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- Herausgeber: Old Pond Books
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Having lived and worked in and around agriculture in Fife all his life, Andrew Arbuckle has a deep affection for his farming heritage. Keen to record this for both those who remember the old ways of farming as well as future generations, Andrew has gathered information from a variety of sources to present a commentary on Scottish farming life from 1900 to the present day. Andrew's avenues of research included local newspaper archives, press cuttings and minutes from union meetings or local shows. Social history also plays a vital part in the project and interviews with people who have worked in farming in days gone by give the book a vitality and humanity often missing from history books. The book is liberally illustrated with between 50-60 black and white photographs arranged in sections.
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Footsteps in the Furrow
ANDREW ARBUCKLE
Dedication
For Lydia and Elizabeth
Contents
Chapter 1
Introduction
AS a boy, my walk to primary school took me along a quiet rural road running parallel with the south side of the river Tay from the small town of Newburgh. Along with half a dozen other youngsters, we would some days dawdle and play along the way. Other days, when the rain beat down upon us, we would scurry home as fast as our short legs would carry us.
Some sixty-odd years later, I still live along that same stretch of road looking out over the land my family farmed for the best part of half a century. The road is known locally as the Barony, after the Barons of Rothes, who, for five preceding centuries, owned the riverside strip of land. Their castle, Ballinbreich, now lies in a ruinous condition but still commands a dominant position looking upstream towards Perth and eastwards to the estuary of Scotland’s largest river.
In those feudal times, the castle was the hub of all life. Small, unfenced bits of land might have been tilled around its sturdy walls. Sheep, and a few of the now-extinct Fife breed of cattle, would have been tended on the slopes. The purpose of the castle had little to do with defence against some invader. It was re-built in the sixteenth century but Fife had never been marauding country, leaving that activity to the more quarrelsome peoples in the Highlands and the Borders.
The castle had more to do with status. Its sturdy presence stamped its mark upon the area and also on the people who lived under the shadow of its walls in those days. Most of those living in the parish would be sheltered within the castle and tenant farmers paid their feus to the barons as they eked out a living from the land.
Although running roughly parallel with the riverside, the road takes the easy route, like all tracks born in the days of horse and cart. Hills were tackled gently, with no steep gradients; winding round the contours rather than heading for the shorter, steeper, more direct route.
It is a road where a steady pull on the cart shafts would transport the loads of grain and potatoes towards the local markets; a road where ridden horses could also keep steady pace without breaking stride to cope with sudden ups and downs on the carriageway. To call it a ‘carriageway’ is somewhat grand. It was a statute labour road, meaning the adjoining landowners were required to carry out the maintenance on it.
This was never a main road between two important points. In the early days, the Barony road would have been no more than a couple of stone-filled tracks for the cart wheels to follow and a softer, unmade up section between for the horse. Only in the early days of the twentieth century did the local authority get round to covering it with tarmacadam, classifying it in their bureaucratic way as ‘C46’.
In those days, the main town of Newburgh had a corn market to which grain merchants from Perth and Dundee would travel, either by horse or by boat. Grain and potatoes for markets in the south of England were loaded onto boats by the simple expedient of horse and cart backing down towards the vessel that lay beached at low tide. Later, in my time, farm produce was transported by tractors and trailers, hauling seed potatoes from the farm towards the station in Newburgh and then onward to their destination in the south of England.
Horse carts and gigs have long gone and although the main Edinburgh to Perth line still crosses the land, the railway closed down four decades ago in Newburgh. Today, agricultural traffic consists of large articulated lorries and is largely limited to a two-month period at harvest time. It sees bulk lorries of grain with 20-plus tonnes of wheat or barley, heading for the malting or distilling markets – or, if the quality is less than it should be, for feed mills. For an equally short period, unwary rural travellers may also encounter large heavy goods vehicles with potatoes in 1-tonne wooden crates being driven away to centralised stores.
The road still winds through the countryside, but in the past hundred years farming has changed more dramatically than in a score of centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, along the 5-mile length of the Barony road were a dozen farms. Some were small, with only the tenant working the acres and keeping a few cattle and sheep. Ownership of the estate passed to the Zetland family – absentee landlords, who acquired it from the Rothes family through a marital link.
Some fifty years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the number of working farms had shrunk to 7. Smaller units were subsumed into the larger ones, to leave only a small biggin – a small set of farm buildings – behind.
On these 7 farms were some 25 cottages, with another 4 added by the estate in the 1950s to cope with demand for additional farm workers. The valuation roll of those days showed all 29 dwellings housed farm workers.
As we march onward in the twenty-first century, only three of the original dozen farms work as independent units. The rest are farmed from outside the parish and all the arable work is done in a short burst of feverish activity at springtime and a slightly longer bout of high-tempo activity in the autumn. One solitary farm along the road has retained its livestock enterprises, so it is still possible to see newborn calves from the commercial suckler herd.
In the spring, the latest crop of lambs can be seen initially looking as if they want to confirm all the prejudices farmers have about sheep having a death wish. However, within a few days, they, and dozens of their colleagues, romp about the fields engaged in pointless, but joyful chases. The rest of the livestock along this parish road arrives for the summer grazing season and departs either to market, or back to the owner’s farm, several miles away.
