Overview

A survey of how Highland society organised its farming communities, exploited its resource base and interacted with its environment from prehistory to 1914 There has long been a view that the farming communities to be found in the Highlands prior to the Clearances were archaic forms. The way in which they were organised, the way in which they farmed the land and the technologies which they employed were all seen as taking shape during prehistory and then surviving relatively unchanged. Such a view first emerged first during the late nineteenth century and found repeated expression through a number of studies thereafter. However, its entrenchment in the literature was despite the fact that many ongoing studies have highlighted aspects of how the region changed from prehistory onwards. This study confronts this conflict over the question of continuity/discontinuity debate through an analysis of the cultural landscape. Starting with prehistory, it examines the way in which the farming community was organised: its institutional basis, its strategies of resource use and how these impacted on landscape, and the way in which it interacted with the challenges of its environment. It carries these themes forward through the medieval and early modern periods, rounding off the discussion with a substantive review of the gradual spread of commercial sheep farming and the emergence of the crofting townships over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout, it draws out what changed and what was carried forward from each period so that we have a better understanding of the region's dynamic history, as opposed to the ahistorical views that inevitably flow from a stress on cultural inertia. The book provides a one-stop text for the long-term history of the Highland countryside, one nuanced in ways that address topical themes like landscape and environmental change. It synthesises a great deal of work on the Highland farming community during the medieval and early modern periods in terms of its institutional organisation, resource exploitation, landscape impacts and interactions with environment so as to produce an overall review from prehistory down to 1914. Introduces new ideas and arguments that have not been treated or previewed in other published work, such as in chapter 6.Provides the most substantive review of the continuity/discontinuity debate in the Highland landscape currently available

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9781399563604

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Reviews

This is a scholarly tour de force, informed by a lifetime of original research and critical reading. The notion of a traditional Highland agrarian system surviving unchanged from the Iron Age until the eighteenth century is simply blown out of the water. * Chris Smout, Institute for Environmental History, University of St Andrews * A welcome addition to the secondary literature approaching Highland and Island history from an original perspective by bringing together archaeological and historical research and by adopting a broad time frame which ranges from the prehistoric period to the early nineteenth century.' -- James P. Bowen, University of Liverpool * Landscape History *

Author Information

Emeritus Professor Robert A. Dodgshon was formerly Gregynog Professor of Geography and Director of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University). His previous books include Land and Society in Early Scotland (1981), From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands, c.1493-1820 (1998) and The Age of the Clans (2002).

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