ABSTRACT
Many of the scattered farmsteads and estate villages which fill the rural landscape today, together with their accompanying network of large, regularly shaped hedged or tree-bound enclosures would be absent. In their place, there existed a different, more naked order. Then, the basic unit of farming, the unit of both operation and co-operation, was the fermtoun or clachan, a frequently huddled, but sometimes planned, cluster of dwellings and outbuildings. The scale of touns can also be expressed in landholding terms, or in terms of how many tenants they carried. The most obvious source material for this type of information is estate rentals. Unfortunately, there has been little systematic study of the many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century estate rentals available. However, generally speaking, there appears to have been a ceiling to the landholding scale of runrig touns.
