ABSTRACT
It is doubtful if agrarian society in the west of Scotland was ever truly self-subsistent, meeting all the needs of its inhabitants from its own resources. Even with a tiny population of 180,000 in 1750, scarcity was never far away, and the need to supplement the local produce with imports from more favoured regions was a recurring one. Any potential for regular surplus production lay behind the barriers of low productivity and primitive techniques. In summer, the greenness of the landscape did not mirror good farmland, but was a reflection of heavy rainfall, the inability to drain, and the dominance of rushes, sedges and moss over great tracts of heavy soils. In winter, the noted mildness of the climate diminished rapidly away from the coastal fringes, and upward with altitude, for the western region, though part of lowland Scotland, still lies deep within highland Britain. Above 600 feet heavy rainfall and low temperatures combined to impose severe limits on the use of the land; about half of the region lies above this altitude, drenched with more than 50 inches of rain each year, and with fewer than five months with mean temperatures in excess of 5o°F. Crops can be grown in these conditions, but ripening is uncertain, and once above 750 feet the chances of successful cropping are slight, particularly when exposure and wind are added to the other disadvantages. The farmer in the west of Scotland was confronted with excessive moisture, a fugitive sun, and soils which, when not waterlogged alluvial loams, were mostly stiff, wet clays or stony sand and gravels. He had to evolve a system of agriculture which could cope with soils, exposure and local climates varying dramatically within short distances. His response was little different from that of peasant cultivators in many other lands with similar physical conditions.
