Events of 1724, Part 2

This is part two of the Events of 1724. [Galloway Levellers Uprising]

If the attacks on Sir Basil Hamilton’s dykes were motivated by his Jacobite background, the anti-Jacobite element of the Galloway Levellers actions may have influenced their decision not to level a dyke built for Robert Johnston of Kelton parish. At first sight, as recounted as a tale told by the grandfather of Samuel Geddes of Keltonhill by Malcolm Harper¹ and published over 150 years later, this incident may appear to be a piece of folklore rather than history. According to Harper:

A band of levellers and houghers, or as some call them ”Rablers” ² having traversed the coast from Balmae to Kirkbean levelling dykes and houghing Irish cattle, the introduction of which was one of their grievances, they reached the estate of Kelton. Captain Johnstone was then laird, and had built a high dyke to fence his estate from the public road…anxious to preserve it he prevailed upon Mr. Falconer [minister of Kelton parish] to accompany him in going to the levellers with the view of advising them to desist from their destructive proceedings… Mr. Falconer then addressed the crowd… assuring them that no man or family would be evicted from Captain Johnstone’s estate on account of [the dyke] being erected - that every person on his lands should continue to have and hold his house, his yaird or garden, and the usual quantity of corn sown (in these days it was generally customary for the labourers to have a certain quantity of corn sown to produce a melder³ for the family, and fodder for the cow and calf).

This speech, aided by the distribution of bread, cheese and beer provided by Captain Johnstone, persuaded the Levellers to pass on, leaving Johnstone’s dyke still standing. As confirmation, Harper says “On a stone in the dyke of the right hand side of the road leading from Lochbank to Furbar House, there is a date, which is now indistinct, but about thirty years ago [I.e. 1840] it was plainly 1725, and is now commemorative of the event.”. Unfortunately for Harper’s account, although there is an inscribed stone in the dyke next to Furbar House, the date on it is clearly 1757 and the events described would have happened in 1724.

On the other hand, in John Nicholson’s notebook⁴ can be found the original account by Samuel Geddes of Keltonhill as used by Harper. This original account is dated 1831, so could realistically have been a story told to Samuel Geddes by his grandfather. In addition, William Falconer was the minister of Kelton parish in 1724 and is mentioned by Morton as one of the ministers alleged to have been sympathetic to the Levellers. Robert Johnstone became laird of Kelton in 1706, purchasing the estate ⁵(centred on Kelton Mains farm, now part of the 1500 acre NTS Threave Estate) from William Maxwell, earl of Nithsdale.⁶ In 1715, Robert Johnstone was one of the Steward-Deputes of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright appointed to help defend Dumfries against Jacobite forces led by William Maxwell.

As well as having strong anti- Jacobite credentials, Johnstone was (at least according to the Latin inscription on his gravestone in St Michael’s kirkyard in Dumfries) a “ strong opponent of Union and assertor of Scotland’s liberty” . In 1706 Johnstone represented Dumfries Burgh in the Scottish parliament and voted against the proposed Union.⁷ As the rest of the inscription on Johnstone’s grave shows, he had also been several times provost of Dumfries and represented the burgh in the Convention of Royal Burghs. But although these anti-Jacobite and patriotic credentials distinguish Robert Johnstone from Jacobite landowners like Sir Basil Hamilton, Lady Mary Gordon (nee Dalzell) of Kenmure and George Maxwell of Munches, the origin of Johnstone’s wealth in trade as a Dumfries based merchant is more significant.

Like William Craik (a Dumfries based merchant who was Johnstone’s father -in - law and business partner and who bought the Arbigland and Duchrae estates in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in the late 17^th century. ⁸ ), landownership was secondary to Johnstone’s main economic activities. The income he derived from his Kelton (Threave) Estate was therefore supplemental. So long as his tenants provided a steady stream of income through mainly arable farming( Kelton Estate having been arable/ grange land since at least the 13^th century ⁹), Johnstone had no pressing need to gamble on the cattle trade and therefore no pressing need to evict his tenants to create a cattle park at Kelton.