Some twenty-eight of the cottages remain, but not one of these provides accommodation for a farm worker. With one exception, work on the farms is carried out by the farmers themselves, or by contractors coming in with seeders or harvesters. The one remaining full-time agricultural worker lives in Cupar – some twenty years after he left the tied house in which I now live.
All the cottages and the parish school and church are now occupied by those who commute from their rural base into the towns and cities. In contrast with the tied housing of a previous generation, many are now owned by those who live in them.
The local primary school has been closed for the past thirty years, and today’s children are collected and deposited, morning and night, by a taxi service that takes them six miles to the nearest rural school. The church has also closed its doors. It sits, roofless, surrounded by a graveyard. Headstones tell of the farmers and workers of previous years. For most of the day, this quiet country road is almost deserted, following the early-morning dash to work until the return journeys in the evening.
Recording the changes
Some twenty years ago, when I gave up active farming to write about agriculture in the Dundee Courier, I would occasionally refer back to farming practices of previous generations. Descriptions of the machine harvesting of potatoes compared with the hand picking of the crop would bring forth letters full of such memories. Similarly, comments on how the Scottish summer raspberry crop would largely be picked by holidaying Glaswegians resulted in phone calls, recalling those seemingly halcyon days. Even reports on relatively mundane heavy physical work, such as dung spreading, seemed to provoke fond memories.
Although the husbandry learned more than half a century ago is still relevant, many of the skills gathered at that time, when labour was an essential of good farming, are no longer part and parcel of farming life. For example, being able to mark out ‘bits’, as the sections of the field were called at potato picking time, lies in the basket of skills now laid to one side and labelled redundant. Likewise, an ability to measure out the capacity of a straw stack is an attribute that now moulders away in the recesses of a few elderly minds.
Apart from the skills skittering away from modern man’s brain cells, many of the customs and practices linked to farming in the last century have disappeared. Gone are the days of labour hierarchy on the farms. With no farm grieves (working farm managers) and no orramen (‘ordinary’ farm workers), this ladder of rural social life has lost its rungs. Gone is the chat or crack between the team of men on the farm and the loon, often a callow youth who was always on the butt end of any prank, or joke – such as sending him for a load of postholes or a tin of tartan paint.
This book is an attempt to shine a light on life on farms in the previous century and to capture some of those work practices and pictures of a rural landscape from yesteryear. It does not pretend to be a history of farming. Although the major events shaping the industry are recorded, they are there merely as directional markers, not part of a definitive history. Nor does it have any pretensions to be a sociological record of rural life: that would be too grandiose an ambition for what is no more than a collection of memories.
The great temptation when looking back into the past is to forget the downside to a simpler way of life and to remember only the good parts. While everyone remembers the camaraderie, few will talk of the harshness of life, where a wage earner’s illness or accident would quickly leave a family clinging onto the proverbial bread line. And while there are happy recollections of harvest fields full of workers, the reality of those days was also one where working conditions were often unpleasant, sometimes severely so.
Pictures of rows of workers standing outside the stables holding their horses reflect the pride and fellowship of the work in the era of the dominant horse. But the photographer was not on hand when those same men were out ploughing in the sleet and rain; sometimes sheltering under the horse with just with an old sack over the shoulders to keep the worst of the weather at bay. I hope that in these memories a fair approach has been taken, one that recognises that some parts were good, especially the camaraderie, and others were not so great.
The physical boundaries of the stories are mainly kept to those around my calf country, that of North-East Fife, but there is a well known saying in the Scottish farming industry and that is, ‘If you want to see the whole country but do not have the time, then just go to Fife.’ It may be one of the most cliched descriptions of the county, but calling it ‘a beggar’s mantle fringed with gold’ describes the rich, fertile coastal strips surrounding the slightly poorer land in the centre.
I have also no doubt that many of the practices recalled within these pages have similarity with those from other areas. The geography is no more than a sampler onto which memories and stories are stitched. One further qualification: this is not a personal history, or even a history of my own family. In farming terms, the Arbuckle family was no different from many others in their origins and work. To their cost, they might have dabbled more deeply in the politics of farming than most, but that is not part of the story.
My own little store of memories and family records has been greatly augmented by the many kind friends who spoke openly of their recollections of times gone past. The verbal harvesting of customs and practices of the older generation has been one of the joys and happiness of this work.
I hope your reading of this book will either tug at your own personal memories, or, if you are of a younger generation, provide an insight to how life used to be down on the farm.
ANDREW ARBUCKLE Newburgh, Fife, 2009
Chapter 2
Early Days
MY grandfather, John Arbuckle, was brought up on the family farm on the outskirts of Bathgate in the industrial heartlands of Scotland. He was reputed to have married one day, and the very next morning to have taken his new bride and all the possessions essential to taking the tenancy of a farm off in a horse-drawn cart to their new home in Angus.
There is no record of the length of time this journey took in the first decade of the last century but it would have retraced the steps of the drovers who, in the 100 years prior to that, brought cattle and sheep down from the hills and glens to the big Tryst at Falkirk.
