723 of the ‘Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture’. As its title suggests the Honourable Society’s main aim was to modernise Scottish farming. However it also planned to develop the Scottish linen industry. This was achieved in 1727 with the establishment of the ’Board of Trustees for Improvement in Manufactures’ which the Society of Improvers helped set up.

The Society’s attempts to modernise Scottish framing were less immediately successful. Robert Maxwell of Arkland in Galloway was the Society’s Secretary. In 1723 Maxwell had taken a 19 year lease of Cliftonhall farm near Edinburgh and set about trying to improve it. He succeeded in increasing crop production, but bankrupted himself in the process. He inherited Arkland in1745 but to cover his debts was forced to sell the farm in 1749 for £ 10 304 Scots (£857 sterling). Another leading member of the Society of Improvers, John Cockburn of Ormiston was also ruined by improvement and had to sell his estate to the earl of Hopetoun.

The difficulty these early improvers faced was that levelling the medieval raised rigs, enclosing the fields with new dykes and hedges, cutting drains and fertilising the new fields with lime was an expensive and labour intensive process. Once the new system was in place, labour costs could be cut by clearing the cottars from the land and re-employing a few as day labourers, but so long as demand and hence the price of grain remained static there was little profit to be made from their expensive improvements.

Although Robert Maxwell managed to produce a weighty 450 page long  ‘Select Transactions of the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture  in 1743, the Society faded away after 1745/6.Politics as well as economics played a part in its decline. Among its 400 members were several Jacobite landowners. These included James Steuart (1713-1780) of Coltness who was forced into exile in 1746 as a Jacobite supporter. After returning from exile in 1763, Steuart published ‘An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy’. Although overshadowed by Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (1776), Steuart’s was the first Scottish book on political economy.

This where things started to get complicated, with a whole combination of factors overlapping and interlocking feeding in to what were to become the Lowland Clearances.

One factor is that after 50 years, the Union of 1707 had started to pay off- but only for a few Scots. To the west, the Atlantic trade in slaves, sugar and tobacco made some merchants, especially in Glasgow, very, very rich. To the east, other Scots were able to make huge fortunes in India. But although they were now very rich, these merchants lacked an essential requirement if they were to become ‘gentlemen’. They were not landowners and so could not become part of ‘society’.

To raise their social standing, the newly rich elite had to buy land, the more the better. At the same time, as Henry Home /lord Kames made clear in his book ‘The Gentleman Farmer’ (1776), as landowners the new Scottish elite had a moral and patriotic duty to increase the wealth and strength of the nation by improving their new lands.

Another factor which came into play had its origins in Adam Smith’s theory of economic and social development. Smith, along with Kames and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers believed that there were four historical stages of social and economic development. The first was the hunting stage, the second the pasturage or livestock farming stage, the third the arable farming stage and the fourth the commerce or merchant trading stage.

Critically, Smith believed that while England and France had reached this the fourth stage, Scotland wasn’t there yet. Scotland was still in the process of transition from the second to the third stages of development. To reach the fourth stage, Scotland would have to increase the surplus produced by its arable farms so that towns manufacturing goods for trade could be developed. This is the gist of this quote from ‘Wealth of Nations’

As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, so the industry which procures the former, must necessarily be prior to that which ministers to the latter. The cultivation and improvement of the country, therefore, which affords subsistence, must, necessarily, be prior to the increase of the town, which furnishes only the means of conveniency and luxury. It is the surplus produce of the country only, or what is over and
above the maintenance of the cultivators, that constitutes the subsistence of the town, which can therefore increase only with the increase of this surplus produce. [Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol 1, page 402]

Between 1764 and 1766, Adam Smith was tutor to Henry Scott, 3rd duke of Buccleuch. As one of Scotland’s largest and wealthiest landowners, Scott’s step-father had expected him to live in London and become a British politician. But under Smith’s influence, Scott decided to live in Scotland and start improving his lands.

A final factor which influenced the Lowland Clearances can be traced back to the Society of Improvers and their promotion of the Board of Trustees for Improvement of Manufactures. In 1728, the Scottish linen industry produced 2.2 million yards of finished cloth. Supported and encouraged by the Board of Trustees, by 1768 this had risen to 11.8 million yards and by 1798 output reached 21.3 million yards. Although output then declined, this was partly due to the rapid rise of the Scottish cotton industry after 1780.

