180 A HUNDRED YEARS 



The Gairloch people were indeed devoted to their 

 proprietor in those days. How often has my mother 

 described them to me, and how often did she extol their 

 very great merits ! Still, when she and my uncle were 

 ruling these five hundred to six hundred families of 

 crofters it was an extra hard time for them, for first 

 of all there was the potato blight — and want generally 

 brings out the bad and not the good qualities of a people ; 

 then there was the great upheaval caused by the trustees 

 deciding to do away with the runrig system and dividing 

 all the arable land into crofts of about four acres. 

 They forced the people to pull down their old insanitary 

 houses, where the cattle were under the same roof as 

 human beings, and where the fires were on the floor in 

 the centre of the dwelling-room, with only a hole in 

 the roof to let the smoke out, and made them build new 

 and rather better houses on their crofts, the proprietor 

 providing the timber. My mother told me many a time 

 that, with very few exceptions, the one desire of the 

 whole population seemed to be to learn how they 

 could please the young laird, and how they could best 

 fulfil the wishes of those who were managing this huge 

 estate for him to the best of their abilities. 



There is no doubt that the people of the west coast 

 went through periods of terrible hunger in what we now 

 speak of as " the good old times," especially before the 

 introduction of the potato. How they lived in pre- 

 potato days is a mystery . But even prior to the destruc- 

 tion caused by the potato blight, when the potatoes 

 usually grew so well, there was hardly a year in which 

 my grandfather and my father did not import cargoes 



