Skip to main content

Highlands history from Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press is the home of scholarship for Scottish history, in particular the history of the Highlands, having published the likes of Eric Richards' Debating The Highland Clearances, Tom Furniss's Discovering the Footsteps of Time, Robert Dodgshon's history of the rural environment called No Stone Unturned, and John Roberts' history of the Highland clans Feuds, Forays and Rebellions. 


A tremendous resource for the lay historian and scholar alike is the journal Northern Scotland, which is moving to two issues a year as of 2019. It is the home for seminal articles on the history of the Highlands and Islands, including such popular issues as land ownership, culture, emigration and diaspora, and biography. It is chaired by Annie Tindley who is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University.








Annie is also editor of the new book series at EUP, called 'Scotland's Land' which has just published its first volume:

Title: The Land Agent 
Author: Annie Tindley, Lowri Ann Rees and Ciarán Reilly
Publication: Edinburgh University Press, June 2018
Hardback ISBN: 9781474438865

The first volume in the 'Scotland's Land' monograph series, this book was commissioned to examine the historical personalities involved in the controversial role of the 'land agent' in Britain between 1700 and 1920, darkly linked with the controversies of the Highland clearances in Scotland, but more broadly representing the British use (and abuse) of empirical power.

Land agents were variously known as 'factors', 'commissioners', 'stewards', 'bailiffs', or 'agents'. Today popular mythology might imagine them as Hollywood-style FBI agents exhibiting emotionless power, standardly suited to distinguish them as impersonal messengers of law, holding a hand to their ear-pieces. 'Don't blame the messenger . . .' - was that the case, or was it more sinister?

Agents were tasked with running landed estates, collecting rents, settling disputes, applying estate policy and were seen as the middlemen in the larger relationship between national economic interest and local rural community. The power invested in them, despite being based on legal statute (many were lawyers, such as Patrick Sellar), was in reality interpreted by the whim of personality and this book takes a number of case studies to show how policy was lensed through the personalities of the land agents themselves. These agents were often reputationally despised and set into folk memory as venal characters - there are many 'memories, not histories' of nefarious factors who populated the Highlands, as well as in  lowland Glasgow, for example a famous 'highland' public house The Lismore commemorates the factor/lawyer Patrick Sellar with a suitably positioned plaque in its urinals. But were they all so despicable?

The chapter 'Not a Popular Personage', by the historian Ewen Cameron, discusses various Scottish factors between 1870 and 1920. One poignant example of a compromised man is the Skye factor Angus Mackintosh, who was a Gaelic speaker from Daviot employed to mediate between local tenants and the Kilmuir estate when a lease on land expired. Forced to identify those who forcibly occupied the contested land ('raiders'), he was ostracized by the community, baptised with the contents of a night-bucket, and found himself unable to resolve complexities, powers and promises which were fundamentally irreconcilable.







Labels:
Location: Sinclair Dr, Glasgow G42 9PU, UK

Popular posts from this blog

Vertical Landscapes: Exploring Glasgow's Hidden Bouldering

With the new guide to Glasgow Bouldering forthcoming, and with the last two years spent scouring our local landscapes for vertical diversion, many of us discovered a closer, more nuanced appreciation of climbing and how it helps maintain mental wellbeing as much as physical. The big mountains and wilderness landscapes were for the first time excluded from access and our pandemic taught us all to appreciate the landscapes on our doorstep. Even the urban world has its own small wildernesses and landscapes to immerse ourselves in for a while. For me, the daily walk in lockdown occasionally became a hunt for an esoteric piece of rock spied on the OS map or Google Earth. Rumours of boulders and mythologies of obscure rock were hunted down to help feed a hunger for the vertical. Even Dumbarton Rock was out of range, lying outside of the Glasgow City boundary. It's a venue which famously makes the blood run cold, with fiercely exposed overhanging routes, highball boulder problems and cl
Read more

The Lost Township of Grulin on Eigg

‘The Stony Place’ as it translates, the archaeological notes on the RCAHMS database for Eigg, state baldly the lost humanity of Grulin as early as an 1880 OS survey map: ‘…eighteen unroofed buildings, six enclosures and a field-system’. Now a scheduled monument and memorialised as a ‘depopulated settlement’, though it is not obvious if the verb is passive or aggressive, Grulin Uachdrach (Grulin Upper) is, like Hallaig on Raasay, a place of violent silence and resonance. Who lived here and why was the site abandoned? If it were not in Scotland, suspicions might fall to the climate, remoteness and apparent unsustainability of the stony place, a rabble of large rocks under the steep slopes of An Sgurr, but the carefully constructed walls tell us it was once a thriving township – the kilns, folds and blackhouse walls integrated with the giant boulders such as Clach Hosdail. In 1853 the whole of the village of Grulin, both upper and lower, housed fourteen families who were forced to l
Read more

Timeline Walks of Scotland #Hallaig to Screapadal on Raasay

'Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig ...' Hallaig - the lost village of Raasay - is a powerful place. Arguably, it has become a shibboleth for the soul of Gaelic culture. To visit it, to just be there momentarily and feel the resonance of the place, is to know the fragility of place and home, of how kinship can be shattered and how loss can invade a land. Aptly, Hallaig is now a site of pilgrimage for those who value the universal lessons of history.  There are t errible reasons for the loss of Hallaig. Its silent mouths of abandoned shielings, the dumb sheep meandering amongst the ruins, whisper with Sorley MacLean's poetry. The place misses the sounds of day-to-day community, and all around the woods and burns and slopes this tough but rich landscape once made this a hardy paradise under the eastern cliffs of Raasay. Facing east to the dawn and overlooking the peninsula of Applecross and the berry-dark depths of the Inner Sound, the walk to Hallaig leads quietly
Read more