In 1780 there were 25 000 linen hand-loom weavers in Scotland. By 1800 there were 58 000 cotton and linen hand-loom weavers. These weavers and other textile workers needed to be fed. So did the population of Glasgow. Between 1700 and 1750, Glasgow’s population only grew by 10 000, but in the next 50 years it grew by 54 000.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, there was little reward for any landowner or their tenants for improving the land. In the second half of the century there was, as demand for food grew and prices increased.

What drove the Lowland Clearances from the 1760s onwards then, was this combination of new super-rich landowners able to afford to improve their lands, an Enlightened economic theory which called for improvement and, most importantly, the prospect of financial reward which encouraged even the most cautious and conservative of landowners to get involved.


Part Four 


Before the Lowland Clearances began, Robert Bruce and William Wallace would have had little difficulty recognising the Lowland landscape as Scotland. After the Clearances it would have seemed like a foreign country to them. Everything had changed, changed utterly.

Some changes had occurred since the Middle Ages, but these were invisible and not marked in the landscape. Fpr example, there is a rental-roll from 1375 for Buittle parish in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright which lists the tenants on each of 12 farms. Most have 3 or 4 tenants but the larger farm of Almorness has 9 and one, Breoch,  has 11. However, by the seventeenth century in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright most farms had only one tenant, although a few had two (often father and son).

The farms didn’t need a smaller workforce, but a new rural class of cottars had been formed. They lived in cots (cottages) and had the use of a small parcel of land, their croft, on which they could grow their own food and/or graze cow or a few sheep. In exchange they provided the tenant farmer with labour on the farm as required- in the winter and autumn ploughing and thrashing grain, in the spring and summer planting, peat-cutting, harvesting and hay-making.

When the physical transformation of the landscape began, the cottars’ small plots of land were swept away. An example of what the rationalisation of the traditional farms involved was given by Andrew Wight, writing in 1782. This example of improvement was drawn up by Henry Home, lord Kames. In 1761, his daughter Jean had married Patrick Heron IV (1736-1803). Heron’s family had grown wealthy through Galloway’s cattle trade, but the farms to be improved were arable farms near Dumfries. Heron’s tenant was James Rome, described by Andrew Wight as ‘the most remarkable man in Scotland for enterprise and expedition’.

As Rome explained to Wight ‘I entered to these improvements at Whitsunday 1763, upon a thirty years lease, in partnership with the proprietor, Mr Heron of Heron. The plan was formed by Lord Kames…’
Rome then gave Wight a detailed description of the immense effort such improvement required. To improve the 144 acres of Ingleston Hill, 90 horses and 24 workers laboured for 32 days to carry and spread 48 346 bags of shell-marl. The hill was then ploughed, first with a team of 6 oxen led by 3 men followed by a team of 4 horses. The 200 acres of Clouden-park were similarly improved and planted with turnips. Kames monitored the progress of Rome’s improvements and in 1770 commented that he had never seen better work.

Part of  James Rome’s work involved removing the existing broad rigs from Ingleston. Wight then discussed the improvement of  Baldoon in Kirkinner parish, Wigtownshire. A hundred years earlier, Baldoon had been owned by the Dunbar family who had a cattle park built there covering 1.5 square miles and which could hold 1000 cattle. Through his mother, Mary Dunbar, the Galloway Leveller’s bête noire Basil Hamilton inherited Baldoon. By 1760, Hamilton’s son Dunbar Hamilton had become the 4th earl of Selkirk and a Mr Jeffray managed the lands for the earl.

As Jeffray explained in a letter to Wight, beginning in 1760 it took 3 years to level 300 acres of old crooked rig and replace them with narrower straight rigs. In 1455, Baldoon had been one of the Douglas lords of Galloway’s grange, that is arable, lands so these ‘old crooked rigs’ were definitely medieval. The new narrow rigs were needed because undersoil drainage by tile drains did not come into use until the early nineteenth century.

Once the old crooked rigs had been done away with and the soil fertilised with shell-marl or lime, new square or rectangular fields enclosed with dykes or hedges were made and new farm buildings built of mortared stones with slate roofs were constructed. Networks of estate roads were built, linked to the growing network of substantially built turnpike roads, along which new villages and towns were built. In Dumfries and Galloway alone, 81 new towns and villages were built between 1750 and 1830.

