The Lowland Clearances by Peter Aitchison

Author:Peter Aitchison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Some planned villages were designed to attract industry – places like Balfron, New Lanark and Stanley in Perthshire where the fast-flowing Tay provided the power for a cotton mill. Others like Grangemouth were designed as a port at the eastern end of the Forth-Clyde Canal. In the South-West where the creation of the great cattle ranches had led to clearances and protest in the early part of the eighteenth century landowners were quick to develop existing settlements. Fishing or shipping centres were created at Glencapel and Port William, while the likes of Kirkpatrick and New Langholm relied upon the cotton and wool weaving industries.

The origins of these communities and the way of life led by their inhabitants were diverse, depending as much on where they were as on the improving zeal of their founder. Nevertheless, they all shared a basic pattern of appearance – a ‘regularity of structure’, as Professor Smout puts it. There was often a simple square or a rectangle of some sort, akin to a village green, around which houses were built. Homes were also strung out neatly along a street with gardens running back. The houses themselves were mainly two or even three storeys high with three, four or five rooms. They were built of stone with tiled or slated roofs.

Unlike many English villages, Scottish settlements rarely had front gardens and a tenant’s front door opened directly onto the pavement beside the street. This was a deliberate design feature to prevent householders from placing their midden or dunghill at the front of the house – a common practice in the old fermtouns. The new planned villages were meant to be desirable places in which to live, settlements which would provide a better social and economic framework for the new Scotland which was evolving.

The lengths to which landowners went to ensure this was so are demonstrated in 1735 when one of the earliest improvers, John Cockburn, began to build Ormiston near Edinburgh. The town was laid out on the lines of an English village by a civil engineer from London but he took instructions from the landlord:

I can give my consent to no houses being built in the Main Street of the town but what are two storeys high. None who thinks justly and wishes well to it can wish to have it disfigured in that particular, or any other that can be prevented. Every man concerned in the place has an interest in having the Main Street appear as handsome and to look as well as we can and not to have little paltry houses . . .

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