The new couple set up home on a small farm outside Glamis in Angus, where they lived and worked for a number of years before a bigger tenancy came along.
And that was how my family came into the county of Fife. The slightly circuitous route may have been unusual, but all through the first half of last century, there was a tidal flow of new farming blood coming into Fife from smaller family farms in the wetter west of Scotland. Such was the scale of this migration that by the 1950s there were very few farmers in Fife unable to trace their roots back west. There were a number of reasons for this, but the biggest single factor lay in the economic benefits from the increased options provided by farming in the east of Scotland.
The east-coast climate allows a wider range of crops to be grown and the soils are generally better than the wet, heavier land in the west. Grass has always grown well in the west, but as Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, knew to his cost, growing crops in Ayrshire was not an easy option.
Those migrating from the west did not all come east; many went south, where the land was again of a better quality and the climate drier and warmer than their homelands. The nature of migration is such that the successful pioneers who blazed a trail into new territory tended to get the message back home. This sets up a second wave of migration and more hopefuls head towards the Promised Land. To this day, there are farming villages in Lincolnshire, Essex and Bedford where those of Scottish origin dominate.
Although not used by my grandfather, the migration into the east was made much easier by the network of railways that criss-crossed their way across the country. It was possible, with a little planning, to move entire farms – livestock, goods and chattels – by train. Many of those coming eastwards would milk their dairy cattle in the morning in their old farm in the west and then carry out the afternoon’s milking at the new base. Some hired whole trains to carry out their flitting. When John Steven came to Stravithie, outside St Andrews, his bill from the railway company for moving the lock, stock and barrel of his farm across Scotland was £39 10/-. This might be multiplied by twenty times to cater for a century of financial inflation and still it would be a tremendous bargain.
Another family making the same move eastwards were the Logans, who came to Dairsie Mains complete with their herd of Ayrshire milking cows. Again, those cows were hand-milked in the west before going on the train, and as they settled down in their new home, they were milked in the afternoon. The Logan family also demonstrated considerable acumen as they sold turf from their new farm to help create the world-famous golf course at Carnoustie, and with the proceeds they bought another farm: Kirkmay at Crail.
Even with the advantage of coming east to farm, anyone regarding it as the Promised Land must have been labelled optimistic in the early years of the century. For the previous three decades from the 1870s, agriculture had slipped into a deep depression. Long gone were the golden days of the earlier 1800s, when the protection afforded by the Corn Laws – import tariffs designed to support domestic British corn prices against competition from less expensive foreign imports – produced prosperity never before or since seen in the countryside.
During those years of plenty, investment in agriculture transformed the landscape. Many of the farm steadings in the country were built around this time to house livestock, store crops and shelter machinery. Drainage and the general improvement of soils through liming and marling (adding clay to improve light, sandy soil) also came about in this period of abundance.
With the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the subsequent surge of imports to help feed the newly industrialised population in the UK, the economics of agriculture within those shores collapsed. As the rich and massive prairie hinterland of America opened up and the plows – American spelling – cut open the vast grasslands, once roamed by buffalo, imports of grain began in large quantities, thus destroying the home market in the 1870s. As a direct consequence, the acreage on corn in the UK fell by 25% in the 20-year period between 1873 and 1893.
From the other side of the globe, imports of mutton flooded in from New Zealand and Australia after it was found to be economically possible to ship meat for as little as two pennies per pound, or 2p per kilo. Even when the cost of transport and the cheaper initial price of the lamb were added up, the total was still far less than the home-produced product. A similar story of cheap beef from South America undercut the UK market to the extent that numbers of beef cattle in the UK were 20% fewer in 1900 than only ten years previously.
In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the consequence of all those cheap imports was that prices were halved. One quarter of the agricultural workers left the land in that same period. Farms fell into dereliction or were reduced to grass as the practice of growing more expensive crops was abandoned. Many tenant farmers simply vanished, leaving the landlord with empty farms.
As they entered the twentieth century, farmers in the UK recognised that their fortunes depended not on how they managed their own costs, but on how their government controlled imports. This position has remained constant throughout the last 100 years and will persist in the future.
As will be seen, only in times of shortage or privation do governments place importance on the home production of food. At all other times, the benefits of cheap food to the wider economy dominate the political thought process.
During the pre-war hard times when they were getting low prices for their produce, farmers did what farmers could do better than most and that was to tighten their belts and cut costs. This rule applies to the present day and comes into play whenever the economic barometer hits the floor. Often it sees land, once ploughed, revert to being grassed over, with livestock running extensively. ‘Dog-and-stick farming’ it is called, employed by many a successful farmer for his survival. Reducing the amount of money going down the farm road and off the farm may not have been the recipe for high-living, but often ensured the ability to continue living on the land.
It was reckoned that for many the main outgoings on many of the farms in the first decade of the century were limited to paying blacksmith’s bills and the small pittance that workers received for wages and a few essentials, such as clothes and food. Even the food that was bought was often obtained under a barter system, with eggs and butter exchanged for salt and spices that could not be home produced.
