The lone Kirkyard, Gamrie
The county took its name from the chief town—Aberdeen—which is clearly Celtic in origin and means the town at the mouth of either the Dee or the Don. Both interpretations are possible; but the fact that the Latin form of the word has always been Aberdonia and _Aberdonensis_, favours the Don as the naming river. As a matter of fact, Old Aberdeen, though lying at no great distance from the bank of the Don, can hardly be said to be associated with Donmouth, whereas a considerable population must from a remote period have been located at the mouth of the Dee. Whatever interpretation is accepted, it was this city—the only town in the district conspicuous for population and resources—that gave its name to the county as a whole.
The whole region between the river Dee and the river Spey, comprising the two counties of Banff and Aberdeen, forms a natural province. There is no natural, or recognisable line of demarcation between the two counties. Their fortunes have been one. The river Deveron might conceivably have been chosen as the dividing line, but in practice it is so only to a limited extent. The whole district, which if invaded was never really conquered by the Romans, made one of the seven Provinces of what was called Pictland in the early middle ages, and it long continued to assert for itself a semi-independent political existence.
2. General Characteristics.
Town House, Old Aberdeen
The county is almost purely agricultural. It has always enjoyed a certain measure of maritime activity and of recent years the fishing industry, especially at Aberdeen, has made immense progress, but as a whole the area is a well-cultivated district. Round the coast and on all the lower levels tillage is the rule. In the interior the level of the land rises rapidly, and ploughed fields give place to desolate moors and bare mountain heights in which agriculture is an impossible industry. The surface of the lowland parts, now in regular cultivation, was originally very rough and rock-strewn. It was covered with erratic blocks of stone, gneiss and granite (locally called “heathens”), left by the melting of the ice fields which overspread all the north-east of Scotland during the Ice Age. These stones have been cleared from the fields and utilised as boundary walls. Some idea of the extraordinary energy and excessive labour necessary to clear the land for tillage may be gathered from a glance at the “consumption” dyke at Kingswells, some five miles from Aberdeen. This solid rampart stretches like a great break-water across nearly half a mile of country, through a dip to the south of the Brimmond Hill. It is five or six feet in height and twenty to thirty in breadth and contains thousands of tons of troublesome boulders gathered from the surrounding slopes. The disposal of these blocks was a serious problem. It has been solved by this rampart. In other parts the stones were built up into enclosing walls and now serve the double purpose of enclosing the fields and providing a certain amount of shelter for crops and cattle. The slopes of the Brimmond Hill are in certain parts still uncleared and the appearance of these areas helps us to realise what this section of the country looked like before the enterprising agriculturist braced himself to prepare the surface for the use of the plough.
Consumption Dyke at Kingswells
The soil, except in the alluvial deposits on the banks of the Don and the Ythan, is not of great natural fertility, yet by the exceptional industry of the inhabitants and their enterprise as a farming community it has been raised to a high degree of productiveness. The county now enjoys a well but hard earned reputation for progressive agriculture. Notably so in regard to cattle-breeding. It is the home of a breed of cattle called Aberdeenshire, black and polled, but it is just as famous for its strain of shorthorns which have been bred with skill and insight for more than a century. In spite, then, of its inferior soil, its wayward climate and its northern latitude, the inborn stubbornness and determination of its people have made it a great and prosperous agricultural region and only those who on a September day have seen from the top of Benachie the undulating plains of Buchan glittering golden in the sun can realise what a transformation has been effected on a barren and stony land by the industry of man.