The Celtic population was in fact absorbed, as we have said, but a certain contingent betook themselves to the mountains and for long kept up a warfare of reprisals upon those who had dispossessed them. This caused no end of trouble in Aberdeenshire but not without its uses for it braced the occupants in the arts of defence and made them alert and courageous.
No less potent a factor in the evolution of the Aberdonian has been his struggle with a well-nigh irreclaimable soil. The county is without mineral wealth, and the only outlet for his energy was found in attacking the boulder-strewn moors and in clearing them for the plough. To this he set his mind in the eighteenth century with grim determination. Small farmers and crofters by dint of great personal toil and life-long self-sacrifice transformed stony tracts of poor and apparently worthless land into smiling and productive fields. It is this struggle with a malignant soil, more than anything else, that has made the Aberdonian; one triumph led on to another, and to-day the spirit of enterprise in farming is nowhere more pronounced than in this difficult county.
The place names are almost entirely Celtic, and even when they appear to be Saxon they are only Gaelic mispronounced or assimilated to something better known. The parish of King Edward might very plausibly be referred to the northern visits paid by the Hammer of the Scots, but it is really Kinedar, with the Gaelic Kin (seen in Kinnaird, Kintore and Malcolm Canmore), meaning a head.
The county has a distinctive dialect, really imported and originally uniform with the dialect of the Mearns, and of Northumbria, the dialect spoken at one time all the way from Forth to Humber. To-day it is called the Buchan Doric and though varying somewhat in different parts of the county and hardly intelligible in the Highlands of Braemar, where Gaelic still survives, it is a Teutonic speech with a thin tincture of Gaelic words such as bourach, closach, clachan, brochan, etc.
The dialect contains many vocables not found in literary English, such as byous and ondeemis for extraordinary, but where the words are English, they are greatly altered. It is characterised by broad, open vowels; “boots” is pronounced “beets,” “cart” is “cairt,” “good” is “gweed.” The final l is dropped; “pull” is “pu,” “fall” is “fa.” Final ol becomes ow; “roll” is made “row,” and “poll” is “pow.” Wh is always f: “white” is “fite” and “who?” (interrogative) is “fa?” It is rich in diminutives like the Dutch—a lassie, a basketie. The finest embodiment of this striking dialect, giving permanent life to its wealth of pathos and expressiveness, is Dr William Alexander’s Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk.
Scots wha hae, which is supposed to be a characteristic phrase common to all the dialects, would be in Buchan—Scots at hiz, which is largely Norse. “The quynie coudna be ongrutten” is Buchan for “The little girl could not help crying.”
The population of the county which a hundred years before was 121,065 in 1901 was 304,439. Since the county contains 1970 square miles this brings out an average of 154 to the square mile—just a little over the average of Scotland as a whole, but as Aberdeen city accounts for more than half of the total, and towns like Peterhead and Fraserburgh between them represent 25,000, the figure is greatly reduced for the rural districts. The country districts are but thinly peopled, especially on the Highland line, and the tendency is for the rural population to dwindle. They either emigrate to Canada, which is a regular lodestone for Aberdonians, or they betake themselves to the towns, chiefly to Aberdeen itself. Except in and around the principal town, the county has hardly any industries that employ many hands. Agriculture is the main employment, and modern appliances enable the farmer to do his work with fewer helps than formerly: hence the depopulation of the rural districts. The towns tend to grow, the rural parishes to become more sparsely inhabited.
11. Agriculture.
This is the mainstay of the county, and considering the somewhat uncertain climate, the shortness of the summer and the natural poverty of the soil, it has been brought to marvellous perfection. The mountainous regions are necessarily cut off from this industry except in narrow fringes along the river banks, but in the low-lying area it is safe to say that every acre of ground worth reclaiming has been put to the plough. A century ago the industry was rude and ill-organised, the county being without roads and without wheeled vehicles, but the advent of railways gave an impetus to the farming instinct and an extraordinary activity set in to reclaim waste land by clearing it of stones, by trenching, by draining and manuring it. The proprietors were usually agreeable to granting a long lease at a nominal rent to any likely and energetic man who was willing to undertake reclamations and take his chance of recouping himself for outlays before his lease expired. Being thus secured, the farmer or crofter had an incentive to put the maximum of labour into his holding. He often built the dwelling-house, and as a rule made the enclosures by means of the stones, which, with great labour, he dragged from the fields. In this way a great acreage was added to the arable land of the county, and though some of it has fallen into pasture since the great boom in agricultural prices during the seventies in last century, the greater part of the reclaimed soil is still in cultivation.
The area of the county, exclusive of water and roadways, is 1955 square miles, or 1,251,451 acres. Of this exactly one half is under cultivation, 628,523 acres. When we remember that Scotland contains some nineteen million of acres and that only 25 per cent. of this acreage is arable land, it is apparent that Aberdeen with its 50 per cent. is one of the most cultivated areas. As a matter of fact it has by far the largest acreage under cultivation of any Scottish county. Next to it is Perthshire with 336,251 acres. The uncultivated half is made up of mountain, moor and woodlands. Part of this is used for grazing sheep, as much as 157,955 acres being thus utilised. In the matter of woods and plantations the county with its 105,931 acres stands next to Inverness-shire, which has 145,629. The trees grown are mostly larch and pine and spruce, but the deciduous trees, or hard woods, the beech, elm and ash, are not uncommon in the low country, more especially as ornamental trees around the manor-houses of the proprietors.