Historical Society

IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY there were no small tenants in our area. The crofting townships we know today were farms or small estates leased to tenants known as tacksmen and identified as Fir [ - ], as appropriate. In 1718 there were only 27 tacksmen in the whole of the parish of Uig who paid rent to the owner Seaforth. The local tacks were Garynahine, Callanish, Breasclete and Marcasdale. The predecessors of crofters were subtenants of the tacksmen paying their rent in labour and a portion of their produce. They had common grazing rights while cultivated land was held in "run-rig". The feannagan or rigs were reallocated from time to time, theoretically to vary the amount of arable according to a family's needs. To us it seems remarkable that one man's rigs were intermingled with those of his neighbours but the system still exists in a few places frozen in time.

Below the subtenants were cotters who had a house but no arable land. In many townships the houses were huddled together in tight little groups some even intercommunicating as can still be seen in the deserted clachan on Vuia Mor. This led to the Garynahine disaster when a spark set thatch alight and destroyed the whole village, which was then cleared of people.

In time the relatively more prosperous tacksmen lost their tenancies and the townships were lotted to individual crofters. This took place after the Seaforth laird, like many a Highland chief who could not balance the cost of expensive tastes with a limited income, was close to bankruptcy. In 1844 the Lewis estate was sold to Matheson of Achany, co-founder of the firm Jardine-Matheson, the most notorious drug-baron of the nineteenth century who made millions of pounds pushing opium into China.

Matheson's factors proceeded with lotting, that is the division of the in-bye land into individual lots or crofts, for which each crofter paid rent to the estate. The crofter had no security of tenure, no lease and held his croft on a year to year basis.

The boundaries of lots were straight lines drawn on a map and pointed out on the land by the factor's agents. Much of the land lotted had to be broken in and a crofter was lucky if his lot included some of the old arable rigs. Discipline was necessary to avoid boundary feuds when there were no fences and a ground officer or constable did his best to enforce the rules including good husbandry.

In Callanish and Breasclete the number of tenants increased by the landless getting lots, and refugees evicted from Uig added to the number. Later subdivision between family members (numbered a and b, or even a, b, c) occurred. In Breasclete there were originally 40 lots but subdivision plus former squatter holdings on the common has increased the official total to over 60. Garynahine is the newest township in Lewis, as a land settlement scheme dated 1935.
Crofting was a hard way of life with much of the in-bye land manured and carefully cultivated to produce a high proportion of the food needed by a family-potatoes, oats and barley, milk and milk products, salt meat, eggs, etc.

And now? Any of the old time crofters who saw these villages today would say crofting is dead. Yet crofting always did and could still survive on sensible and unselfish co-operation.