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Quote by Henry Thomas Cockburn

“I know of no part of Scotland so much and so visibly improved within thirty years as Aberdeenshire. At the beginning of that time the country between Keith and Stonehaven was little else than a hopeless region of stones and moss. There were pieces of many miles where literally there was nothing but large white stones, of from half a ton to ten tons weight, to be seen. A stranger to the character of the people would have supposed that despair would have held back their hands from even attempting to remove them. However, they began, and year after year have been going on, making dykes and drains, and filling up holes with these materials till at last they have created a country which, when the rain happens to cease and the sun shines, is really very endurable.”

Quote by Henry Thomas Cockburn

Book:Journal of Henry Cockburn
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Journal of Henry Cockburn

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Henry Thomas Cockburn

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“In nineteenth century Aberdeenshire farm service was not a career in itself, but a stage in a career that began for almost all in family farming, and would end there for a proportion of servants. Even in the middle of the century enough folk rode what Leslie Mitchell later would call the 'strange, antique whirlimagig of the Scottish peasantry' to ensure that the machine kept spinning. William Alexander called his essay on farm service "The Peasantry of North-East Scotland" because in his time English hired farm workers were conventionally - though incorrectly - described as peasants. But the error conceals a deeper truth. Aberdeenshire farm-servants, crofters, and small farmers were three fragments of a single peasant class.”

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Book:Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire
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“Nineteenth-century Aberdeenshire was seething with land hunger and social strife. The interests of the landowners and muckle farmers were at odds with the democratic ideal enshrined in the concept of 'The Poor Man's County', which proclaimed the value of a finely graded rural economy with the emphasis on smaller farms and crofts as the continuing guarantee of economic opportunity and ultimately, therefore, of social justice. But the cottar class was disappearing as landlords evaded Poor Law assessment by demolishing cottages for married workers. Traditional farm touns and hamlets were being destroyed. As leases expired, holdings were thrown together into bigger units yielding high returns on the kind of investment only great capitalists could contemplate. As entry levels into farming climbed, the land was monopolised in fewer and fewer hands.”

LandAberdeenshireRural Economy
Book:Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk in the Parish of Pyketillim, with Glimpses of the Parish Politics about AD 1843
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“In the agrarian economy of Aberdeenshire, the crofter, or improving smallholder generally, has filled a most useful part in the past. To them it is due that many hundreds of acres of barren moor have been brought under the plough within the last fifty or sixty years; and from his class, trained up in habits of industry, thrift, and self-reliance, there have continued to go forth into various walks of life men and women fitted to act well their part under any circumstances; the main cause of regret without doubt being that in such limited proportion of numbers have these men and women been retained in connection with the soil as settled labourers, cottars, crofters, and farmers, from the smallest tenant upward. But while it will be readily admitted that the existence of crofts in a county like Aberdeen - and indeed any agricultural county - is in the highest degree desirable; and while one may assert, without much fear of contradiction, that a judicious blending of farm and croft is greatly preferable to either a community of crofers apart from farms, or a collection of farms without a mixture of the crofter element, we are not blind to the difficulties that attend the perpetuation of the crofting system, as we have been wont to view it, under the changed conditions that now obtain.”

AberdeenshireCrofting
Book:Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire
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“But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums - blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning, colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acuteness of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbelling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk among the furrows.”

WinterSnowFebruaryAberdeenshire
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies.”

Scottish FictionChris Guthrie
Author:Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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“It must have been soon after that when ways and means were much under discussion that Leslie and Ray came to see us in Wokingham. Leslie was working at high pressure on all sorts of subjects but although he was beginning to find his financial worries lessen he still seemed not to have found and in my opinion did not exactly know what he might be able to do best. I suggested that he wrote a great Scots drama or novel. With one voice Leslie and Ray said it would never pay. I protested that it would if it was good enough - that Scotland was gasping for a picture of the true Scotland as he and I knew it - a picture that was neither A House with the Green Shutters nor yet A Bonnie Briar Bush, neither of which to me rang true.”

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Book:Another Song at Sunset: Jean Baxter, Scots poet and friend of Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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“So of the Flanders Moss. It, too, in mist seems to roll on for miles; its heathy surface turns to long waves that paly against the foot of the low range of hills, and beat upon Craigforth as if it were an island in the sea. Through wreathes of steam, the sullen Forth winds in and out between the peat hags, and when a slant of wind leaves it clear for an instant it looks mysterious and dark, as might a stream of quicksilver running down from a mine. When a fish leaps, the sound re-echoes like a bell, as it falls back into the water, and rings spread out till they are lost beneath the banks.”

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Book:A Hatchment
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