ABSTRACT
The study of estate organisation and management is thus central to a consideration of the changes in rural society which laid the foundations for the better-documented and more visually dramatic changes of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century a number of important organisational changes began to occur within the framework of the estate community. This induced proprietors to begin transferring the responsibility for marketing estate produce to their tenants, though this process was still far from complete by the early eighteenth century. This small-scale ornamental enclosure began to take on a more commercial role on many estates by the end of the century. While enclosures of this type often involved the expropriation of several former farms, as at Castle Kennedy in Wigtownshire, their management was kept strictly in the hands of the proprietors. It has emphasised the changing position of the tenant within the estate community in seventeenth-century Lowland Scotland.