Yet if the Galloway Levellers had only been able to draw on support from those directly evicted to make way for new cattle parks, like the sixteen families dispossessed by Murdoch of Cumloden, the events of 1724 would have been on a much smaller scale. If the eye-witness account of James Clerk is to be believed, the breaking of Sir Basil Hamilton’s dykes in early May 1724 involved 1000 levellers. Although it is possible that it was the threat posed to the ‘moral economy’ which mobilised such a large group, the emphasis given to the 43 Irish cattle ( out of a herd of 400 cattle) seized by the Levellers in their account of the incident and by James Clerk in his account suggests a more direct economic linkage. The smuggling of Irish cattle was also of concern to the customs officers in Dumfries.

So rigid were the revenue regulations at this period [1724] , that when some charitable people in Dumfries commissioned two ship loads of oatmeal from Ireland that the poor might obtain it cheap when it was hardly to be had of home growth for love or money, the collector durst not permit the meal to be landed till he was specially authorized to do so by his official superiors. The officers were also scandalized by a daring innovation which had sprung up, especially at Kirkcudbright, of importing Irish cattle, and they sorely bewailed the connivance given to it by the County gentlemen and their tenants.¹⁰

Leopold’s research suggests that the first Levellers action took place at Netherlaw near Kirkcudbright on 17 March 1724. In their Letter to Major Du Cary the Levellers mention this incident:

understanding that there were a considerable number of Irish cattle in the Parks of Netherlaw, we did, in obedience to the law, legally seize and slaughter them to deter the gentlemen from the like practice if importing or bringing Irish cattle, to the great loss of this poor country as well as the breeders in England, too much the practice of the gentlemen here.¹¹

Although direct evidence of the import of Irish cattle is lacking in the case of Alexander Murray of Cally (Girthon parish, Stewartry of Kirkcudbright), who had “a large park that feeds one thousand bullocks, that he sends once every year to the markets of England” in 1723 ¹², Murray had inherited over 60 000 acres of Irish land, mainly in Donegal. Alexander Murray‘s ancestor, George Murray of Broughton in Wigtownshire, had been granted these lands in 1610 as part of the Plantation.¹³ By 1621, cattle from these Irish estates were being sold in England.¹⁴ In 1724, Alexander Murray would therefore have been highly likely to have been involved in the illegal import of Irish cattle and to have been a target for the Galloway Levellers - which he was. According to one of John Nicholson’s sources - Violet Nish, whose father Robert was born in 1715 at Enrick in Girthon parish- Alexander Murray’s dykes in Girthon parish were levelled in 1724 during an incident in which shots were fired.

At Cardoness in Anwoth parish, on the west bank of the Fleet and only 1 km (½ mile) from Alexander Murray’s cattle park at Cally, lay the cattle parks of Colonel William Maxwell.¹⁵ If the Levellers had been intent on breaking the dykes of all such enclosures, then Colonel Maxwell’s dykes would have been a next and obvious target. But Maxwell’s dykes were left standing. Colonel Maxwell is mentioned in the Letter to Major Du Cary as having, along with ‘Laird Heron’ (either Patrick Heron senior or Patrick Heron junior, both of Minnigaff parish) as having reached an agreement with the Levellers “that we should live peaceably and throw down no man’s dykes.”. This agreement was negotiated immediately after an encounter between a party of armed heritors and armed Levellers at the Steps of Tarff. There appear to have been two such confrontations, one in early May and one in early June, but it is unclear which is being referred to.

More certainly, although the Letter to Major Du Cary includes the Herons “Yr. and elder” amongst its list of depopulating lairds, stating that “the little town of Minigaff belonging to Mr. Heron is only a nest of beggars since he inclosed all the ground about it.” , the Herons’ extensive cattle parks were not levelled. Yet, as Woodward notes in his comparative study of the 17^th century Irish and Scottish cattle trade, “Patrick Herron sent 1000 or more cattle to England via Dumfries in each of the years 1689-91 inclusive.” .¹⁶ Until the death of Sir David Dunbar (elder) of Baldoon in 1686, Patrick Heron senior had managed Dunbar’s cattle trading activities. After Dunbar’s death, Heron and his son built up extensive landholdings in Minnigaff parish to become the main cattle traders in Galloway.¹⁷ Since these landholdings included both upland and lowland farms, this suggests that the Herons had developed a ‘vertically integrated’ approach to the cattle trade. The profitability of this indigenous business model would have been undermined by the illegal import of Irish cattle.

