Atholl shielings
Extract from MS249 The Atholl Experience
Atholl shielings
"When the whole property of the husbandman consisted in cattle,
they necessarily occupied all his care. In winter he chose
the most comfortable spot of his possession for his own residence
and that of his stock; but in the summer months he emigrated from
place to place with his flocks and herds, traversing alternately,
in quest of new grass, every station, where he had a right of
pasturage...
The women spun wool to clothe their families against the approach
of winter and manufactured their milk into butter and cheese.
A trusty shepherd was always sent before, to preserve the grass,
that the cattle might have a full bite upon their arrival; and the
husbandmen regularly repaired the huts a few days before the
emigration took place to a new settlement...
The highest shealing in this county, and probably the highest
inhabited land in Britain, at Dalnaspidal, on the great road for
Perth to Fort Augustus, is of this description....
The shealings, that we have been speaking of, were for the most
part set down in favoured situations, at the head of a small lake,
on the banks of a river or at the confluence of brooks, where the
begnignity of nature had provided shelter, had made the surface
green as a meadow, to the extent of several acres round the huts,
by the manure of the cattle which lay there at night. I have
seen shealings have such a tract of green ground by these means,
that they were afterwards converted into regular farms."
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Illustration: Names of ye Sheales in ye forrest of Atholl,
1669, copied 1828 by John Robertson, Schoolmaster of Moulin, BCCR
Trunk 36 XIX Reproduced by kind permission of Atholl Estates
Source: Rev. James Robertson, General View of the
Agriculture in the County of Perth (1799), from The Atholl
Experience, Volume 11, pp 7-8
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