The new villages were built to accommodate the cottars and tnant farmers who had lost their farms. This was a lesson Lowland landowners had been taught by the Galloway Levellers. But it also meant that there was a workforce close to the land but no longer living on it available at harvest time. Getting the harvest in as quickly as possible in case it was damaged by wet weather or storms was a vital and still labour intensive process.

The new towns had an additional function. With their larger population, fed by the new farming system, the landowners who planned them hoped they would become centres of commerce as Adam Smith proposed. The growth of Airdrie in Lanarkshire was encouraged by the Hamilton family who owned the surrounding lands. As early as 1695, they set up a market in Airdrie. First a village of 300 people developed and then it became a centre for linen weaving.

Weaving was a skill which could be transferred from the traditional to the new economy. By the first census of 1801 the population of Airdrie had grown to 4631 as it absorbed  rural workers cleared from the land. Agriculture in Lanarkshire benefited from the growth of Glasgow, but this had the effect of encouraging landowners to step up the process of improvement, pushing more people off the land. The Hamilton family had a private act passed in 1821 giving ‘their’ town the legal status of a burgh. By this time Airdie’s population was 7362. This had doubled to 14 435 by 1851.However this growth was due to the ‘pull’ of the new iron industry and its associated coal mines industrialisation rather than the ‘push’ or Lowland clearance.

The new fields, farms, roads, villages and towns were also part of a new economy. After the Union of 1707, all the old Scots money circulating in Scotland was collected in Edinburgh ahead of the conversion to sterling. When this was done, it was discovered that 35% of the coins collected were not Scots at all. Some were English, but 30% were not even British but came from France, Holland, Spain and other countries.

The amount of foreign currency was high because apart from merchants trading with Europe, most Scots had little need for cash. They lived in a ‘self-provisioning’ countryside where they provided food, clothing and shelter for themselves rather than having to buy these basic essentials.

But in the new economy, farms were now focused on producing food for sale in a commercial system. Now rent had to be paid on the new farm cottages and the new houses in the new villages. Food, clothing and shelter were now commodities to be bought and sold. Tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar and clothes made from cotton had to be purchased. Gradually, everything in this new economy had to be paid for.

The other side of the new coin was that there was now a demand for carpenters and cobblers, brewers and tailors, road-menders and cart-builders, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. This was very different from the situation in Galloway a generation before when the Galloway Levellers claimed that -

Every year several tenants are exposed to the mountains and know not where to go or get any place; nay it is known that some years ago that some of these poor distressed people have, from despair, put hands in themselves and have been found hanged in their own houses about the term time when they were obliged to go away and did not know where to go…

In the old economy and society, to lose your place on the land was to lose the security of your place in the world. In the new society and economy, it was the old world that had lost its security. As a result hundreds of thousands of Scots had to find a new place in a world which was no longer their land.

Part Five

Why has the clearance of the Highlands been remembered when the clearance of the Lowlands has not? One reason is that the Highlands were still being cleared in the 1850s and attracted the attention of Karl Marx.

The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto considered culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a former chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not find on the soil cultivated by them even the spot necessary for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland.
This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart  and James Anderson.  In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. As an example of the method obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.

As well as Marx, newspapers like the Inverness Courier, the Scotsman and the pre-Rupert Murdoch Times reported on the more dramatic, that is traumatic, incidents of  clearance. But while there were expressions of public sympathy for the victims and outrage against the landowners, the absolute right of property owners to clear their lands of people remained. It was not until the 1880s, a hundred years since the process of clearance began in the Highlands and Islands that the ‘Crofters’ War’ brought it to an end.

The root of the problem in the Highlands was that there was very little arable land but a lot of rough grazing land. In the summer, the rough grazing land could be used to feed cattle and small  flocks of sheep. The people, however, needed the arable land to grow enough oats to feed themselves through the winter. This limited the numbers of cattle and sheep the land could support. But if the arable land was used as pasture for cattle or sheep, larger herds of cattle or flocks of sheep could be kept. The livestock could be over wintered on the better quality land and then allowed to graze on the poorer quality land in the spring and summer.

