This is part of a research project into changes in landownership in Orkney. Part 1 gave a brief introduction of how people lived in Townships where they farmed and shared the Commonty – an area for summer grazing.
The landscape we view in Orkney today of fenced fields and stone dykes is one of relatively recent times. For hundreds of years islanders lived in communities built upon a system of farming in rigs.
When that system changed all the words associated with it – many dating back to Norse settler times, also went. A few remain in place names. Once the process of enclosure got under way this happened relatively quickly. In Orkney, because there were a few Udal forms of tenure still left, some of the words date back centuries.
Orkney was also different in that rigs did not change hands – as happened in Scotland – but remained with the one farmer. Nevertheless wherever a rig was positioned within the Township it had a descriptive word attached to it.
A rig was also known as a rendal. The rigs varied in size with small ones being dug by spade. Rigs formed part of Sheeds (sheds) which we could think of as ‘fields’. These were also of varying sizes. However, this was no haphazard form of arrangement – for in Orkney they were measured out with precision. Neighbours rigs were interspersed with one another. By the 19th century most had been ‘planked’ – a unit of measurement of about 40 fathoms square. (More about measurement in Part 3).
Within the sheed the first rig was the Uppa (Upplay from Old Norse [ON], the last was the Nulay (nulla, nurley, ulla [ON]). In between, the middle rigs were the Midla [ON]. Alexander Fenton in ‘The northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland’, tells us that :
“the number of names descriptive of the shape, quality, or situation of rigs is considerable.”
A rather small rig, compared to all the others, and perhaps with grass either side – would be called a Speld (spell).
It is notable that there are many variations of the words themselves.
The Toumal was a strip of infield – this was good land and cropped with bere which Orcadians would use to pay their land tax. The area of toumal land that went with every house was held in perpetuity by the house. By the 17th century it might also be brought into the runrig system.
To recap, the Townland was a mixture of individually and communally held fields (Sheds) of grass/meadow/arable (where the crops were grown). These were organised in rigs. It was surrounded by a hill dyke separating it from the Commonty where the livestock, including hundreds of geese, would gaze between Spring and the Harvest.
A few more descriptive words for the organisation of the farming landscape:
- Outbreaks: if these were cultivated they could be allocated into rigs, and would then be liable for taxation.
- Inbreaks: a piece of pasture land newly broken up and tilled.
- Inskift: a parcel of land not lying in runrig with other lands but belonging solely to one owner.
- Dall/deld/dello: a small plot of arable land often attached to a home and cultivated with a spade.
- Merkister: a strip of unfenced grass separating arable patches left as unsuitable for cultivation.
- Planticrue: plots where people could grow cabbage/kail from seed before planting it out.
This is just a selection of some of the descriptive words which would have meant so much to a 19th century farmer in Orkney. Words passed down for generations, and evolved since the Norse invaders settled and took over farming in the islands.
Disputes did happen mainly because farming and the maintenance of the hill dyke had been neglected. Farmers and their families were ‘on ca’, having to work for the laird at the booming kelp industry, or other labouring duties. A considerable number of active men were also enlisted in the army, the navy, or had gone overseas to work for the Hudson Bay Company, and in the whaling industry. There were years of famine, and as ever, weather would dictate how good a harvest a farm could bring in.
Despite all the hardships as William Thomson states in ‘Township, House and Tenant Holding’:
“It is worth noting that run-rig was not a system imposed on reluctant tenants by their landlords. The people trying to abolish run-rig were always lairds, ministers, surveyors, estate factors, and agricultural theorists, in short, ‘the people above’….The people who had devised the run-rig landscape, and wished to retain it, were the tenants themselves.”
But go it eventually did, not immediately with the enclosure and division of the Commonty, as arable land was often still laid out in runrig, but as the smaller farms became unsustainable with the loss of access to the full Commonty, rigs were sold off.
The units of measurement and land valuation (pennylands, farthinglands, cowsworth etc) which had survived the 1707 Treaty of Union where they were all to be standardised to align with those of England, also went. The parish of Harray, where there were listed 87 proprietors of land when its Commonty was divided in 1855 held out much longer than every where else. It also retained many of the words associated with that communal system of land organisation longer than anywhere else in Orkney.
Those words are gone now – except in a few place names. What were once colourful and descriptive elements of the Orcadian language, no longer with any purpose, as the farming and societal organisation of the islands was changed forever, the lands enclosed, and the Commonty divided amongst those who owned land bordering it.
In Part 3 : The Measuring Mix-Up.
Leave a Reply