INTRODUCTION

AS PREVIOUS CHAPTERS HAVE shown, the collection of seaware from the foreshore was a critical element in the battle over the ownership of the foreshore. The early litigation about the foreshore from the end of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century had, indeed, mostly been about disputes over the right to collect seaware from the shores, and in the nineteenth century the collection of seaware was probably the most important element in proving the possession that determined ownership in the absence of a grant in the cases that finally determined the question of ownership of the foreshore. As we noted in Chapter 1 and as we see in Chapter 8 in the case study of the island of Tiree, the use by crofters and cottars of the foreshore and their collection of seaware from it played an important role in the battle over the ownership of the foreshore. Running alongside the importance of the collection of seaware for the determination of ownership of the foreshore is the question of what rights, if any, crofters and cottars had to collect seaware from the foreshore. We saw in Chapter 1 how crofters believed they had a customary right to seaware and we examine in this chapter the Napier Commission recommendations as to seaware and the debate in the House of Commons that gave rise to provisions being included in the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 that regulated the collection of seaweed by crofters for the use of their crofts. We also look at proposals in 1891 for legislation that would have given crofters (and others) substantive rights to seaware, and at the position taken by the Association of Seaboard Proprietors of Scotland over this proposed legislation. There is a further discussion in Chapter 9 of crofters’ rights to seaware in the context of the review of the law of the foreshore by the Scottish Law Commission in 2003.