On the other hand, any growth in the human population would be difficult to sustain without the risk of a bad harvest leading to starvation. Growing potatoes rather than oats as the staple crop was a way to support a larger population but a failure of the potato crop would also lead to starvation.

Alongside this problem of how the people who lived on the land were to be fed as their population grew was another one. This was the wider shift from an economy based on subsistence to an economy based on money.  This was a gradual change in the Highlands. It was possible for landowners who saw themselves, and were seen by their tenants, as successors to the ceann-fine or ‘head of the clan’ to maintain traditional land-use practices and the traditional economy. In good  harvest years their tenants would pay their rent, in bad harvest years they would not. In very bad years, the landowners would provide food to keep the tenants from starving.
However a series of poor harvest years combined with population growth could lead to an accumulation of rent arrears. This reduced the landowners income from the land/people. If there was then a harvest failure and the landowners had to buy food to keep the people from starving, debts rapidly mounted. This either bankrupted the landowners, forcing the sale of the land or pushed the landowner into the new economy. In either case the result was the same- the new landowners or the existing landowner would start clearing the people from the land to make way for sheep.

The advantages of replacing people with sheep were two-fold. Firstly, from the end of the eighteenth century until wool started arriving from Australia in the later nineteenth century, the price of wool remained high. This was a result of greater demand as the industrial revolution was applied to the woollen industry. This made sheep farming a profitable form of land use.

Secondly, in the new economy, poor people who were at risk of starvation were seen as a financial burden on landowners. Either the landowners had to buy food directly for their starving tenants or indirectly via parish poor rates. Overseas or internal emigration relived the wealthy of this oppressive burden and made their lands more valuable. Thanks to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, it could also be argued that landowners who allowed their tenants to multiply beyond the ability of the land to support them were immoral if not outright criminals.

The new economy acted like a slowly tightening vice on the Highlands and Islands. In its iron grip, the old world and its Gaelic culture was year by year, eviction by eviction, township by township forced to the brink of extinction.

Was there an alternative? Was clearance inevitable?

 In terms of land-use, there were alternatives. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were six iron furnaces working in the Highlands. They were fuelled by charcoal made from wood  felled from trees up and down the west coast of the Highlands and on many of the islands. Keeping a charcoal based iron industry going would have been difficult, but its existence does show that there were areas of forest and woodland in the Highlands and Islands.

If the areas of forest had been extended through new plantations combined with improvement through liming and drainage of the arable areas along with a more mixed (cattle and sheep) form of livestock farming, the  ecology of the region would have benefited in the long term. Small scale industrial developments -wood-working, boat-building, leather-making, woollen mills and the like- could have provided sources of employment and income.

This would have required adopting and pursuing a region-wide economic development strategy, alien to the spirit of the times. Landowners would have had to agree to forgo the instant profits generated by sheep-farming. And, as the Lowland Clearances showed, the necessary social and economic changes would still have led to the loss of traditional ways of life and culture.

As the later nineteenth century experience of the Lowlands, especially the rural south showed, the increasing tempo of the industrial revolution had the effect of undermining the viability of the non-farming rural economy. The tanneries, small cotton mills, breweries, brickworks, slate-quarries and other rural industries could not compete with the cheaper costs of larger scale rivals once the railway system cut transport costs.

Part Six 

By 1830, the Lowland Clearances were over. The countryside had been transformed. Apart from the spread of dairy farming in the south west which followed the growth of the railway network, the  farmed landscape has changed very little since then. In the Southern Uplands, especially in Galloway, since the 1960s forestry has replaced sheep farming which is a striking change of land use and appearance.

In the Highlands, the clearances continued into the 1850s.

In both the rural south and rural north, despite the clearances, it was only after 1851 that the overall population began to decline. This seems puzzling. The explanation is that in the Highlands, many of the people cleared were re-settled around the coast while in the Lowlands they were re-settled in new towns and villages. The new coastal settlements in the Highlands were supposed to prosper through fishing, but most failed to do so. The new towns and villages in the Lowlands were more successful to begin with, but then lost out as growth became more concentrated in industrial areas.

Today, Helmsdale in Sutherland, Gatehouse of Fleet in Galloway and Airdrie in Lanarkshire have populations of 640, 990 and 42 000 respectively.