According to a letter dated 20 May 1724 written by James Clerk in Kirkcudbright to his brother Sir John Clerk:

Upon Wednesday last a party of about 100 [Levellers], all armed came into town, driving before them about 53 Black Cattle which they had, after throwing down the dykes, brought in the name of Irish cattle. They demanded us to assist in retaining said cattle…We thereupon refused to meddle in the affair, especially considered that we writt the Commissioners 15 days ago upon that account, and have as yet no orders to give any such assistance, upon which they drove them out of town and slaughtered each one [of] them in a barbarous manner notwithstanding as law directs proof was made… that they were not imported from Ireland, but bought of a Highland drover .¹⁸

According to Morton, the slaughter ‘in a barbarous manner’ was carried out in Dundrennan Abbey a blacksmith named McMinn, giving rise to the local folklore saying that “M’Minn’s fore-hammer was more deadly than a butcher’s knife.”. ¹⁹. Between 1640 and 1700 the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds record seven related McMinn’s who were blacksmiths and a Francis McMinn (blacksmith) was a portioner of Gregory croft near Dundrennan in 1724.²⁰

Further confirmation that the alleged illegal import of Irish cattle was a significant factor in the events of 1724 is given by the Earl of Galloway in one of his letters to Sir John Clerk. In this letter, the Earl of Galloway describes an incident which occurred on the 12^th May when the Levellers “slaughtered near Kirkcudbright 55 or 57 cattell belonging to Hugh Blair of Dunrod [parish of Borgue] notwithstanding he made it appear they were bred in Britain, and they have used some of Basil Hamilton’s cattell after the same way and manner upon Saturday morning last.”. ²¹

The defence that the cattle involved were not Irish echoes that made on behalf of Sir David Dunbar (elder) by Symson in his Large Description of Galloway forty two years before.

Those of his [ Dunbar’s] owne breed, are very large, yea, so large, that in August or September 1682 nine and fifty of that sort , which would have yielded betwixt five and six pound sterling the peece were seized upon in England for Irish cattell; and because the person to whom they were entrusted had not witnesses that there ready at the precise hour, to swear that they were seen calved in Scotland (although the witness offered to depone that he liv’d in Scotland, within a mile of the park where they were calved and bred) , they were, by the sentence of Sir J.L., and some others who knew well enough that they were bred in Scotland, knockt on the head and kill’d; which was, to say no more, very hard measure , and an act unworthy of persons of that quality and station who ordered it to be done.²²

By their seizure, public display and slaughter of over 150 ‘Irish’ cattle, the Galloway Levellers were trying to drive a wedge between those landowners and farmers who were involved in the legitimate cattle trade and those who were not. It is difficult to judge how effective this strategy was in broadening the base of support for the Levellers’ actions in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Certainly in Wigtownshire the use of battering ram to demolish a dyke built around the Fell of Barhullion by Sir Alexander Maxwell of Monreith suggests the Wigtownshire Levellers were numerically fewer. Maxwell was also able to enlist his tenants to defend his remaining dykes, although seven of his cattle were houghed (had their hamstrings cut) in the night. This houghing incident, compared with the very public slaughter of cattle in the Stewartry, is another indication that there were fewer Levellers in Wigtonshire. At Balsier in Sorbie parish, it was the tenant who organised the defence of a field dyke ( I.e. a subdividing enclosure) against the Levellers. In the struggle which ensued one of the Levellers was fatally wounded.²³ Finally and most tellingly, the Sheriff of Wigtown was able to suppress the Wigtownshire Levellers without recourse to the Earl of Stair’s Dragoons.²⁴

If the Wigtownshire Levellers were fewer in number, why did they not seek support from the Stewartry? One possibility is that if large scale support for the Levellers was confined to the central parishes of the Stewarty of Kirkcudbright, it would have been logistically difficult to level more distant dykes or to give support to the Wigtownshire Levellers. When the known instances of dyke-breaking in the Stewartry are plotted on a map, they are all within a 16km (10 mile) radius of Kelton Hill. This may be a practical reason why the Herons’ cattle parks in Minnigaff parish were untouched. Minnigaff is 30 km (19 miles) in a direct line from Kelton Hill and approximately 45 km (28 miles) by existing tracks. Likewise, although ‘Murray of Cavens’ was alleged to have threatened thirty families with eviction, his estate in Kirkbean parish was left unmolested. Cavens is 24 km (15 miles) in a direct line from Kelton Hill and approximately 30 km(19 miles) by existing tracks.