Even with self-imposed austerity, some farmers could not see their way through the Depression. One such example saw the disappearance in 1912 of Thomas Hunter White, the tenant of Drumrack farm outside St Andrews, halfway through his agreed tack, or term of lease. A local banker, Henry Watson, received a letter from an advisor in the Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of Agriculture telling him of the situation. Mr Watson, who had always wanted to farm, asked for a description of the farm. Back came the letter:
The whole farm is deplorably dirty. It is ostensibly down to grass but it will require to be sown again. The steading is antiquated and has fallen into a state of disrepair. The cottages are bad and would require to be gutted. The farm has been culpably neglected.
Mr Watson took the farm and now, almost 100 years later, his family still farms the same unit. Possibly unwittingly, he had chosen a period when farming was moving into a short period of profitability.
What many farmers and politicians did not know or did not recognise in the first decade of the last century was that Britain would shortly be engulfed in the largest conflict ever experienced: World War I.
To prove that modern politicians do not have a monopoly on daft statements, in 1903 the Board of Agriculture, the then equivalent of the Ministerial Department responsible for the farming industry, produced a report on food supplies. It stated: ‘There is no risk of cessation of supplies, no reasonable probability of serious interference with them and even with a maritime war, there will be no material diminution of their volume.’ Little more than a decade after that imperious statement, German warships sank shiploads of wheat, oats, beef and lamb destined for Britain.
At the start of the war in 1914, more than half the food consumed in the UK came in from abroad. Five years later, at the end of the war, British farmers were producing two-thirds of the food for a hungry home population. And they did so profitably. Even if rationing helped prevent the worst excesses of profiteering, farmers benefited from price increases and ready markets for their produce. Andy McLaren, of Nether Strathkinness, St Andrews, will be among the last of a generation to remember the latter years of that war being hungry ones, with food rationing having to be brought into play.
That war, with prowling enemy ships sinking boats full of food coming into Britain, first sharpened the nation’s attention to food security. Whatever words are used, it was the war that brought home to this island nation the fact that importing food during conflict brought hazards, such as shipping supply lines being cut by the enemy.
Even before the last guns of war sounded, the then government was planning legislation that would provide a guaranteed price for wheat and oats. It was 1920 before the Agricultural Act actually came into being, with its promise of a minimum price of 95 shillings per quarter for both wheat and oats. But within months of this financial protective shield, food imports again swamped the country. Much to the annoyance of the recently created National Farmers Union of Scotland, the government, faced with high post-war unemployment, decided to ditch the Act as a quick way of lowering the price of food.
The vast majority of farming in Fife in the early years of the last century was carried out through the tenancy system. Even though there were no large-scale landlords in Fife, such as can be seen throughout the rest of Scotland, many private landlords in the county had small, tenanted estates. Fife landlords had been characterised by the saying that they ‘had a wee puckle land, a doo’cot, and a law suit’, which translates into their ownership of a small acreage of land, a pigeon loft for food and a penchant for argument. In 1908, some 90% of the farmed land was tenanted. That percentage was stable until the end of World War I, when cash-rich tenants took advantage of cash-strapped landlords and bought their farms.
So, why were the landlords short of cash? Simply because leases were taken on a 7- or 14-year basis and landlords were unable to raise rents during the good times; reportedly, rents were actually less at the end of the war than at the beginning.
Over the next fifteen years, the percentage of owner-occupiers rose to more than 30%. It was the biggest shift in land ownership in Scotland since monastic times. The change of land ownership was helped along the way by the increase in Estate Duty, introduced in 1925. However, many of those tenants who had taken the leap into ownership may have regretted taking that step as farm commodity prices plunged in the early 1920s to levels last experienced ten and twenty years previously. Other factors further accentuating the post-war economic downturn came into play. The savage loss of life in the war had robbed the country and the farms of a large percentage of its workforce. Some indication of the Grim Reaper’s scything down of young men belonging to the rural areas can be seen to the present day just by reading the war memorials scattered around the countryside. As more and more young men were called away to fight for King and country, it was not unusual to see boys as young as 14 years of age ploughing behind a pair of horse.
Fewer men were left on the farm and those who did remain required more pay, but when commodity prices plummeted, farmers tried to negotiate a drop in wages. As we will see elsewhere, these negotiations helped form the Farm Servants’ Union.
Similar economic woes hit the urban areas and farming was in recession more quickly than was at first realised in the 1920s. In a perceptive remark in 1929, Mr Henderson of Scotscraig, the president of Cupar NFU, stated that because farmers were not getting prices to meet the costs of production, large tracts of land were going down into grass: ‘Certainly, the Nation will awake to this fatal error but then it may be too late with the farming interest largely wiped out.’
In fact, the nadir for the farming industry came in the early 1930s. The average area of land under cultivation in Scotland during that decade was the smallest since 1876. Even in the run-up to World War II, production of all commodities except poultry was much less than at its peak in 1918. This happened despite the efforts of Walter Elliot, a Scottish sheep farmer who became the Minister of Agriculture in the early years of the decade. By imposing some import tariffs and encouraging farmers to grow for defined markets, he tried to bolster the industry.
