Sharon Blackie is a crofter, author and publisher – founder of the eclectic and highly-praised Two Ravens Press and a smallholder on the Isle of Lewis. In August she’ll be talking at Uncivilisation about the meeting point between creativity and the land, and what rooted writing and publishing could look like. In this guest blog, she gives a taste of the crofting life and its meaning.
Okay, so we all know it’s going to hell in a handbasket. We just don’t know when. And so the question becomes what we do in the meantime – how do we live now, clinging as we all are to the fraying edges of a ‘civilisation’ that is so cut off from anything real that, if it were an individual, it would be diagnosed as clinically insane? To me, in some ways, it’s the only question that matters: the urgent one, the one that requires us to find an answer now, while we’re still living, while we still can. Some people choose to look for the answers in philosophy books or meditation classes; David (my husband) and I look for it in the land, and our relationship to the land. More specifically, we look for it – and find it – in crofting, a very special way of living on the land that is unique to Scotland.
What is crofting, anyway? Lots of people have heard of the word, think of it maybe as just a weird Scottish term for smallholding, but very few outside of Scotland know what it’s really about and the astonishingly radical and oddly enlightened thinking that brought it into being – and that (sometimes …) still keeps it alive. I’ll skip the detailed history lesson and say simply that crofting came into being in the Scottish Highlands in the 18sup>th century, following the demise of the old almost totally communal ‘runrig’ system of farming.
Most crofts consisted – and still consist – of a few acres of what’s called ‘in-bye’ land – the actual smallholding itself, on which the croft house is usually situated – along with rights to put livestock out onto the ‘common grazings’ of the crofting township. In the 19th century, following the Clearances and several pretty serious revolts by a number of local communities (some of the most celebrated being here in Lewis, where we live now) the Napier Commission and the Crofters Act of 1886 gave crofters the rights to security of tenure, fixed rents, the right to compensation for improvements to the land, and the right to inherit or assign crofts pretty much in perpetuity. The Crofters Act also set up an organisation called the Crofters Commission to safeguard these rights and ‘manage’ crofting lands on behalf of the government. The current functionality of the Crofters Commission is a matter of some controversy … but happily there are more enlightened organisations that fight on behalf of crofters themselves, like the Scottish Crofters Federation, to redress some of the balance. Crofting land is never freehold, it is always subject to crofting law and must be crofted – it cannot usually be developed.
The historical image of a crofter is that of a smallholder who built a stone ‘blackhouse’ (no windows, a central chimneyless fireplace with an escape route for smoke – on a good day – through the roof) on the croft and who kept a few sheep, a cow or two, and maybe a few chickens. Oats and potatoes were usually grown on the arable in-bye land, and the crofter supplemented his income by fishing or with other work depending on where he lived (here in Lewis and Harris, the weaving of Harris Tweed in a loomshed on the croft was a major way of earning). It’s not necessarily so different today, except that lots of crofters now make their extra income at home at the computer. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere around 17,000 registered crofts in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and these are clustered in crofting communities or ‘townships’ throughout the area.
One of the remarkable things about crofting is that it provides the best of both worlds: the crofting system is both individualistic – a crofter runs and manages his own croft – and collaborative – the elected township Grazings Committee manages the communal land and can often fulfil other functions as well; in many townships the gathering and clipping of the sheep at shearing time is still carried out by the whole community, just as peat-cutting and its transportation back to the township can become a whole community activity. Which makes it all the more sad that this communal way of living is falling away. The reasons for that are many and complicated and would take more space than I have here to explain. But as we observed first-hand in the mainland crofting community I first moved to in 2003, one of the major reasons for the demise of the crofting way of life is the selling on of crofthouses – or building sites on crofting land – to incomers (often retirees) who bring completely different values with them when they move into crofting communities. Who don’t use the land, but see it as an extended garden or let it go wild and ruin it rather than allow anyone else to use it for its intended purpose.
(This latter point raises an interesting issue, and warrants a small digression. If you let previously long-grazed land simply go wild in the kind of places we’re talking about, you won’t suddenly regenerate precious forests or even promote the growth of habitats worth keeping. What usually happens is that invasive species like bracken or dock or silverweed take over, and the previous, often surprising, biodiversity of the grazed land disappears. This was recently confirmed in a major report on the environmental impact of the decline in hill farming in Scotland commissioned by Scottish National Heritage.)
And then they start to complain about cow pats and sheep droppings on township streets, or about the noise of cockerels crowing or the keeping of bees (those rabid, petrifying creatures) on the croft next door. Such people move to crofting communities precisely because crofting land is protected from development. They want the idyllic scenery and the freedom from fear of development, but they don’t want the less picturesque realities of small-scale farming that go along with it. Or if they do, they just want to watch it, like television, from a picture window. They don’t want to actually do it. And of course, you don’t have to love sheep or manhandle cows to be a crofter – there are many gentler ways of using and being on a croft. But a croft, to us, is almost a sacred thing. To neglect it or misuse it is a betrayal of something unique and very special.
So, crofting – and specifically, the active crofting community – is under threat. And its demise would be, to me, a real tragedy. Not because of the history or traditions surrounding it, but simply because it represents a remarkable system of land use, enshrined in Scottish law. What else is remarkable about crofting? The right, now part of crofting law, that crofters (either as individuals or as communities) have to buy back their land from the landlord if they wish to. Starting with the Assynt community buyout in the North-West Highlands, continuing with the buyout of the Valtos estate just down the road from us here in Lewis, through to the much-publicised buyout of the island of Eigg, a number of high-energy communities are coming into being around the country who are doing very fine things to retain all that is good about the crofting way of life, while branching out into other projects such as renewable energy.
So what is it like to be a crofter? Well, David and I previously lived on a croft just outside Ullapool, in the North-west Highlands of Scotland, and a year ago moved to a croft here in the beautiful and wild region of Uig, right at the very end of the last road south on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, near the border with Harris. We have about 5-6 acres of in-bye land and the rights to graze a few dozen sheep (and a handful of cows, if we should choose to do so) on the common grazing. We keep two small breeding flocks of pedigree sheep: Hebrideans, and Jacobs. We have two breeding sows, and a miscellany of poultry. We have a polytunnel and grow our own vegetables. In our spare time we are writers (David is a poet, I’m a novelist) and we run Two Ravens Press, a small but high-profile literary publisher, from the croft.
To us, it’s the perfect way of life. We are remote enough from the ‘civilised’ madness that we can simply refuse to participate in those parts of it that we abhor. We have no television (widely quoted by elderly crofters as the single most important thing that contributed to the demise of much community life in these islands), and we require no manmade costly ‘entertainments’ – everything that we could conceivably need is right here. We produce as much of our own food as is feasible – meat, vegetables, supplemented with the occasional fish – and when we’re not working we’re outside, drinking in the spirit of this place until we feel we’ve merged with it. It is a completely different – and absorbing – way of life. We weren’t born to it, of course – David spent 26 years flying fast jets in the RAF, and I’ve been everything from a neuroscientist to a practising psychologist. But precisely because we’ve inhabited the madness, we can appreciate so much better what it is that we have here: a life that can so easily be stripped of everything superfluous and artificial. I’ll be talking more about that life – its content, its qualities – at this year’s Dark Mountain Festival in August. Talking about the stories imbued in this land, the way we have refashioned our own narratives as a result, and how all of that influences not only the way we choose to be, but the way we choose to publish books.
