Crofting: An Uncompromising Adaptation

The regular form of the crofting township is a defining feature of the modern Hebridean landscape. Though the individual service croft had much older roots, the crofting township did not appear until the late eighteenth century, with most Hebridean examples appearing only during the nineteenth century, with some islands being quicker on their uptake than others. As well as looking at the factors that helped to shape their layout and the way in which many were laid out over land in an uncomprising way, the discussion considers the changing expectations over how much subsistence support a croft should provide and the pressures that subsequently acted on them to the extent of reworking their layouts, squeezing their resource base and even displacing them within a generation of their formation. The discussion is rounded off with a brief review of how, by the late nineteenth century,  the crofters found a political voice that gradually led to legislative changes that gave them security and the creation of a network of more viable crofts.