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Updated: June 11, 2025
Observing that the country was specially adapted to the raising of sheep, they sought by offering high rents to acquire land for sheep-walks. Thus, through the length and breadth of the Highlands, great enclosures were formed for the breeding of sheep. Where many crofters had once tilled the soil, only a lone shepherd was now found, meditating on scenes of desolation.
That means we've taken a lot of land somewhere north, that you can shoot over that is, you needn't be afraid of hitting a house, or a tree, or a man anywhere; and we've got a strip more of the same sort on the seashore somewhere off here, occupied only by some gay galoots called crofters, and you can raise a lawsuit and an imprecation on every acre.
The dwellings of this class and of some of the poorer crofters are wretched in the extreme.
Big John lived alone in a little shanty in the hills, and the prospect of a good square meal was a pleasant one to the lonely fellow who had been his own cook so long. Big John lived among the Crofters, whose methods of cooking were simple in the extreme, and from them he had picked up strange ways of housekeeping.
It requires no detail here of how Lord Selkirk bought a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company's stock, made out his plans of Emigration, and took steps to send out his hoped-for thousands or tens of thousands of Highland crofters, or Irish peasants, whoever they might be, if they sought freedom though bound up with hardship, hope instead of a pauper's grave, the prospect of independence of life and station in the new world instead of penury and misery under impossible conditions of life at home.
Now, all at once, a daughter, the ugly one, from whom no credit was to be looked for, dared to defy him for a clown figuring in a worn-out rag of chieftainship the musty fiction of a clan half a dozen shepherds, crofters, weavers, and shoemakers, not the shadow of a gentleman among them! a man who ate brose, went with bare knees, worked like any hind, and did not dare offend his wretched relations by calling his paltry farm his own! for the sake of such a fellow, with a highland twang that disgusted his fastidious ear, his own daughter made a mock of his authority, treated him as a nobody!
The masses of the people have better houses, better food and clothing, while with the development of the school system and the newspaper press general intelligence has greatly increased. The accounts of the poverty and wretchedness of the crofters now reach the public much more quickly and make a much deeper impression on all classes than they did forty years ago.
Besides, many of the crofters are, and their ancestors for many generations have been, "truly laborers, living chiefly by the wages of labor, and holding crofts and lots for which they pay rents, not from the produce of the land, but from wages."
It was these slopes that the crofters commonly used for pasture, below which, in the straths and glens, were their holdings and dwellings. The ruins of cottages, or patches of green here and there where cottages stood, mark the sites of many little holdings from which the crofters and their families were turned out many years ago in order to make room for sheep-farms.
As a convention of landlords which was held at Aberdeen last January, and which represented a large amount of land, resolved to increase the size of crofters' holdings as suitable opportunities offered and when the tenants could profitably occupy and stock the same, the demand for more land seems likely to be conceded in many cases without compulsory legislation.
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