The Highland Clearances – the removal and flight of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – evoke strong feelings to this day. Through economic pressure and physical force, roughly 100,000 Highland people were driven from their homes by lairds and their agents, rupturing a land-based worldview known as dùchthas. But one thread in the ties that were severed between people and land is missing from the narrative: seeds. Scotland’s reform-minded landlords, styling themselves as improvers, sought to reshape Highland society by controlling what their tenants planted and how they kept and processed it.
Before the Highland Clearances, tenants’ relationships to seeds and land were governed by cultures of reciprocity and practicality. Historian Michael Newton states that Gaelic farmers considered it ill fortune to plough one step further than the generation before, and gave ‘a portion of the yields of their crops […] back to the Otherworld forces.’ John Gregorson Campbell, a nineteenth-century folklorist who interviewed people across the Highlands and Islands, similarly reported that tenants scattered oats as an offering to fairies. Such seed offerings were an important part of the worldview of Gaelic tenants. Campbell reported the story of a man in Islay who received ‘a loan of oatmeal from the Fairies’ and returned to them ‘more meal than he borrowed’ out of gratitude. The fairies were ‘offended’ by the idea that their gift was profit-oriented and so ‘never after gave that man a loan of meal.’ Seeds were a vehicle to explain that dealings with the natural world were reciprocal rather than extractive.
This is consistent with what we know about growing practices before the Clearances, many of which would now be described as ‘agroecological’. Tenants built low-input and naturally-draining ridged beds, known as feannagan, to maintain yields on poor soils. The rich machair landscape, nourished by generations of farmers using seaweed as fertiliser and sand as a drainage material, and by alternating crops with light grazing, is also evidence of ecological sensitivity. The sheiling cycle, meanwhile, meant that people and cows moved up and down the glens according to the seasons to allow low-lying land to regenerate. None of this should make us think that this was an ideal society – poor medical knowledge and famines periodically led to suffering and early death – but it was one attuned to local conditions and informed by centuries of knowledge-making.
These practices clashed with improver visions for Scotland. The tensions between a market-led and sustenance-led approach to land and seeds are apparent in eighteenth-century texts that discuss ‘graddaning’. The ‘graddan’ method of burning oat husks to expose the edible seed was recorded by the Skye resident Martin Martin in 1695, who emphasised its speed and practicality. ‘The corn may be so dressed, winnowed, ground and baked’, he explained, ‘within an hour after reaping from the ground.’ Historian Robert Dodgson also points to the rationality of the practice, which prevented grain from rotting in the intense rains brought on by the Little Ice Age. He quotes an observation made in 1790 about farmers on Tiree and Lismore, which reveals that these communities began to graddan their oats in response to unusually heavy showers. Landlords typically failed to recognise this value. A Scottish cartographer in the 1760s described graddaning as a ‘barbarous custom’ and noted that tenants could face eviction if they were caught doing it. In 1771, the Duke of Argyll likewise instructed his agent to reduce ‘the hurtful effects of greddan’. The agricultural historian I.F. Grant reveals that lairds typically disliked the practice because it made oats ‘less saleable’. The improvers’ focus on the low market appeal of graddaned oats led them to dismiss the rational purpose they served for tenants.
Graddaning was just one seed-related practice that appalled improvers. An essay submitted to the improvement-oriented Highland Society in 1788 stated that ‘the saving of seed [by tenants] is the greatest enemy to the Flax culture’ and the wider linen industry. According to the author, letting the plant ‘stand till the seed is ripened’ reduced its value when harvested, which ‘follows it through every stage of the manufacture’. Another submitted essay criticised ‘the bad policy of the saving of [flax] seed in a country where Flax ought to be the capital object’. In practice, however, letting a plant ‘stand till the seed is ripened’ prepares the seed for resowing. This allowed tenants to access free and renewable flaxseed instead of having to buy it new from elsewhere each year. As with graddaning, a seed practice that balanced future and present needs competed with the improvers’ more specialised and commercial approach.
