Rural Customs of Scotland

A brief geographical orientation will help with an understanding of customs and arbitrary divisions among the Scottish people as a whole. Scotland is traditionally divided into three geographical areas--the Highlands, the Lowlands, and the Southern Uplands. The coastal plain, stretching from the eastern Grampian region around the Moray Firth to the flat expanse of the northeastern Highland region, is distinctive enough to constitute a separate Northeast area. The Highlands are bisected by the fault line of the Great Glen (Glen More nan Albin), which is occupied by a series of lochs (lakes), the largest of which is Loch Ness.

Scots have traditionally been divided into two categories--one was either a Highlander or a Lowlander, and such categories still have marginal significance, although they are an oversimplification. In addition, the Shetlanders, with their Norse blood and traditions and th

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tation soon died down, but it was a key stage to a forging of a modern Scottish consciousness in that Highlanders and Lowlanders had been united in the struggle. Crofting is remembered by some old timers as a cross that the working man had to bear--at least as long as a meager wage was to be gained from it. Israel Shenker's In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell: A Modern day Journey Through Scotland is an excellent collection of narratives by those who know well the customs of traditional Scotland. The author interviewed a 95 year-old man named Donald Morrison who remembered the abuses brought to bear on the tenant farmers who scraped out a living in the Highlands. In Morrison's words, "The landlord was an absolute monarch. He had his word, and you had nothing to say. After the clearances [for sheep and/or deer] ... in 1883, the landlords put up the rent awful, and the people could not pay it, the land wouldn't pay it ... [however] later the royal commission did a lot of good ... things have changed completely. There's not half the population there was when I was younger. That's what they call rural depopulation." In terms of rural customs, Morrison went on to say that English was not a farmer's primary language towar
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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