THE FARMING COMMUNITY BEFORE LAND ENCLOSURE

Strathkinness in the Middle Ages was simply a group of farmtouns (small

hamlets). There was no centre, or ‘nucleated village’. The two high ridges

of what are now the High Road and the old Bishop’s Road were the routes

into St. Andrews. The present low road running along the bottom of the

valley did not exist until 1810, when the marshy land there was drained,

allowing a road to be made and causing the Bishop’s Road to fall into disuse.

There was from at least as early as the lSOOs a road running from south to

north across the marsh and the Kinnessburn (presumably by causeway) and

along what is now Main Street to Guardbridge and beyond. The Clatto Road

(now Church Road and Bonfield Road) was in existence at least as early as

the time of the division of the Strathkinness commonty in 1777.

These roads were in fact little more than tracks, muddy and treacherous

in wet weather. Ways between farms were not much more than paths. Even

the Bishop’s Road, the main road from Cupar to St. Andrews, was simply a

series of tracks varying in width by several feet according to the conditions,

with the different ‘tracks’ being used according to the state of the ground.

The farmtouns, isolated from one another, formed the pattern of the

agricultural system and consisted of a group of dwellings, with sometimes a

single tenant farmer or perhaps joint tenants working the land for the

landowner, and with sub.tenants, some of whom were weavers, shoemakers,

tailors, etc. providing for the day-to-day needs of their small community.

Only the tenant4armer had any land rights, and the sub-tenants were com-

pletely dependent upon him. Also working on the land were farm labourers,

who during the period of their employment would live in the farmtoun in

conditions which were the most primitive of all. In return for labour the

sub-tenants were allowed a small piece of land to cultivate and the right to

graze animals on the commonty.

A commonty was not common land for general use. It was land jointly

owned by several heritors and could be used only by the tenants and sub-

tenants of these heritors.

The early pattern of cultivation of arable land, much of which required

better drainage, was based on the ridge and furrow system. Land was ploughed

into a series of ridges over 35 feet wide and about three feet high from the

base of the furrow to the top of the ridge. These furrows and ridges ran

downhill, thus enabling water to drain away more easily from the ridge. This

method of plough ing, which lasted for many hundreds of years, had the defects

of being very slow, leading to waterlogging of the furrows in abnormally wet

weather and to the drying-out of the ridges in unusually dry weather.

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