Contents

       Chapter 1

       Introduction

      AS a boy, my walk to primary school took me along a quiet rural road running parallel with the south side of the river Tay from the small town of Newburgh. Along with half a dozen other youngsters, we would some days dawdle and play along the way. Other days, when the rain beat down upon us, we would scurry home as fast as our short legs would carry us.

      Some sixty-odd years later, I still live along that same stretch of road looking out over the land my family farmed for the best part of half a century. The road is known locally as the Barony, after the Barons of Rothes, who, for five preceding centuries, owned the riverside strip of land. Their castle, Ballinbreich, now lies in a ruinous condition but still commands a dominant position looking upstream towards Perth and eastwards to the estuary of Scotland’s largest river.

      In those feudal times, the castle was the hub of all life. Small, unfenced bits of land might have been tilled around its sturdy walls. Sheep, and a few of the now-extinct Fife breed of cattle, would have been tended on the slopes. The purpose of the castle had little to do with defence against some invader. It was re-built in the sixteenth century but Fife had never been marauding country, leaving that activity to the more quarrelsome peoples in the Highlands and the Borders.

      The castle had more to do with status. Its sturdy presence stamped its mark upon the area and also on the people who lived under the shadow of its walls in those days. Most of those living in the parish would be sheltered within the castle and tenant farmers paid their feus to the barons as they eked out a living from the land.

      Although running roughly parallel with the riverside, the road takes the easy route, like all tracks born in the days of horse and cart. Hills were tackled gently, with no steep gradients; winding round the contours rather than heading for the shorter, steeper, more direct route.

      It is a road where a steady pull on the cart shafts would transport the loads of grain and potatoes towards the local markets; a road where ridden horses could also keep steady pace without breaking stride to cope with sudden ups and downs on the carriageway. To call it a ‘carriageway’ is somewhat grand. It was a statute labour road, meaning the adjoining landowners were required to carry out the maintenance on it.

      This was never a main road between two important points. In the early days, the Barony road would have been no more than a couple of stone-filled tracks for the cart wheels to follow and a softer, unmade up section between for the horse. Only in the early days of the twentieth century did the local authority get round to covering it with tarmacadam, classifying it in their bureaucratic way as ‘C46’.

      In those days, the main town of Newburgh had a corn market to which grain merchants from Perth and Dundee would travel, either by horse or by boat. Grain and potatoes for markets in the south of England were loaded onto boats by the simple expedient of horse and cart backing down towards the vessel that lay beached at low tide. Later, in my time, farm produce was transported by tractors and trailers, hauling seed potatoes from the farm towards the station in Newburgh and then onward to their destination in the south of England.

      Horse carts and gigs have long gone and although the main Edinburgh to Perth line still crosses the land, the railway closed down four decades ago in Newburgh. Today, agricultural traffic consists of large articulated lorries and is largely limited to a two-month period at harvest time. It sees bulk lorries of grain with 20-plus tonnes of wheat or barley, heading for the malting or distilling markets – or, if the quality is less than it should be, for feed mills. For an equally short period, unwary rural travellers may also encounter large heavy goods vehicles with potatoes in 1-tonne wooden crates being driven away to centralised stores.

      The road still winds through the countryside, but in the past hundred years farming has changed more dramatically than in a score of centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, along the 5-mile length of the Barony road were a dozen farms. Some were small, with only the tenant working the acres and keeping a few cattle and sheep. Ownership of the estate passed to the Zetland family – absentee landlords, who acquired it from the Rothes family through a marital link.

      Some fifty years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the number of working farms had shrunk to 7. Smaller units were subsumed into the larger ones, to leave only a small biggin – a small set of farm buildings – behind.

      On these 7 farms were some 25 cottages, with another 4 added by the estate in the 1950s to cope with demand for additional farm workers. The valuation roll of those days showed all 29 dwellings housed farm workers.

      As we march onward in the twenty-first century, only three of the original dozen farms work as independent units. The rest are farmed from outside the parish and all the arable work is done in a short burst of feverish activity at springtime and a slightly longer bout of high-tempo activity in the autumn. One solitary farm along the road has retained its livestock enterprises, so it is still possible to see newborn calves from the commercial suckler herd.

      In the spring, the latest crop of lambs can be seen initially looking as if they want to confirm all the prejudices farmers have about sheep having a death wish. However, within a few days, they, and dozens of their colleagues, romp about the fields engaged in pointless, but joyful chases. The rest of the livestock along this parish road arrives for the summer grazing season and departs either to market, or back to the owner’s farm,