THE CELTIC SYSTEM 1 65 



population, where is the difference, whether the other three far- 

 mers live on the farm or in an adjoining village ? " ^ Elsewhere, 

 writing of runrig as an obstacle to improvement, he continues: 

 " But in our times nothing can be more absurd, than to see two 

 or three, or perhaps four men, yoking their horses together in one 

 plough and having their ridges alternately in the same field, with 

 a bank of unploughed land between them by way of boundary. 

 These diminutive possessions were carried to such a length, that 

 in some parts of Scotland, beyond this county, the term a horse's 

 foot of land is not wholly laid aside.^ The land is like a piece of 

 striped cloth with banks full of weeds and ridges of corn in con- 

 stant succession from one end of a field to the other. Under 

 such management, all these people must have concurred in one 

 opinion with regard to the time and manner of ploughing every 

 field, the kind of grain to be sown, and the season and weather 

 fit for sowing, and whether they and their horses were to be em- 

 ployed or idle. Even so late as thirty or forty years ago, this 

 practice prevailed, not only over the greater part of the county 

 of Perth, but with very few exceptions over all Scotland. Since 

 that period it has been gradually going into desuetude . . . 

 and must soon disappear, except where the landlord is as much 

 of a Goth as his tenants." ^ 



In verification of the important fact that runrig applied to the 

 arable strips of the tenants of a single farm, who were seldom 

 more than six in number, we have the explicit statement of two 

 other reporters. Fullarton writes of Ayr: " The arable farms 

 were generally small, because the tenants had not stock for larger 

 occupations. A plough-gate of land, or as much as could employ 

 four horses, allowing half of it to be ploughed, was a common 

 sized farm. It was often runridge or mixed property; and two 

 or three farmers usually lived in the same place, and had their 

 different distributions of the farm in various proportions, from 

 10 to 40, 60, or 100 acres." * Again, from Annandale, in the west, 

 comes the comment: " It may have been from the same ideas of 



1 Southern Perth, (1794), p. 65. 



2 According to the author's note, this was " the sixteenth part of a plough-gate." 



3 Ibid. (i799)> 392- * ^y. P- 9- 