In the 1930s, there were many cases of bankruptcy and then there were the less publicised ones of suicide. It was said at the time that no farmer could look out over his neighbourhood without seeing at least one farm where the farmer had either taken his own life or had simply vanished from the scene. In the depressed years, the small parish of Carnbee lost two farmers who took their own lives, while another six went bankrupt. As was witnessed in an earlier era at Drumrack, farms let on tacks or rental periods of 7–14 years regularly were abandoned by the tenants.
Far more than in any other occupation, failure in farming, for whatever reason, is a heavy burden and one that is often carried alone. However, it was in those deep, dark days that the industry first pulled itself together and set up organisations to fight its corner. Their story is carried elsewhere in this book.
Chapter 3
Farms, Fields and Steadings
WHEN travelling through towns nowadays, every so often you come across a children’s play area, filled with swings, chutes, roundabouts and climbing frames. They are in stark primary colours and mostly surrounded by a soft rubberised area, lest the children fall off. It all seems so distant from the play area of my own childhood and of those brought up on the farms of a generation or more ago.
For youngsters growing up in the country, farmyards were our playground – the buildings, the farm machinery and the goods stored about the place provided the landscape for rich adventure and risky escapades. One favourite starting point was the farm stables; the horses had gone from the farm but the stables in the farm steading still had a certain relevance.
The size or the number of stalls in a stable gave an idea of the scale and nature of the farm. A rule of thumb was that a pair of horse could cover some 50 acres on an arable farm and so a quick count of the number of stalls would tell the size of the farm.
Some farms in Fife had two stables. Unusual, until you consider that in World War I, often the military came onto farms, unannounced, and requisitioned the best of the horses. Farmers found it was far better to split the risk and hope that those responsible for taking away the horsepower of the country to the battlefields would not realise they were only seeing half the horses on the farm.
From an early age, we youngsters could open the half-hack stable doors, where the top half could be opened for ventilation, leaving the bottom still closed with a latch or a draw bolt. Once inside the stone-built building, we could climb up onto the food troughs at the front of the stalls, which were separated by wooden partitions. Even by this age our senses were heightened by the sharp smell of the creosote applied to every piece of wood in contact with livestock.
We did not know it then but this form of disinfection was applied on an annual basis to keep at bay contagious diseases such as ringworm. Nor did we realise at that time that there was a similar reason for whitewashing all the stone and brickwork with limestone. For some, whitewashed walls equate to cleanliness and good hygiene.
For myself, and others who applied the hot lime or the creosote during the summer months when the livestock were outside, there are memories of stinging faces whenever the brushes accidentally splashed preservative onto our skin. This routine work was not enjoyed. In addition to the discomfort experienced by wayward splashes and drips, working clothes were marked. There being no overalls in those days, the general practice was to cut a hole in the base of an old jute sack and then stick your head through it, leaving the wearer with the latest fashion: a bag advertising Bloggs Grain.
From the food troughs, with a slightly acrobatic swing we could get into the slatted hay haiks above the troughs. On some farms, there was a direct connection with the loft next door so that hay or oat straw could be fed through the boles. Crawling through these boles would then take you into the loft with its shiny wooden floor; smoothed and ribbed by years and years of forage being dragged along as it was filled and gradually emptied.
On some farms these lofts would be filled by straw conveyers slung from the roof rafters straight from the threshing mill; others had conveyors that took the bulk grain into the dry feed store that was also filled with sacks of various foods for livestock. In both, bags or bulk, there were a thousand dusty hidey-holes where youngsters might conceal themselves when playing hide and seek.
The loft was accessed by a set of stone steps. These steps were worn away by the tackets, or short nails in the soles of the boots of a generation of men who carried sacks of grain weighing more than 100 kilos. Pre-Health and Safety Executive days, there were no handrails on the steps and so, if brave or foolish enough, we youngsters could jump off the top step onto the cobbled yard below.
Below the loft was the cart shed where the coup carts, and later small tractor trailers were housed; each with its own beautifully constructed archway of stonework built in an arc with a keystone. At the highpoint of the arch was a hook, on which the carter would hang the shafts of the cart. Alongside each cart were hooks on which the extra cart sides were stored, in case the work involved a bulky crop. Above, on the wooden rafters were the flakes used when carting hay and straw.
At the other end of the loft were the cattle courts and again, we, as children out of sight of adult restraint, would climb into the troughs running along each side of the raised gangway. We would then climb into the hay haiks and up onto the couples, or roof rafters. From this high vantage point, it was a test of courage to crawl along these wooden batons looking down on the cattle below. Then, in a game of dares we would hang from the beams until an unsuspecting bullock wandered below. The aim was to land on its back, but more often we missed and fell onto well-trodden dung.
As we stepped from rafter to rafter we had little thought of the joiners of a previous century possibly having skimped on their nailing. In our escapades, we believed that accidents were for other people; any superficial damage would sort itself. That is why short trousers were always worn because skinned knees were cheaper to sort out than tears in long trousers.
Below us were the cattle that were spending their winter being fed and watered as part of the fattening process. Fife was, and still is, an area for finishing cattle and winter housing was required for this purpose.
On farms with breeding herds there would be some smaller buildings with stalls, where the cattle would be tethered by the neck. These buildings had large, vertical flagstones separating the stalls. There was a food trough in front and a dung passage at the back, where the day’s animal waste, as we never called it, could be swept along to the end of the shed before being barrowed out to the midden – the heap of waste and animal dung.
