No Stone Unturned

A survey of how Highland society organised its farming communities, exploited its resource base, and interacted with its environment from prehistory to 1914.

There has long been a view that the farming communities found in the Highlands prior to the Clearances were archaic forms. The way in which they were organised, the way they farmed the land, and the technologies they employed were all seen as taking shape during prehistory and then surviving relatively unchanged. Such a view first emerged during the late nineteenth century and found repeated expression through numerous studies thereafter. However, its entrenchment in the literature persisted despite many ongoing studies highlighting aspects of how the region changed from prehistory onwards.

This study confronts this conflict over the question of continuity/discontinuity through an analysis of the cultural landscape. Starting with prehistory, it examines the way in which the farming community was organised: its institutional basis, its strategies of resource use, and how these impacted the landscape, as well as the way in which it interacted with the challenges of its environment. It carries these themes forward through the medieval and early modern periods, rounding off the discussion with a substantive review of the gradual spread of commercial sheep farming and the emergence of the crofting townships over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Throughout, it draws out what changed and what was carried forward from each period, providing a better understanding of the region's dynamic history, as opposed to the ahistorical views that inevitably flow from a stress on cultural inertia.

The book provides a one-stop text for the long-term history of the Highland countryside, nuanced in ways that address topical themes like landscape and environmental change. It synthesises a great deal of work on the Highland farming community during the medieval and early modern periods, in terms of its institutional organisation, resource exploitation, landscape impacts, and interactions with the environment, producing an overall review from prehistory down to 1914.

It introduces new ideas and arguments that have not been treated or previewed in other published work, such as in chapter 6, and provides the most substantive review of the continuity/discontinuity debate in the Highland landscape currently available.