ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the pattern of landholding. The pattern of landholding in the Highland region is not entirely uniform, the counties of Caithness, Ross and Cromarty and Argyll showing slightly different characteristics from the main group of counties. If basic continuity and slowness of change in the pattern of landholding is considered, along with the growing importance of non-economic motives for possession and acquisition of land, one is almost justified in regarding this pattern of landholding as a social system within which economic change operated. The pattern of landholding which has emerged can throw new light on many subjects associated with eighteenth-century landowner. The pattern of landholding can also bring a fresh viewpoint to the study of the changing landscape in eighteenth-century Scotland. There has been no other study made of the landholding pattern in Scotland except Millman's work on 1970s, and although sources are few as one enters the seventeenth century, there is no such dearth in the nineteenth.
