Scotland’s 18th century farm landscape 

‘The family patriarch had been a bondsman to the Duke of Hamilton. At the age of 15, in 1675, he had left the family home to live in a ferm toun. It was a group of black houses for farm labourers. He worked over twelve hours a day with only oats to eat. His drink was water or milk. Persecution as a protestant made life worse. In 1685, for joining a field preaching on Dechmont Hill outside Cambuslang, he had been put to the horn. Dragoons chased him over the moors like a stag. He was captured, tortured, tried and executed. Raising his battered head for the last time, on the gallows, he declared that “I die not for any crime, but for the truth of the Gospel and the liberty of Christ's Kirk.”’ This is a quote from The Claudians: gardens, landscapes, reason and faith: John Claudius Loudon and Claudius Buchanan by Tom Turner, (Kindle, 2024).

More about Scotland’s landscape in the 18th century

• Settlement structure
• Ferm Toun: The ‘ferm toun’ (Scots for ‘farm town’) was the primary form of rural settlement in lowland Scotland. Typically, a ferm toun comprised a group of 4 to 5 dwellings. The settlement form, like the terminology, differed from that of English villages and hamlets, which were more nucleated.
• Clachan: In highland Scotland, the equivalent settlements were called clachans, and the dwellings were more dispersed.

. 

• Arable Land:
• Arable land was scattered in isolated and unenclosed fields rather than in large blocks.
• The fields could be interspersed with areas of moss, coarse grazing, bog, and stony ground.
• The land within the fields was divided into strips or rigs, which were often steeply ridged and very long (for convenient ploughing).