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 A Typical Croft 
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 Runrigs |
Pre-clearances - Farming Life | |||||||||||||||
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You can see the wooden frames of the crofts – wood was an extremely precious commodity on islands where there were no trees. The small buildings near the end of the video are the sheilings where people would have decamped to during the summer months, taking with them their animals to fresh pastures. |
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Nowadays a typical farm is worked by a single family who live in their holding's single house and who manage a single, and exclusively-operated, set of neatly-fenced and regularly laid-out fields. In contrast, the closely-packed dwellings and outbuildings of the past are closer to our notion of a village. Hence these settlements were referred to by the Gaelic term baile: a term usually translated into English as 'township' and one preserved in numerous Highland place names like Ballachulish or Balmacara. The average clan's territory - which generally ran to a sizeable tract of hill country - included a whole series of townships. In times of trouble and when ordered to do so by their chiefs, the adult males among a township's residents doubled as the fighting men. Most of those men's lives, however, together with the lives of their wives, their daughters and their sons, were taken up with the more mundane, but endlessly pressing task of growing the crops and rearing the animals on which their community depended. Runrig, as this system of land-use was known, as each family had it's own 'rig' or strip of land, had its strengths. For instance, it helped ensure that each one of a township's families got a reasonably fair share of the available arable land - by making it possible for good, not so good and poorer land to be fairly distributed among all the township's occupiers. Life was hard but the Highlanders were devoted to their land. To them it was a land alive with stories and songs from clan history and legend. This is a view of runrigs at Drumbuie in Balmacara in Kyle, Ross-shire. Balmacara is exceptional because there are currently eight crofting townships flourishing there. These communities are still very much active and, in the case of Drumbuie, the traditional runrig structure, combined with crop rotation produces an interesting landscape in summer. As crofting involves limited use of pesticides and fertilisers, it is environmentally beneficial. The field margins are full of insects, birds and rare flowers and herbs. |
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