Footsteps in the Furrow. Andrew Arbuckle
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directly as a result of towns and villages expanding their boundaries. Those picking up their ancestral roots often come back to the family farm to find they require to walk the concrete pavements or muddy playing fields of the burgeoning urban landscape.
The scale of change in farming is not easily observed from the traditional view over the hedge or dyke, or even through fence wires on visits along the rural roads. The fields provide permanence, and crops are still grown.
Often, if the rural jungle drums do not beat out the message, the first that even neighbours now know of a change in working the land may come with the arrival of a stranger’s set of machinery entering the fields. Gone too are the smallholdings, including those set up specifically after World War I by the British Government in their repatriation of soldiers – part of their belief that they were creating a land fit for heroes.
In North-East Fife two larger properties were split up to make smaller holdings – Third Part and Easter Pitcorthie. These holdings each had a farmhouse and steading, and approximately 50 acres (or 20 hectares). Today, only two of these original holdings remain, the rest have either been amalgamated or the land sold off to neighbours, leaving a house in the country.
Fields
The old trick of looking at the placement of a gateway to see who owned the field has also gone with the aggregation into larger units. It used to be that the gate was always placed in the corner nearest the farm steading. That was the shortest route for the horse to walk and for any work to be done. Nowadays, with a takeover of husbandry, that trick no longer tells tales.
The youngster who in the mid-1950s perched precariously on the old steading roof, would have been able to look beyond the immediate buildings to see the stackyard, possibly even a pond for water power and then a scutter of henhouses in nearby fields, or even a small paddock in which the tups (rams), or some ailing animal would be kept.
Beyond the buildings and the in-bye enterprises were the cropped and grazed fields. In the early days of the century, when the average size of a farm in Fife was 112 acres, seldom would the field size go beyond 20 acres.
There were still areas of land unfenced up in the rigging or highlands of Fife, but the vast majority of farmland was enclosed. A century previously, it was reckoned that only one-third of the land in Fife had been fenced or hedged into small workable fields. But even if they were enclosed, some fields were in a fairly basic state. In 1917, Mr Watson of Drumrack Farm, Anstruther paid the rector of local Waid Academy some £7 7/6 (£7.37) for the use of a squad of boys to clear the field of whins (gorse). At the same time, he also employed a team of Waid Academy girls to clear up the fields. This latter task was most likely one of hand-weeding crops such as potatoes or turnips, but it might also have included taking weeds out of grain crops.
Following massive investment in this unseen aspect of good husbandry during the previous century, the majority of the improved fields were also drained. Originally, the drains were trenches into which stones were placed, thus allowing water to flow between them. That rough description does no credit to the quality of the stone drainage work that still operates after more than 100 years.
Anyone who has had to repair a stone drain will confirm it is much more difficult than replacing a tile drain. These clay tile drains came into being on land where there were few stones. Generally it was an easier system laying these hollow cylindrical tiles, which – provided there was a run or gradient – would work effectively. Most of the drainage work was carried out in herringbone systems, with leader drains forming the spine and these emptying into open ditches or streams.
Fife is not an area where hedges are common, although 200 years ago the most popular method of creating fields was the combination of ditch and blackthorn hedge. There were also areas where stone was plentiful for building dry-stone dykes, but again, this was not a widespread practice as there are parts of Fife that are stone-free and, in horsepower days, the carting of stone was costly.
Not until fence wire became popular did the enclosure of farms become complete. As an example of the cost of fencing in the early days of the century, at Drumrack Farm outside Anstruther in 1914, Mr Watson paid £38 for the post and wire fencing of 1,000 yards, or just over 900 metres.
One of the first industrial imports from the US was barbed wire, used extensively and controversially to enclose the vast prairie ground. But it did not arrive without its problems, as in 1921 the NFU of Scotland received a communication from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries reminding farmers of the injuries that could be sustained by indiscriminate use of barbed wire. However, barbed wire is still, to this day, an essential part of any new livestock fencing.
Most farm gates were made of wood and, equally, most were just tied or roughly hung on the wooden gateposts. Only the major estates or home farms could afford properly hung metal gates. Almost all these early gateways have been demolished as the width and scale of the farm machinery has increased and now there is often just a large, open gash in the hedge, fence or dyke to allow the machinery access to the field.
In a slow, but constant process since World War II, there has also been an increase in the size of fields as fences, hedges and dykes have been removed. In some arable parts of the East Neuk, there is no fencing at all, but as one farmer remarked, ‘You do not need a fence to keep the potatoes in.’
Another slippage from the scene is the loss of field names. Old maps may still hang on farm office walls, but the names of individual fields have gone. These ranged from the self-evident ‘Quarry’ field, where a big hole would signify where the stone used in local building and possibly even for the farm steading had been quarried.
Fields with names such as ‘Stoney Knowes’ would no doubt give the ploughman thought as to exactly where the rocky outcrops might make his life difficult. Some field names gave the game away as to their previous history. ‘Coal’ field at Brigton Farm, St Andrews, was once worked for coal. Most people know of the coal-mining industry in west and central Fife, but right up until the late 1940s there were coal workings in east Fife.
The field on another farm called ‘Clay Pit’ may well have been the source of the pantiles on the roof of old steadings, but equally offered little in arable cropping. A field known as ‘Holly Hedge’ would again be named for obvious reasons and further down in the lower ground were the fields named ‘Burnside’.
At Logie Farm, Newburgh, there was a field called ‘The field with the stone in it’ as it had a massive boulder, around which all farm machinery had to dodge. A visit from the local quarrymaster, along with a heap of dynamite, changed its name to ‘The field without the stone in it’. Every farm had a ‘Big’ field just as every one had a ‘Paddock’. A few even had a ‘Big Paddock’ and a ‘Small Paddock’.
Few farms went to the same lengths as one owner at Falfield Farm, Peat Inn, when he erected a pillar made of sandstone specially brought down from Arbroath at each field. Each pillar proudly carried the field name.
So, what was the point of all the field naming? Well, it was easy for the farm grieve to tell the ploughman to go to plough the ‘Big’ field, or to manure the ‘Big’ paddock. Errors were known and men were found in the wrong fields, starting to plough where no cultivation was intended that year, or applying fertiliser when the required amount had already been broadcast. That was why field names were important.
Field names also gave an identity only taken away by scale and bureaucracy. All today’s civil servant checking the forms filled in by the farmer needs to know is the Ordnance Survey field no. 123, on farm code no. 456, and he or she can then check by satellite the actions on that field.
Before leaving the naming and breakdown of the landscape into small parcels, it is important to mention that every parish would have had its church, and every church its own land, or Glebe. Some were quite sizeable, with the Glebe at Cameron amounting to 24 acres. While in the early years of the century many ministers would use this land for the grazing of their horse, this tradition slipped away by the middle of the century. Nowadays, most of the Glebe land is let to the nearest neighbour.