Helmsdale was developed from 1812 onwards to provide housing and employment for people cleared from the land. Gatehouse was likewise developed as a planned town from 1766 onwards. About the same time, the existing village of Airdrie was developed as a centre for the linen weaving industry, becoming a Burgh in 1821. Gatehouse had become a Burgh in 1795. Helmsdale did not become a Burgh.

Helmsdale’s main industry was herring fishing, but in 1790 a cotton spinning mill was built at Spinningdale about 30 miles away. This burnt down in 1808 and was nor rebuilt. Closer to Helmsdale, at Brora 11 miles away, there was a coal mine. Coal had been mined there on a small scale since the late sixteenth century and used for salt making. Between  1812 and 1820, in an attempt to provide employment for people cleared from his lands, the 2nd Duke of Sutherland spent £31 000 in an attempt to revive the mine. The attempt failed in 1825, but another was made in 1872 after the railway reached Sutherland. This was more successful and the mine survived for 100 years until it closed in 1974.

In 1724,  the dykes of Alexander Murray’s cattle park at Cally in Kirkcudbrightshire were thrown down by the Galloway Levellers. Forty years later, when his son James was busy improving Cally estate, he made sure that history would not repeat itself by planning a new town called Gatehouse of Fleet. Within 30 years, as well as two cotton mills, the new town had a tannery, a brewery, a brickworks and a brass  foundry. From zero the population had grown to 1150 and reached 1370 by 1841.

By 1850 however, the water-powered cotton mills had closed, unable to compete with their steam-powered rivals. Then, despite the best efforts of local landowners, the railway from Castle Douglas to Stranraer by-passed the town when it was opened in 1861. ‘Gatehouse station’ on the line was 6 miles from the town it claimed to serve.

For the next 100 years, from being the very model of a modern minor general commercial community at the heart of an improved (and cleared) agricultural landscape, Gatehouse slowly fossilised. By 1974, the Open University were able to use this once thriving town for an educational  film ‘Gatehouse of Fleet - a study in industrial archaeology’.

If Lanarkshire had followed the pattern of Sutherland and Galloway, then Airdrie’s growth would have petered-out in the 1840s once the mechanisation of weaving had been perfected. That Airdrie continued to grow through the nineteenth century was in part due to an accident of geology. As well as coal, beneath the fields around the town there was also ironstone.

In 1769, ownership of Airdrie and the lands around it passed from the Hamilton family, who had begun the towns development, to John Aitchison. After his death, his daughters continued to live at Airdrie House and encourage the development of the town into a Burgh, which it became in 1821.

In 1816, Alexander Baird, a tenant farmer who had prospered as the crops on his improved land fetched record prices during the Napoleonic wars, decided to diversify into the coal industry. He persuaded the Miss Atchison’s to lease the Rosolloch coal field near Airdrie to his son William. His son John continued as a farmer, but another son, Alexander was sent to Glasgow to sell the coal from Rosolloch. Later Alexander’s fourth son James was put in charge of another mine at Merrystown.

In 1826, the Baird family leased the coal fields of Gartsherrie estate to the west of Airdrie. In 1828 they leased an ironstone mine nearby. Their next step was to build an iron furnace at Gartsherrie which was completed in May 1830. This was built using a new system which replaced the ‘cold blast’ of traditional iron furnaces with superheated air. Under the old system it had taken 8 tons of coal to produce  1 ton of iron. Under the new system it took only 3 tons of coal. This cut the cost of the iron produced. By 1839, the Bairds had 8 furnaces in blast. By 1843 there were 16 and Gartsherrie was the largest iron works in the world.

To keep the furnaces blazing required a constant flow of coal from the Bairds coal mines. To keep their profits up, the Bairds also had to keep  the cost of coal down. In April 1837 there was a downturn in the Lanarkshire coal trade. Since their wages were based on the price of coal, the miners in Lanarkshire started working a three-day week to reduce coal supplies so the price and their wages would rise. The Bairds responded by sacking all their miners and evicting them from their company houses. The strike last 15 weeks, during which the Bairds sent surface workers down the mines to keep the iron furnaces going.  This is James Baird’s version of the events.

