“Their mode of dividing the land and of equalising the stock may seem primitive and complex to modern views, but they are not so to the people themselves, who apply them amicably, accurately and skilfully. The division of the land is made with care and justice. This is the interest of all, no one knowing which place may fall to himself, for his neighbour’s share may become his own three years hence.

“Whatever may be the imperfections, according to modern notions, of this very old semi-family system of run-rig husbandry, those tenants who have least departed from it are the most comfortable in North Uist, and, accordingly, in the Outer Hebrides.”

Mr. Carmichael informs me that the whole of this description held good at least up to May, 1904.

The brief descriptions and other references to the run-rig system of the agricultural writers whom Sir John Sinclair and Arthur Young enlisted in the service of the Board of Agriculture at the end of the eighteenth, and the beginning of the nineteenth century, are sufficient to show that in all essential features it was fundamentally identical in different parts of Scotland. Sir John Sinclair’s own description is meagre and unsympathetic: “Were there twenty tenants and as many fields, each tenant would think himself unjustly treated unless he had a proportionate share in each. This causes treble labour, and as they are perpetually crossing each other, they must be in a state of constant quarrelling and bad neighbourhood. In order to prevent any of the soil being carried to the adjoining ridge, each individual makes his own ridge as high as possible, which renders the furrow quite bare, so that it produces no crop, while the accumulated soil in the middle of the ridge is never stirred deeper than the plough. The proprietors begin to see the inconveniences of this system, and in general intend to remedy it, by dividing the land into regular farms.”[86]

This is obviously a description of run-rig in a state of decrepitude; the communal spirit has died out of it, and apparently the practice of periodic redivision of the land has fallen into desuetude. In another passage[87] we find a variation of the method of guarding the crops which again, when compared with Mr. Carmichael’s description of the “promiscuous rig,” appears to show the decay of the system. “The tenants have a miserable sort of fence, made of turf, which separates their arable land from the adjoining waste; but it requires constant repairs, and when the corn is taken off the ground, is entirely neglected, and the country becomes one immense common, over which immense numbers of cattle are straggling in search of food, greatly to the injury of the soil.”

William Marshall, the rival as an agricultural writer and bitter critic of Arthur Young, supplied the “General View of the Agriculture of the Central Highlands of Scotland.” He supplies us with one significant hint, if we need it, with regard to the fundamental basis of run-rig: “Not the larger farms only, but each subdivision, though ever so minute, whether ‘plow-gait,’ ‘half-plow,’ or ‘horse-gang,’ has its pittance of hill and vale, and its share of each description of land, as arable, meadow, green pasture and muir” (p. 29). By the way, even smaller farms than the “horse-gang,” i.e., one quarter of the arable land which could be ploughed by a four-horse plough, together with the corresponding proportion of meadow, pasture and moor, were to be found on the Royal burghs where intermixed ownership was exempt from the operation of the Act of 1695. On these the smallest farms consisted of a “horse’s foot” of land, i.e., one sixteenth part of a “plow-gait.”

Dr. James Robertson defines run-rig as “Two or three or perhaps four men yoking their horses together in one plough, and having their ridges alternately in the same field, with a bank of unploughed land between them, by way of march.”[88]