"Improvements and Clearance: the Lowland Countryside" with David McLean

Improvement and Clearance : The Lowland Countryside 1750-1850

This talk begins with a look at the ferm touns of Lowland Scotland around 1700 with their traditional system of open fields and runrig farming. It then examines how the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed farming practice as well as the rural landscape - with particular examples from Aberdeenshire and Berwickshire. Finally, it follows the fate of those thousands of cottars who were cleared from the Lowland countryside during those years of unprecedented change.

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