THE stories of Scotland’s farming families begin with the making of Scotland’s farms. These were times of innovation, of the sweeping aside of the old ways. The farming revolution brought the excitement of progress and the despair of dispossession.
How had it all come to be? In the old landscape there were few farms. So we need to go back to that time; before the Clever People came. As for a date – a watershed – then let’s say 1745, as good a date as any to talk of rebellions and revolutions. So what was going on before then?
Newlands vale folds into the form of a gentle curving glen from Howgate to Drochil with Romanno at its nub. It is neither large nor particularly spectacular – grandeur can be safely left to the Northern Highlands. Through the bottom flows the River Lyne, which snakes purposefully, 500 feet above sea level, from valley side to valley side. The hill tops, rounded and swathed in short hill grasses, rise to twice that height, with a few heathery knolls peaking at over 1,200 feet.
In the early 1700s, Newlands was a populous place, busy with families tilling the land for their staple cereal grains, feeding animals for their meat and clothing, and digging peat for fuel. Their cottages were rubble-stone built, with roofs of turf, stone or thatch. The unit of life was the family, the work was the land, and the social structure a cooperating community helping itself with all those tasks that take many pairs of hands; tilling, harvesting, herding, killing.
The people livedin their Newlands landscape, notupon it. As often as not, a part of their sustenance would come directly from their natural environment, not just from the agrarian one. In those times the ‘wild’ landscape yielded a rich bounty of seasonal food for the ordinary people who were scattered through the countryside: fish, meat, eggs, fruit.
The salmon came up the Lyne from the Tweed every autumn to spawn in the pebbled pools of the upper reaches. There the smolts vied with the brown trout, grayling, sticklebacks, freshwater prawns, oysters and eels. The riverbanks were rich with wild-fowl.
The wetlands and bog ponds beside the river nurtured duck, snipe, goose, quail, gull, moorhen, coot and dabchick; all good for human food. Care was needed, however. The dark deceitful swampy flats of sphagnum moss grow cotton grass, asphodel and rush on the sides of the Dead burn and the Black burn. The first flows south to the Lyne while the second flows north to the Esk. Both are well named, flowing languid by hidden pools in the peaty wastes through which they wander. These places will swallow up any beast or human that does not watch where they tread as they make their way across the moor.
Higher up the slopes of the vale’s sides there were trees scattered openly in the upland pastures. Here and there, not yet robbed for fuel and building materials, were denser woodlands hiding plenty of wildlife and plump-breasted pigeons living among the birch, pine, alder, beech and oak trees. Small herds of deer ventured out into the moor from the woodland fringes. The woodland itself, come autumn-time, also offered generous bounty; fungi, hazelnuts, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries. These were important supplements to cereal grains for family survival.
The hill tops and upland slopes either side of the glens above the woodland line were covered in tough grasses; fescues, bents, matgrass, interspersed with molinia clumps. The open grazings were abundant with flowers and herbs; harebell, eyebright, bedstraw, trefoil, vetch, pansy. In this, undercover, hid partridge, grouse and black cock. Above, eager for the chicks, circled hawks, buzzards and a pair of eagles.
The big houses all had dovecots, as well as rights to the deer. These dovecots provided sanctuary through the spring and summer to semi-tame doves that would
