Helensburgh is a Scottish town whose quiet streets lead uphill away from the North Clyde Estuary. A short walk from the waterfront esplanade, almost hidden behind a naval housing estate (1957), an observant tourist can contemplate the stone remains of Ardencaple Castle, parts of which might date to the thirteenth century but more of which dates to the eighteenth century. Walking near the stone wall which runs parallel to the small street, it is difficult to imagine that a large, imposing, perhaps intimidating, building once stood upon vast grounds, housing the chief of the Clan MacAuley (or Macaulay). Recently, I stood with a friend in the warm September sun looking at the grey wall, trying to imagine the visage and the determination of nineteenth-century watercolourist Kate Macaulay as she might have gazed, sketchbook in hand, at the then extant house, once the property of her dispersed clan. She may have turned her eyes and her pencil away from the house toward the river or toward the rolling, treed and rocky terrain that stretched beyond the castle walls toward Loch Lomond. She, after all, preferred to draw and paint land and water more than the buildings sprouting from the stone and the soil. But she did paint ‘MacAuley’ land, recording numbers of scenes in and around Loch Lomond, Gare Loch and Loch Long, sometimes moving beyond clan boundaries to Oban and Skye or to the area around her own ‘Ardencaple House’ in North Wales.

In the introduction to his practical manual on the organisation of friendly societies published in 1851 J.H. James writes:

The character of a nation may be pretty well ascertained from the general features of its public institutions. When these are directed to the morals, social and intellectual training of the human mind, and to the privilege of a cultivation of religious principles we may be sure of the existence of that high degree of buoyancy and healthiness of mental vigour, accompanied by great physical energy not to be found in any other condition of society.

During the last two decades interpretations of agrarian modernisation have been the subject of critical debate. In neo-classical tradition, agrarian economists and economic historians have traditionally laid emphasis on the diffusion of technology and on the commercialisation of production. They have customarily been interested in the development of agricultural output and incomes, and basically understood modernisation as an evolutionary process by which commercial, market oriented production was substituted for traditional, subsistence production. During the 1970s and the 1980s agrarian sociologists and historians posed the question in more social and historical terms, seeking to determine which type of producers, large farmers or family farmers, were the bearers of modernisation. The traditional Marxian standpoint, as is well known, was that capitalist farming — in spite of delays and problems inherent in agricultural production — would come to dominate the agrarian sector through technical innovation and large scale production. Opposing this, neo-Marxian/neo-Chayanovian interpretations claimed that family farming, due to the innate characteristics of that particular production form, provided family farmers with a competitive advantage in relation to large scale production. According to this, more ‘social’ historical tradition, the social organisation of family based production was the key to understanding the viability, or even superiority, of family farming in the industrialised and urbanised societies of western Europe and North America.

This paper has two objectives. The first is to explore the creation of a Highland policy area in the 1880s. Emphasis will be placed on the use of historical arguments by the government in the course of the construction of the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, especially in the attempt to justify confining the operation of that statute to the Highlands. The second theme, explored in the latter parts of the paper, concerns the strategies which succeeding governments have used to justify the perpetuation of a distinct Highland policy area. An element of continuity in Highland history in the twentieth century has been the special treatment of the area by governments. On the occasions when this has caused resentment in other rural areas of Britain, the Scottish Office response has been to argue that the Highlands are a special case because of the existence of the crofting counties with their special code of legislation. Clearly, this is a tautological argument and it is hoped that this paper, by exploring the period from the creation of the crofting legislation in the 1880s, to the late twentieth century, will shed some light on its origins. It will be argued that this has created a climate of fear in the Highlands and particularly the crofting community, but also, on occasion in the Lowlands. Further, there are occasions when the existence of a special Highland policy area has served to marginalise Highland policy. The paper falls into five main sections: the first will briefly review the literature about the Highland/Lowland division in Scotland, the second will look at the origins of the Crofters' Act of 1886, the third will examine the period from 1906 to 1911 when aspects of crofting legislation were extended to the rest of Scotland; the fourth section will identify the inter war period as an era when Highland policy became more diverse and the final section will scrutinise the impact of that more diverse approach in the years after the Second World War.

On a tour of the Chiltern hills upon the eve of the Second World War the rural commentator Henry Massingham came across a Buckinghamshire farmer. As rural ‘characters’ are wont to do in Massingham's books, the farmer was able to recite a piece of rustic wisdom, on this occasion concerning the type of country worker that he always sought to employ, saying ‘A man as can't do more'n one thing baint good for anything’. As an employer of men the farmer simply meant that all his charges should be of sufficient calibre to prove themselves versatile within an industry that called on them to change tasks by the hour, day, week and season. In short, in the eyes of the farmer an adaptable labourer was an efficient labourer. However, there was another side to this equation, as the aphorism also held resonance with workmen across a wide range of trades and not simply agriculture. For it was the man who was able to vary his work patterns, switching between employment sources, going beyond his central occupation if necessary, that was best able to ride-out the vagaries of the rural labour market.