Milk cows were also tethered in the same type of stalls so that milking could be carried out in relative safety with only the danger of a kick from the hind legs, if the cow did not relish the milking process.
When we tired of the cattle courts or the milking stalls, with their warm, moist, sweet smell, we would play in the turnip shed, which was handily built next door so that the cattlemen had only short trips to make between shed and trough. The turnip shed was less fun and invariably led to excursions onto the roofs of the steading itself; the route was through a broken roof light, then a clamber up the pantiles, trying hard not to dislodge them.
Again, we seemed to care little for the robustness of the roofs. We could see down into the sheds, but never thought that the whole roof might be somewhat unsafe. The brave walked along the ridges, from where they could see the whole layout of the steading, all the time hoping no adult would see them.
Many of the old farm steadings were built in a U-shape, with the farmhouse often helping to fill the gap in the ‘U’. From a high point on the roof, our eyes followed around. First, the stables, then the loft and cart sheds, and onto the cattle courts, always bounded in by the turnip shed.
Many of the smaller farms had a horse mill. This was a separate hexagonal building, in which the power to drive the threshing mill was generated by a single horse pulling a shaft that drove a central hub or capstan. The old steadings were built for, and by, horsepower, though on the larger farms steam engines may have puffed away, turning the wheels of the threshing mills.
The majority of the steadings in the arable parts of Fife were built in the middle and late 1800s. Most of the farms were tenanted and landlords, keen on improvement, built farm steadings for their tenants. Stone was the main material used in the construction and the buildings were built of local sandstone or harder whinstone. Because of the cost and effort of transporting stone, many quarries were created purely to supply material for farm steadings and cottages.
In that busy building era, most of the parishes had several stone masons. The buildings they created reflect the agricultural priorities of the area, as well as the relevant importance of both the farmhouse and the farm cottages. But even in my youth, there were additions to these traditional steadings, thus proving the old adage that no farmer, however intelligent he claimed to be, ever built his steading big enough or his field gates wide enough.
The latter point related not just to the ever-increasing scale of farm machinery, but also to the fact that generations of ploughmen, farmers and farm students have notoriously been unable to guide a tractor or implement into, or out of, a field without touching, scraping, or even the downright breaking of a gatepost. The arrival of the tractor saw great ugly holes being punched through the original stone walls as the old stable door had not been built wide enough to allow access for mechanical vehicles.
Some of the earliest additions to farm steadings were former World War II buildings, which were given a second lease of life as implement sheds, henhouses or pig-fattening buildings. Many of these were made of corrugated iron; others were pre-fabricated buildings.
On some farms, silage towers had been built in the 1920s and 1930s. These were often made with concrete and a few examples such as the one at Collairnie Farm, Letham still exist. Then, as new materials came along and more knowledge of silage making came into use, fibreglass sealed silage towers soon pierced the skyline. With less demand for grass-based forage, there were always fewer of these in Fife than in dairying districts of Scotland.
The boy on the roof of the old buildings in the 1950s could also see the first bulk grain bins built close to the steadings. These came in with the combines when lifting heavy sacks fell out of favour. Conveying grain electrically by auger and elevator was found to be far more efficient and much quicker.
The first of the specialist potato sheds also came into being in the post-war years. These were brick-built, with asbestos sheeting over steel trusses. As technology advanced, later models dispensed with the trusses, replacing them with steel beams. This allowed farmers to maximise storage space by stacking the potato boxes higher than previously imagined.
Today’s modern potato shed comes with ambient temperature control that removes the old problem of tuber diseases spreading through the crop when the potatoes overheated after being lifted in wet conditions. It also stops the sprouting of potatoes in warmer weather.
As husbandry knowledge increased, specialist livestock buildings were erected. This was especially true for pigs and poultry. Long, low buildings with controlled ventilation first went up in the early 1960s. Outside these were metal feed hoppers to automatically feed the livestock; inside, the intensive production of poultry or pig meat was carried out.
For those farms still considered working units, the footprint of the buildings has multiplied several times during the course of the last century as crop storage and livestock production moved indoors.
At the start of World War II, there were some 1,243 farms or landholdings in North-East Fife. Today’s total of viable working farms in the same area numbers less than 300. What has also happened is a congregation into fewer, but larger working units. Quietly, many smaller farms have been taken over.
Often no agricultural use is made of the farm buildings on these smaller units. Many, especially those around St Andrews, where there is a strong demand for accommodation from those working or studying in the ancient university, have been converted into housing. Once a month, the Planning Committee of North-East Fife area of Fife Council meets in Cupar. Almost without exception over the past decade, in the normal list of planning applications there have been bids to convert redundant farm steadings into housing on a regular basis. These are invariably granted. At least in this local authority area there is a requirement that any conversion largely takes place within the original curtilage or footprint of the buildings, with as much of the original building as possible retained.
Other councils take a more relaxed view. They allow old farm buildings to be demolished and then transplant a clutch of largely identical houses or a small piece of suburbia onto the flattened site. Even containing any development into the area previously covered by cart sheds, barns, lofts, cattle courts and neep sheds, sufficient space can be created for a dozen or so houses. So, now, theoretically, we have a repopulation of the countryside.