In a letter to Sir John Clerk of Pencuik dated 3rd June 1724, James Clerk states that two troops of horse and four of foot left Kirkcudbright at 3 am on the 2^nd June and arrived at the Boat of Rhone at 8 am, expecting to confront a gathering of Levellers, but no Levellers appeared. The direct distance from Kirkcudbright to the Boat of Rhone (at the junction of the rivers Ken and Dee) is 15 km (9 miles). Even if the actual distance travelled along the rough tracks then existing was nearer 19 km (12 miles), the troops were travelling at 3.8 km/ hour (2.4 miles/ hour). A large group of Levellers are unlikely to have travelled any faster than the troops so would have taken roughly 12 hours to reach Minnigaff from the centre of the Stewartry and 8 hours to reach Kirkbean. Sorbie parish in Wigtownshire is 20 km (12.5 miles) south of Minnigaff. It would have taken a party of central Stewartry Levellers at least 17 hours walking non-stop to provide support for the Wigtownshire Levellers. Any such attempt would have been easily halted long before this by the two troops of horse stationed in Kirkcudbright.

Of the 23 Levellers pursued for damages by Sir Basil Hamilton in January 1725, having demolished 580 roods of dyke at Galtway (near Kirkcudbright) between the 12^th and 16^th May 1724, Thomas Moire and Grizel Grierson his wife lived furthest away. Moire was the owner-occupier of Beoch farm in Tongland parish. Beoch is 13 km (8 miles) from Galtway. As a farm owner, Moire and his wife would have been able to travel by horseback to Galtway. The other named Levellers all lived less than 9 km (5.5 miles) from Galtway and the majority lived within 4 km (2.5 miles). Three lived at mills (at Auchlane Miln and Nethermilns), two in crofts (Greenlane and Meadow Isle) and the rest were either tenant farmers or cottars. One, John Martin, was the 14 year old son of a tenant farmer in Lochdougan.

The involvement of Thomas and Grizel Moire is significant since it reveals that at least some of the Galloway Levellers were owner-occupier farmers. Their respective family backgrounds also suggest that, at least in the case of Sir Basil Hamilton, the anti-Jacobite rhetoric of the Levellers had deep historical roots. Grizel Grier was the daughter of Thomas Greirsone of Bargatton farm. Thomas Moire was the son of Henry Moire of Beoch.²⁵ These are neighbouring farms.

In 1640, William Grierson of Bargatton (Grizel’s grandfather) was appointed to the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright War Committee of the Covenanters, and was one of the Stewartry representatives in the Scottish Parliament from 1644 to 1651. Between 1649 and 1704, William Grierson and his son, also William ( I.e. Grizel’s uncle) were Commissioners of Supply for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright,²⁶ but by 1724, Bargatton was no longer owned by the Griersons.

In 1640, William Grierson of Bargatton (Grizel’s grandfather) was appointed to the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright War Committee of the Covenanters, and was one of the Stewartry representatives in the Scottish Parliament

from 1644 to 1651.²⁷ McKerlie gives the details of the ownership of Bargatton, noting that it and seven other farms in Balmaghie were owned by the Grierson family between 1600 and 1700. The farms then changed hands several times. William Murray, a merchant in Dumfries owned them from 1700 to 1712, then Robert Maclellan of Barcloy had them until 1720, followed by his brother Samuel until March 1725 when Colonel William Maxwell of Cardoness bought them before they were sold again in 1735 to the Reverend Walter Laurie of Redcastle (parish of Urr). The Laurie family were still in possession when McKerlie was writing in 1878, owning 12 farms and the village of Clachanpuck which Walter Laurie improved and re-named Laurieston. Mckerlie also notes that in 1678, Henry Mure (or Moire) commissary-clerk of Kirkcudbright owned Bellymack and Grannoch Waulk Mill in Balmaghie parish.²⁸ Unfortunately, McKerlie apart from noting that ‘Hendrie Moore commissar clerk of Kirkcudbright’ also had principle sasine of Beoch (Tongland parish) in 1678 does not provide any further information on the Moires of Beoch.

Footnotes

1 Harper: Rambles in Galloway: 1876, similar also in McKenzie: History of Galloway : 1841

2 Concise Scots Dictionary : 1995 links ‘rable’ as ‘mob’ to the 1688/9 ‘Rabbling of the Episcopalian Curates’

3 melder - quantity of one person’s corn taken to the mill to be ground at one time: Concise Scots Dictionary: 1999

4 Hornel Library: NTS Broughton House: Kirkcudbright

5 Centred on Kelton Mains farm, now part of 1500 acre NTS Threave Estate which also includes Keltonhill and Furbar cottage.