In April 1837 the colliers were receiving five shillings a day, but as trade was looking rather unfavourable, they took it into their heads that they would be able to keep up their wages by working only three days in the week, and they continued to do this for some time. The other coal masters took no steps to resist it ; but we resolved that we would not, if we could help it, have our output limited in this way, and we accordingly gave every man notice to quit in fourteen days…This strike taught the poor men a lesson which they did not soon forget. It was as determined and prolonged a strike as any we have ever had at Gartsherrie. Many of the wives and children suffered greatly during the fifteen weeks of their foolish idleness. When they returned their condition was sadly changed. The best their furniture was gone. Most of the people who returned were in squalid wretchedness, and some of those who had left us had succumbed to their sufferings, and were in their graves. All the time I remained about Gartsherrie—down to 1851 or 1852—I never again saw the colliers up to the same mark of health and comfort as that in which they were before this strike. [From 'The Bairds of Gartsherrie’ 1879, pp 67-69.]

Of the miners forced to return to work by hunger, only some were re-hired since the Bairds had already filled most of the miners’ former houses with new workers. What James Baird does not mention is that it was only after troops were brought in, stationed in Airdrie, that order was restored and the strike physically broken.

Altogether, between 1816 and 1874 there were 23 strikes in the Lanarkshire coal field. most of which affected the iron industry as well. As these realted industries grew, so did employment and output. By 1913 Scotland produced 43.2 million tonnes of coal and 140 000 people or 10% of the Scottish population were employed in the industry. In the same year, Scotland produced 1.3 million tons of pig iron and 1.4 million tons of steel. On the Clyde, 756 973 tons of shipping were launched equal to 1/3 of UK production and 18% of world wide production.

But along with locomotive building for export, another Scottish speciality, this industrial growth was frequently interrupted by periods when trade was ‘depressed’. This led to lay-offs and wage cuts. While one response to this roller-coast ride of good times and bad times was the growth of trade unions and then a Labour party, another was emigration. Over the course of the nineteenth century, 1. 9 million Scots left the country. This figure includes those directly forced from the land by the Highland Clearances, but most came from the Lowlands.

Of the Lowland emigrants, some left directly as a result of the Lowland Clearances in the early part of the century. But most of those who left later were a generation or more removed from the land. Even as late as the period 1951-1960 which was an ‘interlude of comparative prosperity’ for the west of Scotland, 127 000 people emigrated from the region. As  Anthony Slaven put it ‘The region failed to generate enough jobs to offer the economically-active age groups.’ [The Development of the West of Scotland 1750-1960’ (London, 1975)]

While the term ‘the Industrial Clearances’ has been used to describe the loss of Scotland’s  heavy industries in the 1980s and 1990s, this period marked the end rather than the beginning of the Scottish Clearances.


Part Seven 


The problem at the end of this rapid run through of the Scottish Clearances remains the same as it was at the beginning. As far as most people in Scotland and wherever Scots have emigrated to around the world, the only clearances they know about are the Highland Clearances.

To talk about the Lowland Clearances let alone the Industrial Clearances is therefore quite confusing. To bring in these other clearances cannot help but make what happened in the Highlands (and Islands) less unique. If the Highland Clearances were not a unique event, then, while their injustice remains, their significance as part of Scotland’s history is diminished.

If history was a neutral subject, such rebalancing of the relative importance of past events would not be controversial. But in Scotland history has become a mirror in which the ghostly presences of Independence Past and Independence Future are reflected.

In this mirror, the Highland Clearances have become part of a ‘Jacobite Interpretation of History’. In this, the rejection of James VII as Scotland’s rightful king in 1689 set in motion a string of disasters which included the loss of Scotland’s independence in 1707 and a Highland Clearances which were driven not by economics but by politics. After the Jacobites almost managed a second Stuart Restoration in 1745, their defeat at Culloden in 1746 was followed by a decision to destroy the last vestiges of Scotland’s independence by clearing the Highlands of their Gaelic people and culture.

This is a very powerful story with deep roots. The Roman historian Tacitus quoted Calgacus, leader of Caledonian resistance to the Roman Empire, as saying

there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.


But this powerful story of the Highland Clearances starts to lose its strength if what happened in Galloway a century earlier is examined. Here a very similar process of clearing people from the land began before the Union of 1707. In Galloway the people were cleared from the land to make way for cattle as landowners took advantage of the 1666 English ban on Irish cattle.

