The Life
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The people of Auchindrain were farmers, growing crops on the small areas of flat land around the township and rearing animals on the hill ground. Auchindrain was a communal tenancy township, the tenants as one body renting the land from the landlord and sharing it between themselves. With the arable ground, the sharing was done with the system known as 'run-rig' and with pasture land the sharing was called 'the souming'. The land was not particularly fertile, nor easy to farm, and the inhabitants had a hard life.
Everything was governed by the seasons, and life revolved round constant work. The community had to be self-reliant in most things from building houses to coping with illness. |
Washday at the old Cart Shed |
The main events of the year were seed-time and harvest, and the movement of stock on to or off the hill. There is little record of the earlier tools of cultivation at Auchindrain, but we can get a reasonable idea from those used in other parts of the West Highlands. A light version of the lowland swing plough with its flat mould-board may have been used.
At one time it is more likely that a combination of several tools - the risteal which cut a vertical slit in the ground, the crann nan gad which followed it, grubbing up the ground, and then people coming after with the caibe or straight spade to turn the ground further, and the racan, a heavy blunt toothless rake to bash down the clods. Unlike the lowlands, where the ox was the main draught animal, the ploughs were pulled by small horses, often several yoked side by side. |
Eddie MacCallum, the last tenant of Auchindrain, ploughing |
| The crops were predominantly bere and oats. Bere is an old version of barley. It can be sown later and harvested earlier, and in a wet climate which makes for cold ground and unsure germination, this is a bonus. Bere needed a lot of work - a good tilth and plenty of manure; however, it was reliable and produced good straw, valuable for animal fodder, and was also used for thatching and animal bedding. Oats were better able to survive in the wet and, even when harvested late, they would ripen in the stook with a touch of light frost. The straw made good bedding and valuable winter fodder. |
MacGougan's House early 1900's |
People's relationship to animals was once different to that of today - less sentimental, more dependent, symbolised in the common roof people once shared with their cattle. Stock was valuable for its live produce - wool and milk - and was only consumed as meat when it had died or had to be killed for the want of winter feed.
The old breeds survive but are not widespread. The traditional Highland cattle were as much black as the familiar brindle or rusty colour. The old native white-face breed of sheep were small and fine-wooled like the Shetland. From the 1850s the now familar black-face began to come in from the Borders. Sheep were milked as well as cattle, and hardiness was as important as the produce.
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Auchindrain circa 1900 |