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Historical Background - The Commercialisation of Land
 

The Ness Community Co-operative threshing machine working on a croft in the 1980s		  

By the early 18th century the traditional clan system of patronage had largely been eroded and replaced by more commercially focussed forms of social organisation.  With improvements in the country’s infrastructure, better road links offered new opportunities for trade, particularly with mills in the south of Scotland.  Entire communities were evicted from the land or relocated as unscrupulous landlords saw sheep farming as being more profitable than agriculture or labour based economic activity. 
 Many of the dispossessed were forced to emigrate to America and Canada.  Others were cleared from inland pastures and pushed towards the coast – which would ultimately lead to the development of the prodigious west coast fishing industry of the 19th and 20th centuries.  The sheep that forced so many people from their homes during those turbulent times would ironically end up as one of the principle industries within the rural and crofting economy of Scotland.
 
The Emergence of Crofting
Crofting has its roots in the 18th century Highlands and Islands when landowners offered small parcels of land to the indigenous populations in return for an annual rent.  These plots of land enabled the people to build modest homes for their families, keep some livestock and grow crops.  But the amount of land available to tenants was limited, with the best properties often reserved for commercial sheep farming.   

ABOVE RIGHT: Donald Morrison and daughter Dolina, South Galson, carting manure out to the croft
 

Limited land distribution within rural communities ensured that self-sufficiency was not achievable by crofters and that there was a continuing dependence on the estate for support.  Top-down land management and social organisation also offered the landlord an impoverished and compliant community from which to draw a readily-available workforce when required.  This dependence by small-scale agricultural tenants in the Highlands and Islands on additional means of income or support was the precursor of the subsistence form of farming that would later become known as ‘crofting’.

During the 18th century a number of Lowland landowners commissioned land surveyors to help improve their estates.  This structured approach to land management and planning was adopted in the Western Isles around 1800 and would ultimately determine the shape, size and location of crofts and croft housing that largely remains with us today.

For much of the 19th century the fortunes of crofters were largely at the discretion of their landlords; who could raise rents at any time, and failure to pay usually resulted in summary eviction of families from their land and homes.  By the 1880s, poverty, the insecure nature of croft tenancy and the failure of staple crops such as potato led to a great deal of unrest within the crofting population – concerns that were becoming increasingly vocal and militant.

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