The people cleared from the land were not Gaelic speakers nor were they Jacobites, if anything they were anti-Jacobites who supported king George I in 1715. Although the immediate trigger for Galloway Levellers uprising in 1724 was fresh wave of clearance, some of the dykes levelled that year had been built around cattle parks 30 or 40 years earlier.

While what happened in Galloway can be seen as a one-off event, the later Lowland Clearances cannot. The Lowland Clearances saw the disappearance of a  whole class of rural workers, roughly a third of the workforce, from the land. These were the cottars and along with the cottars their cots and croft lands also disappeared. But unlike what had happened earlier in Galloway and later in the Highlands and Islands, the cottars were not driven from the land by cattle and sheep.

The cottars lost their place on the land because the new system of arable farming was based on ’enlightened improvement’. This combined a rational or early scientific approach to land-management with the economic theories of Adam Smith and his contemporaries. The aim was to increase both the quantity and quality of arable crops and thus the economic value of the land.

The expectation was that this would modernise the Scottish economy so it could catch up with the English economy.  The cottars and traditional tenant farmers were part of pre-modern (medieval or feudal) Scotland and so had to be eliminated along with their ‘superstitious’ rather than enlightened methods of farming.

According to Adam Smith’s theory, increasing the surplus produced by the land while reducing the number of  farm workers would cut the cost of food. This would encourage the growth of ‘manufactures’ by cutting the cost of labour- since cheaper food meant wages could be lower. With lower labour costs, Scottish manufactures would be more competitive, stimulating Scotland’s commercial economy.

In the Lowlands Smith’s theory worked. Improving the physical quality of the soil while rationalising the management of the land increased crop production. The ‘surplus’ people cleared from the land found new occupations in Lowland towns and villages, many of which were themselves the creation of improving landowners. The new economy began to grow and was then given extra impetus by the industrial revolution. At first the industrial revolution was powered by water. Then coal became its fuel source, creating yet more jobs in mining and the production of steam engines.

In the Highlands and Islands however, the virtuous cycle of economic growth which offset the impact of the Lowland Clearances did not happen. Instead a vicious circle of economic decline set in. With only enough good quality land available to feed the existing population in good harvest years, attempts to modernise the region’s economy focused on livestock grazing inland and fishing around the coast. Neither activity provided sufficient employment for the existing population, let alone a growing one.

So while the region’s economy could become part of the new economy by providing wool for mechanised factories and fish to help feed the new industrial workforce, most of the people could not. Even after Thomas Telford oversaw the construction of 1200 miles of roads in the Highlands between 1803 and 1827 and the construction of the Caledonian Canal at a cost of £1 million, clearance continued into the 1850s and emigration into the second half of the twentieth century.  However over the past 30 years the population of the Highlands and Islands has recovered. At 448 392 (2011 census) it is approaching its 1831 level of 504 955. [Note- this figure includes the Northern Isles.]

But even in the rural south of Scotland- South Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders- where the Lowland Clearances were over by 1831, a similar pattern of population loss  followed by recent recovery can be seen. In Dumfries and Galloway, there was a population peak in 1851 of 158 890. The population then declined but by 2011 had recovered to 151 324.

What such region wide figures miss is the fine detail. In 1851, the population of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway was just over 44 000. It is now only 24 000. In Wigtownshire the population was 39 000 in 1851, today it is 29 000, with 10 000 living in the (former) ferry-port of Stranraer. In other words, even where there may appear to be a recovery of rural population, the reality is that the growth has mainly been concentrated towns like Inverness in the rural north or Dumfries in the rural south.

For at least some of the Scots cleared from the land in the Highlands and many of those cleared in the Lowlands, the growth of industry in west central Scotland provided an alternative to overseas migration.

In Lanarkshire, north Ayrshire and Renfrewshire between 1825 and 1840, iron production grew by 2000% from 25 000 tons to 500 000 tons. 15% of the iron was exported to the USA while the other main markets were the rapidly expanding shipbuilding and railway industries. By 1913, west  central Scotland produced half of the UK’s marine steam engines, a third of all steam locomotives and a third of all ships built in the UK. The shipyards on the Clyde were able to build more ships than all the shipyards in Germany combined. This growth in industrial production was matched by a rapid increase in Scotland’s overall population.