6 Register of Sasines

7 Whitelaw: TGDNHAS : II: 19 : 1907 : The Union of 1707 in Dumfriesshire

8 http://www.rps.ac.uk/search.php?action=print&id=id19214&filename=charlesii_trans&type=trans

9 Brooke: 1991: 303

10 McDowall: 1886 : 556

11 Morton: TDGHNAS :1936 : 252/1

12 Mackay : A Journey through Scotland : 1723, in MacRobert: 201 : 30

13 www.proni.gov.uk/introduction__murray_papers_d2860-2.pdf

14 Corrie : Droving days in south west Scotland : 1900

15 Mackay : A Journey through Scotland : 1723, in MacRobert: 201 : 30

16 Woodward : 156 in Cullen and Smout : 1977

17 McKerlie: 1878

18 Prevost: 1967, quoting Clerk of Pencuik: No.5288/47/1

19 Morton: 1936: 237

20 Register of Sasines:

21 Prevost: 19267, quoting Clerk of Pencuik: No. 5246/61

22 In McKenzie:1841

23 Orton: 1936, quoting Daniel Mathieson of Sorbie in a letter to John Nicholson dated 1830

24 Agnew: 1864

25 KSCD:3604ii

26 Morton: 1914, War Committee minute Book: 1851: 2, Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, K.M. Brown et al eds (St Andrews, 2007), 1704/7/67. Date accessed: 1 May 2008.

27 War Committee Minute Book: 1851:2, Morton : 1914 : 78 and 354, NAS. PA2/25, f.125v-126r.

28 McKerlie: 1878: Vol. 3:156-161

Progress is the Enemy: Part 2

I wish I was not feeling quite so tired, but it is 11.45 pm and I am.

Silent Noise has responded at length to Progress is the Enemy Part 1. [ See below]What I need to do is go through the response slowly and absorb it before replying. I cannot do this right now, so what I will do is do something on my Galloway Levellers Uprising of 1724 as a separate post and come back to this next week.

Photo is of ditch/ bank - part of my Galloway Levellers research project

AL

silent noise said...

Alistair,
re relativism: while ‘progress’ is guided by rock-hard ideals of development, “growth”, accumulation of profit and the ‘right’ to do so, Reason, etc, what is equally complicit in this process is the relativistic thought process that allows say a scientist to justify working on a nuclear bomb or corporate-sponsored research &lobbying against environmental protection etc, e.g. “if I don’t do it someone else will” or simply the absence of any values fixed enough to resist (“I was only following orders”)… Or one of the lynchpins of consumer society, advertising, which depends on professional sofists willing to sell anything for the highest bidder. There’s a kind of connection here between the universal equivelance of money and the equivalence of all values which mirrors it; internally it also serves as a psychological mechanism which numbs all values and internal conflict in this period of alienation and hopelessness.

Revolt Against Plenty: “…some abstract pseudo-critique of the notion of progress which is post-modernism's revelry in meaninglessness - a lifeless relativism which, like the commodity form itself, makes everything - all histories and societies - interchangeably equivalent. The progress of alienation, the progress of the potential of the struggle against it, the progress of the immensity of our tasks are realities that can't be philosophised out of existence.”

Biroco: “So everything is equally valid? The stupidest most naive interpretation of say politics in Iraq from a schoolboy in middle America is just as valid as a detailed insight from a scholar of Persian teaching philosophy in Baghdad… I don't know if you are a Buddhist, but certainly many Buddhists are of the opinion that a goal is to render all distinctions null and void. But what they often forget is that this is something only possible on an absolute plane and that to attempt to apply such ideas on the relative plane leads one into error.”

Vaneigem: “...these particles of antagonism moulded into a magnetic ring whose function is to make everybody lose their bearings, to pull everyone out of himself and to scramble lines of force. Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by power. The opposition of two terms is given its real meaning by the introduction of a third. As long as there are only two equal and opposite polarities, they neutralize each other, since each is defined by the other; as it is impossible to choose between them, we are led into the domain of tolerance and relativity which is so dear to the bourgeoisie.”

re progress… have been re-reading Debord and trying to fit it together:
Debord: 136 …The religions that evolved out of Judaism were the abstract universal recognition of an irreversible time now democratized, open to all, yet still confined to the realm of illusion. Time remained entirely orientated towards a single final event: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.”… Eternity was also what humbled time in its mere irreversible flow – suppressing history as history continued – by positioning itself beyond irreversible time, as a pure point which cyclical time would enter only to be abolished.

