Regional Development in the Crofting Counties

The Highlands and Islands demonstrate in extreme form many of the problems which affect Great Britain's peripheral areas in general. Government aid was first geared to the maintenance of the crofting population and the 'Crofting Counties' were delimited essentially with the areal extent of this type of agriculture in mind. The newly established Highlands and Islands Development Board is particularly significant for the area since the emphasis is now being placed more firmly on industrial growth; but since this exercise constitutes an important experiment in regional development more widespread interest is being attracted. Recent census and employment data show the striking imbalance in growth which currently exists at both regional and local levels, an imbalance which is likely to increase with large-scale industrial development concentrating in a limited number of locations. Small-scale growth is being actively fostered in the remoter areas, but this may prove insufficient to prevent a further substantial redistribution of population within the Highlands as a whole and also within each of its component areas. RECENT YEARS have witnessed a rapid evolution of regional policy from one of special measures relating to depressed areas and of detailed physical land-use planning to the recognition of a set of planning and development regions.1 Regional economic planning councils have been estab- lished in England and Wales, leaving Northern Ireland and Scotland as satisfactory units in themselves for this purpose. The regional component is important in a rational plan to regroup population and delimit industrial sites, since local government, until such times as reforms are effected, illogically fragments city regions which are functionally unified. In the light of these changes, it is appropriate to examine the changing geography of the Highlands and Islands, a Scottish sub-region, yet one which has recently received its own Development Board. It is also important to stress that this is an area with extensive economic problems of long standing, as many writers have explained,2 and, as a result of legislation from I886 onwards, it could claim to be the oldest development area in the United Kingdom. Highland Development since 1886 The legislation passed in I886, the Crofters (Scotland) Act, followed the report of the Napier Commission.3 It aimed at stabilizing and developing the system of crofting agriculture, on whose limited land resources a large proportion of the local population depended owing to the disappointing results from fishing, textiles and other replacement economies which had been introduced, mainly by private enterprise, at the time of the improving movement.4 Although the crofting system, in the sense of small consolidated farms, exists in other parts of Scotland, notably the north-east, the effective area of crofting on the basis of township organization with common grazings was limited to certain parishes of the north and west Highlands by I886. The terms of the Act, which sought to establish security of tenure and machinery for fixing fair rents and assessing compensation for improvements carried out by tenants, applied initially only to these 'crofting parishes', but subsequent legislation has been applied to the whole of the 'Crofting Counties'.5 Since earlier programmes of development under alien and often absentee landowners had

Economics · Geography · Regional science · Socioeconomics · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies · Scottish History and National Identity

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  Open Access•Peter Self•Urban Studies•1964

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  Open Access•Huw Jones, Huw R Jones•Tijdschrift voor Economische en…•1967

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• Evolution of Farming Patterns in Lochaber

  David Turnock•Transactions of the Institute of…•1967

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