THE LOWLAND CLEARANCES

The Lowland Clearances in Scotland were one of the results of The Agricultural Revolution, which changed the traditional system of agriculture which had existed in Lowland Scotland for hundreds of years.

The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland began in the mid-eighteenth century with the improvements of the lowland farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the most backward into what was to become the most modern and productive system in Europe. The traditional system in Lowland Scotland had existed unchanged for hundreds of years. In many ways it was a totally rural economy, the land being worked by the cottars on the centuries-old runrig system of subsistence farming.

Recent research is showing that the Agricultural Revolution led directly to what are now known as the Lowland Clearances, when hundreds of thousands of cottars and tenant farmers from the southern counties of Scotland were, in many cases, forcibly moved from the farms and small holdings they had occupied for hundreds of years.

Many small settlements were torn down, their occupants forced either to the new purpose-built villages built by the landowners such as John Cockburn of Ormiston to house the displaced cottars on the outskirts of the new ranch-style farms, or to the new industrial centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh or northern England.

As a result, between 1760 and 1830, many tens of thousands of Lowland Scots emigrated, including families such as the Porteous family, taking advantage of the many new opportunities offered in Canada and the northern United States after 1776, finding opportunities there to own and farm their own land. Some chose to remain, either by choice or out of sheer necessity, but rents were increased to the extent that tenant or sub-tenant were eventually forced to sell. Consequently, the cottars and their way of life disappeared altogether in many parts of southern Scotland.

However, in time, the improvements in agriculture in the Lowlands, the so-called Age of Improvement, led to a more stable and modern system of agricultural production which was to make Scotland the envy of Europe.

Although the causes were different, the lowland Agricultural Revolution are being seen as the forerunner of the Highland Clearances half a century later. Consequently, with new research (2003-04) about the forcible uprooting, expulsion, emigration and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Central and Southern Scotland, these events have become known as the Lowland Clearances.

See also

• A History of the Scottish People: 1560–1830, TC Smout, 1969
• The Scottish Nation: 1700–2000, Tom Devine, 2001
• The Lowland Clearances, Scotland's Silent Revolution: 1760–1830, Peter Aitchison, Andrew Cassell, 2003

• BBC Radio Scotland series
• Scotland's Forgotten Clearances