The reality is different as there is little or no connection between the work of the land and those who live in the steading conversions; the vast majority drive to work early in the morning and return late at night, the week’s shopping achieved at some distant retail park.
It is fanciful to think that the ghosts from the past inhabit these old buildings recycled into modern homes; it is difficult to believe today’s inhabitants, looking out from their floor-to-ceiling windows placed in openings of the old cart sheds, hear the voice of the old grieve shouting across the close about some perceived failing by one of the loons. And as they rush out to their cars to go to work, they will never hear the clip-clop of horseshoes over the cobbles at the start of day, or the sound of the turnip, or neep hasher, getting the daily diet for the cattle.
The past century has also seen a loss of farms and buildings directly as a result of towns and villages expanding their boundaries. Those picking up their ancestral roots often come back to the family farm to find they require to walk the concrete pavements or muddy playing fields of the burgeoning urban landscape.
The scale of change in farming is not easily observed from the traditional view over the hedge or dyke, or even through fence wires on visits along the rural roads. The fields provide permanence, and crops are still grown.
Often, if the rural jungle drums do not beat out the message, the first that even neighbours now know of a change in working the land may come with the arrival of a stranger’s set of machinery entering the fields. Gone too are the smallholdings, including those set up specifically after World War I by the British Government in their repatriation of soldiers – part of their belief that they were creating a land fit for heroes.
In North-East Fife two larger properties were split up to make smaller holdings – Third Part and Easter Pitcorthie. These holdings each had a farmhouse and steading, and approximately 50 acres (or 20 hectares). Today, only two of these original holdings remain, the rest have either been amalgamated or the land sold off to neighbours, leaving a house in the country.
Fields
The old trick of looking at the placement of a gateway to see who owned the field has also gone with the aggregation into larger units. It used to be that the gate was always placed in the corner nearest the farm steading. That was the shortest route for the horse to walk and for any work to be done. Nowadays, with a takeover of husbandry, that trick no longer tells tales.
The youngster who in the mid-1950s perched precariously on the old steading roof, would have been able to look beyond the immediate buildings to see the stackyard, possibly even a pond for water power and then a scutter of henhouses in nearby fields, or even a small paddock in which the tups (rams), or some ailing animal would be kept.
Beyond the buildings and the in-bye enterprises were the cropped and grazed fields. In the early days of the century, when the average size of a farm in Fife was 112 acres, seldom would the field size go beyond 20 acres.
There were still areas of land unfenced up in the rigging or highlands of Fife, but the vast majority of farmland was enclosed. A century previously, it was reckoned that only one-third of the land in Fife had been fenced or hedged into small workable fields. But even if they were enclosed, some fields were in a fairly basic state. In 1917, Mr Watson of Drumrack Farm, Anstruther paid the rector of local Waid Academy some £7 7/6 (£7.37) for the use of a squad of boys to clear the field of whins (gorse). At the same time, he also employed a team of Waid Academy girls to clear up the fields. This latter task was most likely one of hand-weeding crops such as potatoes or turnips, but it might also have included taking weeds out of grain crops.
Following massive investment in this unseen aspect of good husbandry during the previous century, the majority of the improved fields were also drained. Originally, the drains were trenches into which stones were placed, thus allowing water to flow between them. That rough description does no credit to the quality of the stone drainage work that still operates after more than 100 years.
Anyone who has had to repair a stone drain will confirm it is much more difficult than replacing a tile drain. These clay tile drains came into being on land where there were few stones. Generally it was an easier system laying these hollow cylindrical tiles, which – provided there was a run or gradient – would work effectively. Most of the drainage work was carried out in herringbone systems, with leader drains forming the spine and these emptying into open ditches or streams.
Fife is not an area where hedges are common, although 200 years ago the most popular method of creating fields was the combination of ditch and blackthorn hedge. There were also areas where stone was plentiful for building dry-stone dykes, but again, this was not a widespread practice as there are parts of Fife that are stone-free and, in horsepower days, the carting of stone was costly.
Not until fence wire became popular did the enclosure of farms become complete. As an example of the cost of fencing in the early days of the century, at Drumrack Farm outside Anstruther in 1914, Mr Watson paid £38 for the post and wire fencing of 1,000 yards, or just over 900 metres.
One of the first industrial imports from the US was barbed wire, used extensively and controversially to enclose the vast prairie ground. But it did not arrive without its problems, as in 1921 the NFU of Scotland received a communication from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries reminding farmers of the injuries that could be sustained by indiscriminate use of barbed wire. However, barbed wire is still, to this day, an essential part of any new livestock fencing.
Most farm gates were made of wood and, equally, most were just tied or roughly hung on the wooden gateposts. Only the major estates or home farms could afford properly hung metal gates. Almost all these early gateways have been demolished as the width and scale of the farm machinery has increased and now there is often just a large, open gash in the hedge, fence or dyke to allow the machinery access to the field.
In a slow, but constant process since World War II, there has also been an increase in the size of fields as fences, hedges and dykes have been removed. In some arable parts of the East Neuk, there is no fencing at all, but as one farmer remarked, ‘You do not need a fence to keep the potatoes in.’