So Debord located the shift not in Zoroaster like Boyce, but in Christianity about 1500 years later. But the point is the same at least to the extent that there is a shift in the consciousness of time (progress) that continues into modernity in secular form. (But I’m also wondering if there aren’t other religions with a definite apocalypse-type end-point other than the monotheistic & written middle eastern ones).

AL: “Where are we? Chasing Hegel the Hermeticist / Gnostic in his pursuit of the Absolute which Karl Marx turned into the pursuit of the Revolution / Eschaton and wondering if there are other ways to make some kinda sense of it all (or should that be The All?)”

But was Marx simply manipulating Hegel’s concepts founded on abstraction and theology, or did he manage to catch a glimpse of the real world that abstraction was clouding, and then on the basis of that glimpse proceed to demystify/unveil that which was repressed and unconscious within both Hegel and the religious currents that inspired him.

Debord: 138 “…modern revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of millenarianism. The exact opposite is true: millenarianism, the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking only the consciousness of being historical and nothing more…The peasant class could achieve a clear consciousness neither of the workings of society nor of the way to conduct its own struggle, and it was because it lacked these prerequisites of unity in its action and consciousness that the peasantry formulated its project and waged its wars according to the imagery of an earthly paradise”

Marx: “The world has for a long time possessed the dream of a thing, of which it now suffices to become aware so as to really possess it.”

“Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, will no longer be tempted to find the mere appearance of himself, an unman, where he seeks and must seek his true reality…This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world…The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”

But then why pluck the flower in the first place… the point being that neither Marx nor Debord questioned industrial progress from an ecological perspective – and so theirs are critiques to be superceded too. But that supercession would also be a progress although of a different kind than what politicians, corporate experts and their advertisers have planned; a progress opposed to consensus reality and its architects. If Hegel imagined the end of history, revolutionary theory reinterprets it as the end of pre-history – a qualitative shift which is not an end-point but a new beginning. Capitalism though can evisage neither, only what Debord calls pseudo-cyclical time, the accumulation of more profits and, like an artificial intelligence working on faulty programming, its own reproduction.
And a final quote:

Debord:133 The dry, unexplained chronology that a deified authority offered to its subjects, who were supposed to accept it as the earthly fulfillment of mythic commandments, was destined to be transcended and transformed into conscious history. But for this to happen, sizeable groups of people had to have experienced real participation in history. Out of this practical communication between those who have recognized each other as possessors of a unique present, who have experienced a qualitative richness of events in their own activity and who are at home in their own era, arises the general language of historical communication. Those for whom irreversible time truly exists discover in it both the memorable and the danger of forgetting: “Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his researches, so that time will not abolish the deeds of men...”

So essential change can only come by conscious mass participation in history; a progress not based on any limited concept of Reason but something more total and wider in scope… drawing on both progress/irreversible-time and tradition/cyclical-time in an attempt to move beyond both? Let us hope that this is already beginning.

Progress is the Enemy

Got the following comment to Anarchic Punk Questionnaire in which I said :

"There is no such thing as progress, only change. The idea of progress is the enemy, it justifies all manner of idiocies."

[Note - pic of open cast coal mine near Dalmellington about 30 miles from here. ]

Commentator said:

Would you care to expand on that one or possibly to discuss it? For one, if both progression & regression are imaginary constructs/ideologies, and only change exists, doesn't that necessarily arrive at a complete relativism of values? And relativism, in this day and age more than ever, justifies as many idiocies as the dominant views of progress do. Plus understanding nuclear war as a threat that was superceded or defeated seems to assume a belief in progress at some level.

Good question I.e. “You got me bang to rights gov. I was rushing to finish the list of questions and not taking the time to check answers for internal logical coherence.”

What I was thinking of was cyclical vs. linear time - rather than relativism of values. I had a look at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on relativism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/ but was confused rather than enlightened.