Another conflict centred around the specific seeds that communities in the Highlands and Islands planted. In the 1760s, before he became a Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, Reverend John Walker surveyed the Hebrides and reported that ‘agriculture is not perhaps conducted in any part of the World, in a more rude and artless manner than in this Country’. As evidence, Walker described the widespread ‘Bear and grey Oats’ under cultivation. A contemporary surveyor agreed, describing the black oats grown on the islands of Jura and Colonsay as ‘very unproductive’, while his counterpart in Orkney complained that ‘Small bear … and black oats, have been sown alternately on the same field for several hundred years.’ The Scottish Government’s Agricultural Directorate defines black or grey oats as ‘a historical crop of marginal soils’. The four-rowed ‘bere’ barley Walker describes, which he contrasts to his preferred ‘two rowed Barley’, is similarly an heirloom variety. By the time of the Clearances, these strains had already been largely eliminated from the Lowlands. Before the adoption of marl as a fertiliser in Kirkudbright, explained one surveyor in 1792, ‘the species of oats, commonly cultivated, was of the grey kind; but, in a few years after, it entirely disappeared, and gave place to the white oats.’ Improvers wanted the same changes to be imposed upon the Highlands and Islands.
As with graddaning and seed-saving, a drive for commercialisation animated the improvers’ hostile reaction to the seeds of the Highlands and Islands. A surveyor in Orkney in 1795 advised landlords to ‘change their seed-oats and bear’ to improve their quality. An essay published by the Highland Society of Scotland in 1799 blamed the prevalence of ‘grey oats’ on farmers’ failure to ‘change seed’. Improvers also made it clear where they thought this ‘changed’ seed should come from: agricultural surveys and manuals emphasised that only foreign strains would produce desirable crops. Reverend John Walker even documented one landlord’s efforts to implement this vision. ‘Mr Campbell’s Tenants in Isla’, he wrote, ‘are bound by their Tacks [lease agreements] to sow half a Boll of Foreign Lintseed for each Quarter Land they Possess.’ Improvers wished to replace tenants’ established practices of saving resilient seed with imported seed sold via merchants in a commercialised structure.
In practice, however, the decision to sow black oats and bere was a sensible one, as we can see by combining the records of improvers with modern scientific evidence. The Scottish minister John Buchanan described a trial of the supposedly superior white oats failing in the Hebrides, noting that ‘great oats have been tried without success, as they soon dwindle down into frail grain.’ Edward Burt, an administrator of Highland estates, also attested to the durability of black oats, stating that ‘the Soil is peculiarly adapted to that Kind of Grain.’ This resilience was no accident. Burt recorded that ‘if there be one Part of their Ground that produces worse Grain than another, [the tenants] reserve that, or Part of it, for Seed, believing it will produce again as well.’ The historians E.H.M. Cox, Annette Smith and I.E. Grant have claimed that tenants in the Highlands and Islands saved their weakest seed for resowing, but Burt’s mention of ‘one part of their ground’ makes it more likely that tenants were deliberately collecting seed from the crops that had grown despite being on the least nourishing soils. This approach may not have produced maximum yields, but it would have selected for resilient and versatile traits.
John Walker, similarly, noted that Hebridean tenants in the 1760s did not sow white oats because black oats were more resilient to storms. Walker dismissed this as an ‘excuse’, but the tenants’ observation is supported by scientific evidence. Timothy George et al., Peter Martin et al., and scientists at the James Hutton Institute have each found that Scottish landrace varieties, including black oats and bere barley, are better adapted to the soils of the Highlands and Islands, and are more resilient to environmental stresses and disease than other plants. Black oats and bere were products of tenants’ understandings of longevity and sustainability rather than ignorance.
The conflicts around the seeds Scottish tenants sowed and how they sowed them offer insight into the economic and environmental contestations at the heart of the Highland Clearances. The tenant practices of graddaning, seed saving and resowing, as well as selecting for resilient traits, were rejected by market-oriented landlords, just as the tenants themselves were rejected and evicted for profit and ‘progress’.