By Ian Cooper from his excellent series ‘Records of a Bygone Age’ first published in The Stronsay Limpet and shared here with kind permission.
Last month we left Rev Simpson sitting comfortably in his new Manse and happily working his glebe land, the farming of which had been highlighted as an outstanding example of progressive agricultural practice.
Although apparently a good preacher and well enough liked by his congregation, it was thought by some that he spent too much time caring for his glebe land and not enough tending to his flock. This may have been part of the reason that members of Rev Simpson’s Established Church congregation were gradually drifting away to the new Secession (later United Presbyterian) Church and, by the mid-1830s, it was reported that only around 30 were attending the Established Church while around 300 were attending the Secession Church.
The Manse continued to be the Established Church manse until their union with the United Free Church in 1929 and fell into disrepair soon after. It’s great to see it recently fully restored into a lovely family home once more.
Some of the larger properties too were being improved and we can see that when the farm of Holland was advertised for sale in the John o’ Groat’s Journal in July 1838 it had already been much improved and enclosed, partly with newly built stone dykes. The going rate for dyke building around this time was around 4d a fathom for a dyke four feet high and uncoped. In today’s terms that would be about 1.7p for 1.8m of dyke with a height of 1.2m before having the cope (what Orcadians would call ragstones) added.
The reference to a new Church and Manse having been recently built as stated in the advert seems rather strange to us today but certainly had relevance at that time. With the ownership of heritable property in a parish went the obligation to pay the teinds (a form of tax, originally a tenth of total income), a part of which went to pay the minister’s stipend and keep the parish church and manse in repair, so it would be of benefit to a prospective purchaser to know that they would be unlikely to have any major fees imposed for repairs to church or manse for some considerable time.
By now the speed of change was gathering momentum, with some of the lairds looking south to central Scotland to find experienced managers to put these new ideas into practice. These changes had been greatly assisted in 1831 by a ‘planking’ process similar to that carried out in the late 1700s (where the old ‘runrigs’ were merged into larger plots of land), but on a much more radical scale. To distinguish it from the earlier planking this process came to be commonly known as ‘squaring’ for reasons that will soon become apparent. The ‘out-by’ common grazing was nearly all taken in hand (with one notable exception being what was known as the ‘Crofter’s Hill’ on the Housebay lands, where 12 crofts retained the right to grazing on common land) and each tenant or cottar was allocated an area of land in proportion to that previously farmed, all in one manageable block. The allocated area was then divided up into fields of what was believed to be a practical size. What was reckoned a practical size depended very much on the size of the farm and could vary from an acre or two on the smallest croft to 50 acres or more on the larger farms.
Although rotational cropping was being practised by some in a small way, this now became the basis of accepted practice, the necessity of which was often written into the farm lease. No longer was any cultivable land permanently sown to grain but instead was farmed on a five year rotation, with a field sown to grain (oats or bere) in year 1, neeps or tatties in year 2, oats in year 3 and then grass in years 4 and 5. This rotation did much to influence the differences in field sizes noted previously, as there needed to be a minimum of 5 fields of roughly equal size to enable this system to be put into practice.
The ideal field was set off as a square or rectangle if possible (hence the imaginatively named ‘squaring) and, failing that, with at least two sides parallel to each other to make for easier cultivation. This ideal was often thwarted by farm boundaries, topography or coastline, with no option but to lay out some very oddly shaped fields indeed!
Once these boundaries had been laid down, a great number of ditches were dug, partly to define boundaries but mainly to help water run off the fields. If the land was wet then a system of drains was also dug with the water from them feeding into the ditches, eventually finding an outfall into loch or sea.
In 1848 this drainage was encouraged by government loan assistance and was often, as in the case of the Airy Estate, part of the condition of lease, where a given amount of drains had to be dug annually, being inspected as work went on to make sure that they complied to specified width and depth specifications. These drains were mainly what was termed as ‘coupled drains’, with flat stones set on their edge and coupled together in an inverted ‘V’ shape to leave an open drainage channel between them before being backfilled with the spoil previously removed from the drain. This was a very labour intensive but extremely effective method of improving the land, costing the lairds little but the sweat of their tenant’s (or more usually sub-tenant’s brow) and making use of the island’s greatest natural resource, the same natural resource that had been put into good but intermittent use since around the late 1700s to build the drystone dykes that were to become so much a feature of our island landscape.
As we move through the middle of the 19th century steel wire and wooden posts to erect stockproof fences were becoming more freely available but even here use was made of suitable large stones to form gateposts and straining posts at the end of these fences.
Large stones still in use as gate posts and strainer posts for fences. Note the flag fence topped by a barbed wire guard fence in the background of the second photo
Although some of these new fences were being erected to control livestock and protect crops, the lairds were looking to establish more permanent boundaries in a climate where no hedges would grow. This resulted in thousands of metres of stone dykes being built, with many of the bigger farms being enclosed mainly by these dykes. Much of this building took place from the mid 1830s until around 1860, when farming was profitable and labour cheap and easily available. Much of the land on these bigger farms would have been mainly of the ‘in-by land’, easily cultivated and improved to make excellent farm land while a great number of the smaller farms were sited on the previously uncultivated common where reclaiming it would have been a long, hard slog and few had more than a small park next the farm enclosed by dykes. The possible reason for this is, I feel, described very well in a paper in the Orkney Archives titled ‘A Journey from Serfdom’ where author Ernest Marwick, after describing this lack of dyked enclosures, gives his poignant analysis:
‘Such is the visual evidence. How is it to be interpreted? Roughly speaking, I think, in the following way. Where stone walls are common, it may be assumed that agricultural improvement began, and became general, at a comparatively early date, when it was still economically possible to erect long stretches of dry-stone dykes, owing to the fact that labour was cheap and plentiful. Many, perhaps most, of the more extensive enclosures date from a period prior to the general outburst of farming activity in Orkney. When the frenzy finally seized them, the peasant farmers were so busily occupied with the reclamation of the soil that they had no time to enclose the land so dourly won. At the same time the larger landowners were deprived of the source of labour which they had formerly exploited. When the farmers finally manged to straighten their backs, to survey the results of their toil, they found that time had passed them by, and that stone walls, no matter how desirable in a windswept region like Orkney, were luxuries which none could afford.’
Despite this analysis of the demise of building drystone dykes, it was apparent that over a relatively short space of time these measures of planking, squaring and enclosing had transformed the previous hotchpotch of strips of land and inadequate faelie dykes into first class farms, turning the island landscape into something quite similar to what we still see today.
The dykes separating one estate or farm from another tended to be the highest and most substantial, with one of the best examples of that being the ‘march’ (boundary) dyke which divided the original Housebay estate from the rest of the south end of the island.
Dykes varied considerably in height and width and, believe it or not, in the quality of the raw material! When building stones were quarried the first layers of stones were generally of poorer quality, less dense and more prone to deterioration through the effects of wind, rain and – in particular – frost where water trapped in minute seams in the stones could expand when frozen and gradually cause the stones to fracture. These top layers of stones often went to build dykes, with the deeper, better quality stone being used for the building of dwelling houses, outhouses and farm steadings.
Part 4 follows next month.