Can a Farm Too Small to Live On Still Matter? It Was Designed That Way

The unit is a small area of enclosed land, typically between two and twenty hectares, held in tenancy rather than owned, together with a share in a much larger area of rough grazing held in common with neighbours. The enclosed part carries the house and is used for crops and for keeping animals through the winter, and the common grazing carries them in summer. Holdings sit in townships, meaning groups of neighbours sharing that grazing and managing it collectively through an elected committee. The arrangement is regulated by its own body of law and its own commission, separate from the rest of Scottish agriculture.

The size was a deliberate design rather than an accident of geography:

• •Populations were moved off inland straths to coastal strips from the 1780s
• •Plots were made too small to live on by farming alone
• •That forced tenants into kelp gathering, fishing and seasonal labour
• •Landlords gained both rent and a cheap dependent workforce
• •The cleared inland ground was let for large-scale sheep farming
• •When kelp prices collapsed the population had no way to support itself

Tenants held no security whatever through the nineteenth century and could be removed at will, which is what made the clearances possible and what eventually produced organised resistance. Rent strikes and land occupations spread through the 1880s, most famously on Skye, and the government sent a gunboat and marines, which did not settle anything. A royal commission reported in 1884 documenting conditions in detail, and legislation in 1886 granted security of tenure, the right to a fair rent set independently, and the right to compensation for improvements made by the tenant. Those rights passed to heirs. The Act is generally regarded as one of the earliest pieces of legislation anywhere to constrain a landlord's rights in favour of an occupier.

The shared rough land is the part of the arrangement that visitors least expect and is genuinely unusual in British land law. Each holding carries a stated right to graze a specific number of animals on the common ground, and those rights are attached to the holding rather than to the person, so they pass with the tenancy. A committee elected by the shareholders manages the land, decides on improvements and enforces the stocking limits, which prevents the overgrazing that unregulated common land invites. Disputes go to a specialised commission and to a land court rather than to ordinary courts. The system is a working example of collective management of a shared resource of the kind studied extensively by economists.

Roughly seventeen thousand holdings remain, concentrated in the Highlands and Islands, and almost none supports a household on its own. Income comes from combining the holding with other work, which is exactly the pattern the original design forced and which now sustains population in places that would otherwise empty. Later legislation gave tenants the right to buy their holdings and allowed communities to buy whole estates, and several large islands and estates are now community owned as a result. The system is criticised for keeping units uneconomically small and for the difficulty young people face in obtaining one, since tenancies pass within families, and it is defended for keeping people on land that would otherwise hold sheep and nobody.

Small tenanted plots with a share of common grazing were laid out deliberately too small to live on, so that tenants had to supply cheap labour for kelp and fishing while the cleared inland ground went to sheep. Rent strikes and occupations in the 1880s produced legislation in 1886 granting security of tenure, independently set rents and compensation for improvements, rights that pass to heirs.