Another slippage from the scene is the loss of field names. Old maps may still hang on farm office walls, but the names of individual fields have gone. These ranged from the self-evident ‘Quarry’ field, where a big hole would signify where the stone used in local building and possibly even for the farm steading had been quarried.
Fields with names such as ‘Stoney Knowes’ would no doubt give the ploughman thought as to exactly where the rocky outcrops might make his life difficult. Some field names gave the game away as to their previous history. ‘Coal’ field at Brigton Farm, St Andrews, was once worked for coal. Most people know of the coal-mining industry in west and central Fife, but right up until the late 1940s there were coal workings in east Fife.
The field on another farm called ‘Clay Pit’ may well have been the source of the pantiles on the roof of old steadings, but equally offered little in arable cropping. A field known as ‘Holly Hedge’ would again be named for obvious reasons and further down in the lower ground were the fields named ‘Burnside’.
At Logie Farm, Newburgh, there was a field called ‘The field with the stone in it’ as it had a massive boulder, around which all farm machinery had to dodge. A visit from the local quarrymaster, along with a heap of dynamite, changed its name to ‘The field without the stone in it’. Every farm had a ‘Big’ field just as every one had a ‘Paddock’. A few even had a ‘Big Paddock’ and a ‘Small Paddock’.
Few farms went to the same lengths as one owner at Falfield Farm, Peat Inn, when he erected a pillar made of sandstone specially brought down from Arbroath at each field. Each pillar proudly carried the field name.
So, what was the point of all the field naming? Well, it was easy for the farm grieve to tell the ploughman to go to plough the ‘Big’ field, or to manure the ‘Big’ paddock. Errors were known and men were found in the wrong fields, starting to plough where no cultivation was intended that year, or applying fertiliser when the required amount had already been broadcast. That was why field names were important.
Field names also gave an identity only taken away by scale and bureaucracy. All today’s civil servant checking the forms filled in by the farmer needs to know is the Ordnance Survey field no. 123, on farm code no. 456, and he or she can then check by satellite the actions on that field.
Before leaving the naming and breakdown of the landscape into small parcels, it is important to mention that every parish would have had its church, and every church its own land, or Glebe. Some were quite sizeable, with the Glebe at Cameron amounting to 24 acres. While in the early years of the century many ministers would use this land for the grazing of their horse, this tradition slipped away by the middle of the century. Nowadays, most of the Glebe land is let to the nearest neighbour.
Chapter 4
Workforce
DRIVING home the message that my brothers and I were fully aware that money did not grow on trees, my father always ensured there was work to be done before he handed over any cash. And that was why, one summer holiday, I was set the task of painting the ‘tin shed’ on the farm. This was a straightforward structure, open on one side, to allow access for the machinery to be stored inside it. It was constructed of corrugated iron sheets that gave it a semi-circular roof and this was the object of my paintwork. The only trouble was that by the end of the day there seemed to be as much paint on me as the shed.
Immediately next to the tin shed was the bothy, a square wooden hut that was home to two Irishmen who came to work at the harvest and the sugar beet. One of them, seeing the state I was in, offered to help clean me up a little before I went back home. Shortly afterwards, I was sitting in the bothy with Paddy – whether or not this was his real name, I will never know – as he wiped the paint off my face, using one of his old socks dipped in an old jam jar filled with petrol.
Seeking to distract myself from the burning sensation on my face, I looked around the single-room building. There was a fire to one side of which a kettle was boiling, and an iron grid on the other side to be swung over the fire with a cooking pot. The beds were two single bunks, one above the other, with grey blankets hanging over the side. I did not see the mattresses, but they would be filled with chaff – the common source of bedding on the farm. Obviously, I did not see what we schoolboys called ‘loupers’ or bed bugs, although in some bothies these little biting beasts became a real scourge. Close to the bunks were several clothes hooks, on which the Sunday clothes hung.
My body-paint remover and I were seated at a table covered in newspaper. On the table were a loaf of bread, an open jar of jam and a tin of meat paste, and that appeared to be the only food available. It was pretty basic living, even for the early 1950s. Water was collected from the tap that fed the horse troughs. And the toilet? Well, I never thought about it then, but it must have been in the cattle courts.
Farm bothies have been part of the folklore of Scottish agriculture and in some parts, such as Aberdeenshire, a culture was built up around them and the men who lived in them. However, the bothy system was not always seen as a good thing, and in 1891 a government report into farm labour reported on the ‘evils of bothy life’. One official concern was the ‘impropriety’ of young men living together and the resulting effect it would have on normal society as it encouraged bad habits, such as drinking alcohol. Often, the report commented, there was but one apartment in the bothy, thus mixing living and sleeping quarters. The official view was that the blame for the ‘disgusting character of bothy life lies with the farmer. They are aware of the unwholesome condition of them.’
It should also be remembered that bothy life was not just for the single man. If a married man went to the feeing market and failed to get a work contract, often he would take work where only a bothy was provided.
Just before World War II, the County Council of Fife put forward byelaws on ‘farm bothies, chaumers and
