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- Small settlement of clustered farmhouses.
- No church, and usually, no shop or school.
- Usually, considerable ties of kinship between the
families in the clachan.
- The land around the cluster of farmhouses was held
under a system of land tenure often referred to as the
Rundale System - whereby farmers within the clachan had scattered plots of good, medium and poorer
quality land.
- The better land was usually found close to the
cluster of houses and was known as the infield -
poorer quality land was found in what was often
referred to as the outfield, since it was further away
from the cluster.
- Parts of the land were held ‘in common’ e.g. the
land around the houses and the mountain land.
- The mountain land was allocated in soums - e.g. one
soum entitled a farmer to graze a cow or so many
sheep. The number of soums that a farmer held was
related to how much land he held in the
infield/outfield area.
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The map below dating from 1860 shows, for example, a farmer
holding the plot of land 4A in the outfield and the land
4B in the infield. Area 9 (enclosed by a blue circle on
the map) was common land around the
cluster of houses where most of the farmers lived. Off the
bottom left hand corner of the map was the mountain
land which was also held in common. |
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