Between 1830 and 1911, the population of Scotland doubled from 2.3 million to 4.8 million. But during the same period, 2 million Scots emigrated overseas and 750 000 moved to England. If the economy was booming, why did so many Scots decide to leave? Part of the answer is that in Scotland wages were 10% lower than in England. Since as much as two thirds of the cost of building a ship were labour costs, this gave Scottish shipbuilders an advantage. But at the same time food and housing costs were higher than in the industrial areas of England. In 1911, over 50% of the Scottish population could afford only one or two room dwellings, compared with 7 % in England.

In the 1830s and 40s, apart from England and Wales, Scotland was the only industrialised country in the world. By the end of the 19th century most European countries as well as the USA and Japan were producing iron and steel, ships and locomotives. Faced with this competition, Scottish industrialists tried to keep their costs down by reducing wages. The 19th century global economy was also subject to booms and slumps leading to surges in unemployment. So while the few Scots who owned the coal mines, iron works, shipyards and locomotive works became millionaires, millions of ordinary Scots voted with their feet, abandoning the industrial hell that was North Britain to make new lives in new lands.

The two world wars of the 20th century and the recovery from them provided some respite from the decline of Scotland’s Victorian industries. Yet even during the post war boom of the 1950s, half a million Scots left the country. Despite nationalisation of the coal, railway and steel industries and state led attempts to diversify the economy, through the 1960s and 1970s all that had once seemed so solid continued to melt into air. The Industrial Clearances of the 1980s and 1990s marked the (almost) final withering away of Scotland’s Victorian industries.

To conclude: when placed in a wider context which includes both the Lowlands Clearances which came before and the Industrial Clearances which came after, the Highland Clearances lose their uniqueness. They become part of the Scottish Clearances.

The Scottish Clearances were initially an attempt by Scotland’s landowning and intellectual (Enlightened) elite to catch up with England by modernising Scotland’s economy. The aim was to transform Scotland’s economy and society by boot-strapping the country from an agricultural to a commercial nation. In the arable Lowlands this worked. In the pastoral Highlands and Southern Uplands it failed, creating huge swathes of depopulated ‘wilderness’  which remain empty of people to this day.

However, even before the process of Enlightened improvement was completed in the Lowlands with the clearance of the cottars from the land, it had already been superseded by an even more revolutionary revolution- the Industrial Revolution.  This revolution was not the commercial revolution anticipated by Adam Smith and his fellows. It was an energy revolution.

To meet the demands of this revolution, the newly improved fields of central Scotland were dug up to gain access to the coal and iron ore which lay beneath them. First canals and then railways were constructed across the corn fields linking mines, iron works and industrial towns in a dense network which all but erased the Enlightened landscape.

It was within this darkened industrial landscape, not the Highlands, that the real tragedy of Scotland’s history was played out. A tragedy that embraced  not only Scots who had been cleared from the land, but over 200 000 Irish people who had been cleared from their land by famine as well as landlords.

Over successive generations, children, women and men laboured in the factories and coal mines, shipyards  and iron works. But only a fraction of the wealth their labour created was ever returned to them. In despair, millions left Scotland- clearance on an industrial scale.

What drove Scotland’s industrial clearances was not just the appalling physical conditions Scotland’s working class had to endure. Through the power of their trade unions, the condition of the working class in Scotland was slowly improved. What helped drive the later industrial clearances was the conservatism of Scotland’s capitalist class. This class failed to heed the advice of the Communist Manifesto : ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production’.

Instead, Scotland’s industrial capitalists tried to preserve their early Victorian instruments of production even as Scotland entered the twentieth century. As a consequence, from the 1920s onwards their economic role was replaced by that of the State until they were ultimately extinguished by nationalisation. But although nationalisation did bring new investment, it could not reverse the decay of Scotland’s Victorian industrial infrastructure and an economy built on coal. Long before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, coal mines were being closed, railway lines ripped up and steel furnaces blown-out.

If the wealth from North Sea oil had not been squandered by Margaret Thatcher and her successors in pursuit of their neoliberal fantasies, it could have been used to help build a new Scotland. But it wasn’t and now, after the failure of the 2014 independence referendum and the failure of neoliberalism, Scotland’s future is as bleak as it has ever been.

In the past, the prospect of a future of endless austerity would have led to a wave of migration, of economic clearance. Will things be different this time?


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