for milling, and conflicts could arise over this. In fact, in general millers

served the farmers well, and if they did not, then an appeal could be made to

the landowner to allow the grain to be sent elsewhere for milling. ‘Thirlage’,

as well as tying the tenants and sub-tenants to a particular mill, also required

them to help to keep the mill, the dam and the lade in good repair, and when

necessary to help to transport new millstones to the mill. Similarly, tenants

on the farmtoun were obliged to use the blacksmith on the landowner’s estate.

The dwellings on the farmtouns varied in size from a single room to several

rooms for a more prosperous tenant. The earlier dwellings were primitive

huts made of wood, turf, and stones and boulders found in clearing the land.

In 1689 Thomas Kirke, quoted in Early Travellers in Scotland, wrote, ‘The

vulgar (common) houses ... are low and feeble. Their walls are made of a few

stones jumbled together without mortar ... so ordered that there is neither

sightliness nor strength, and it does not cost much more time to erect such a

cottage than to pull it down ... the turf they renew as often as there is occasion,

and that is very frequently done. It is rare to find chimneys in these places

a small vent sufficing to carry the smoak away . ..Iittle comfort there is in sifting

at one of their fires’. This is only one of many similar descriptions of the

homes of the ordinary people.

Agriculture in Scotland before the enclosures has not yet been adequately

studied, and in the past theories about it have been based largely on

supposition. These theories are now increasingly being proved to have been

mistaken.

For a long time it was believed that agriculture remained unchanged for

centuries, until the ‘improvements’ of the mid.1700s altered the pattern

dramatically as a result, for example, of land enclosures, better crop rotation,

and selective breeding of animals. However, recent research into previously

unexplored estate documents is beginning to show that such a sudden change

did not take place, but that the development of agriculture, in the view of

some modern scholars, was probably more an evolutionary than a revolutionary

process. But the pattern of agriculture in Fife, as in other oarts of Scotland,

was of course very different in the early 1 800s than it had been in the 1 500s.

In order to know what Strathkinness and the surrounding area were really

like before enclosures, it is essential to make a thorough study of the docu-

ments of the Estate Papers of the Melvilles of Strathkinness, of which there

are over thirty boxes in the Scottish Record Office in Edinburgh. Until that

is done our knowledge can be only partial, and it is an important task awaiting

some historian.

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