Although the improving movement had a comprehensive regional impact, involving the development of industry and the overhaul of transport and settlement systems it was in agriculture where the greatest changes were made. So much so that the notion of an ‘agricultural revolution’, which is good currency south of the border, has been put forward. There was vigorous action taken to enclose land, to create consolidated holdings and to introduce new rotations, especially during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Arguably the legislative preconditions had already been satisfied and particular elements of the new agriculture were exemplified in the countryside before 1700. However, a further important act was passed in 1770 relating to entailed estates, authorising longer leases, if tenants agreed to certain improvements, and allowed proprietors to charge to their heirs three quarters of the costs of enclosure and other agricultural improvements. Furthermore the eighteenth century witnessed not simply the application of a number of different ideas to accelerate the growth of agriculture but, rather, comprehensive packages of measures being introduced on each estate. These local development plans involved the landowner taking a lead and concentrating all major decision-making in his hands. Some seventeenth-century proprietors were very much aware of the potential for commercial farming, especially in Lothian, but it has not yet been shown that on any single estate the owner abolished all sub-tenancies and introduced a uniform system of leasing, with associated policies to redeem wadsets, eliminate boundary problems and set up holdings as enclosed and consolidated units.

In the period since the First World War the importance of the cities has been reinforced through a rapid expansion of their tertiary functions combined with retention of an important stake in manufacturing, albeit with much diversification. The accessibility of cities has improved through a rapid growth in road transport offering a far more developed system than the railway network, which has been drastically reduced in consequence. This has meant the avoidance of a ‘dual economy’ type of development in which city growth is associated with increasing urban isolation and diminishing influence or contagion throughout the region. But it has, equally, not induced urban growth evenly throughout Scotland: disorderly urban sprawl would not be possible anyway given the relatively stringent planning controls that have evolved during the period but even in the context of government and local authority control of urban layouts it is evident that the growth areas are restricted, especially in the Outer Regions where the urban network remains poorly developed. Thriving industries require the full range of urban amenities such as may usually be found in the regional centres of Scotland, but spread away from these cities is difficult. For an industry can only flourish in the context of favourable environmental circumstances. The spread of industry to the Outer Regions is socially necessary, in view of the reduction in employment in primary sectors which are no longer so labour intensive, but the recent improvements in terms of power and transport are not balanced by a satisfactory urban pattern.