From Townland to Shieling: .
the Traditional Farming Township
The Challenge of Environment
Just as the ruggedness of the region, its extreme fragmentation into so
many self-contained glens and straths, peninsulas and islands, created a
challenge for its political integration into the emerging Scottish king-
dom over the medieval period, so also did it represent a challenge for
the farning communities who relied on its soil for subsistence. Though
only a small fraction of the region was physically suitable for cultiva-
tion, what stands out about the medieval township is that it valued
arable so much. Though most had access to extensive hill or mountain
grazings that were used to produce meat, milk, butter and cheese, in
practice they gave priority to arable. Indeed, the very definition of
townships, the basis on which they were assessed, was their arable core,
or what was 'ploughable and bedewable' as one early charter put it,
other resources being treated as appendages. Admittedly, arable and
pasture were hardly disconnected given the role of the one in provid-
ing manure for the other. So dependent was arable on the manure
produced by the grazings of the township that Dean Munro referred to
arable as 'manurit land' throughout his survey of the Hebrides. The
problem for Highland and Hebridean communities, though, was that
for all their reliance on arable, the amount of land suitable was tightly
prescribed. To maximise what was available, townships had to be
opportunistic, squeezing arable into an environment in which cul-
tivable land was sometimes linear, stretched along straths or raised
beaches, often patchy and broken, but always limited.
Along the western edge of the Outer Hebrides, many townships lay
at the interface between the machair on the seaward side and the peat
inland. Indeed, on islands like the Uists, townships positively gained
from the mixing of these soils. During expansion, they pushed freely
onto peatier soils, using the machair sand to sweeten it and, at greater
risk, they pushed out onto the sandier soils, using peat to give the soil
more organic content. The problem was that ploughing the sandier
soils left them susceptible to erosion because, as a seventeenth-century
source on the Uists put it, the 'sand doeth flow with the winds'.
Across the medieval period and beyond, many townships in the
Hebrides repeatedly faced this problem. The island of Pabbay, for
example, lost over 300 acres of its arable on its south-west side to a
single storm in the late seventeenth century. A later 1772 report on
the island was able to claim that 'the sea flows ... where many people
still alive have reaped crops of grain'.

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