I suppose what I should have done first is ask the commentator for an example of an idiocy caused by the relativism of values before bashing out the following 1600 words since I suspect they will not answer the question.

So it goes. And here is my non-answer…

AL


Now 09.25 am 16 April 2008 e.v. and already been for a healthy walk round Carlingwark Loch where a wildlife observation hide is under construction. Since I suggested building something similar 9 years ago as a Millenium Project (but in form of a crannog see http://www.crannog.co.uk/ ) I guess this could be described as ‘progress…’[Even got it included -as ‘crannog style observation post’ in Stewartry Local Area Plan but Scottish Natural Heritage got the ‘crannog’ bit struck out- so on land not in water].

So here we go….

1. Mary Boyce - see obit here http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/apr/11/guardianobituaries.religion

Mary Boyce suggested that Zoroaster lived around 3500 years ago and developed his religious insights through a series of visions provoked by a conflict . This conflict was between the pastoral, possibly still stone tool using, community he lived in and a metal/ bronze using and chariot driving community.

Harsh experience had evidently convinced the prophet that wisdowm, justice and goodness were utterly separate by nature from wickedness and cruelty;and in vision he beheld, co-existing with Ahura Mazda [the uncreated creator of the world] , an adversary, the ‘Hostile Spririt’, Angra Mainyu, equally uncreated, but ignorant and wholly malign. [Boyce:1984:20]

Ahura Mazda accomplished the act of creation in two stages. First he brought all things into being in a disembodied stage, called in Pahlavi ‘menog’, that is ‘spiritual, immaterial’. Then he gave it ‘material’ or getig existence’ The getig existence is better than the previous menog one, for in it Ahura Mazda’s perfect creation received the added good of solid and sentient form. Together, the fashioning of these two states constituted the act of Creation, called in Pahlavi ‘Bundahishn’. The achievement of the getig state set the field for the battle with evil, for unlike the menog one it was vulnerable to assault; and Angra Mainyu straightaway attacked. According to the myth as set out in the Pahlavi books, he broke violently through the lower bowl of the stone sky [think meteorites as in stones which fall from the sky], thus marring its perfection. Then he plunged through the water, turning much of it to salt, and then attacked the earth, creating deserts. Next he withered the plant, and slew the Uniquely -created Bull and the First Man. Finally he fell upon the seventh creation, fire, and sullied it with smoke, so that he had physically blighted all the good creation. [Boyce:1984:25]

‘Creation’ was the first of the three times into which the drama of cosmic history is divided. Angra Mainyu’s attack inaugurated the second time, that of ‘Mixture’ (Pahlavi ‘Gumezisn’), during which the world is no longer wholly good, but is a blend of good and evil; for the cycle of being having been set in motion, Angra Mainyu continues to attack with the Daevas and all the other legions of darkness…According to Zoroaster’s new revelation, mankind thus shared with the spenta divinities the great common purpose of gradually overcoming evil and restoring the world to its original perfect state. The glorious moment when this will be achieved is called ‘Frashokereti’ (Pahlavi ‘Frashegird’) [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology ] a term which probably means ‘Healing’ or ‘Renovation’. Therewith history will cease [think Hegel, end of history] since the third time, that of ‘Separation’ (Pahlavi ’Wizarishn’) will be ushered in. This the time when good will be separated from evil; and since evil will then be utterly destroyed, the period of Separation is eternal, and in it Ahura Mazda and all the Yazatas and men and women will live together in perfect, untroubled goodness and peace.
In thus postulating not only a beginning but also and end to human history, Zoroaster made a profound break with earlier ideas, according to which the process of life, once started, was expected to continue forever, if men and gods both bore their part. [Boyce: 1984 :25/6]

Mary Boyce describes this process of Creation >Mixture > Separation as ‘cyclic’, but it is a cycle which operates over many hundreds, even thousands, of years. It is also a one-off cycle which will never be repeated so it implies an irreversible and one- directional arrow of time which moves from Creation through Mixture ( the age we are in) to a final Separation when history ends and Eternity is renewed.

Although historically obscure, Zoroaster’s revolutionary ideas have influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Zoroaster’s religious innovations became the state religion of Persia/ Iran. About 2500 years ago, the Persian/ Iranian ruler Cyrus who invaded and occupied the city of Babylon in Iraq. The Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar had about 50 years previously captured and carried off members of the Jewish community into captivity. Cyrus allowed surviving members to return home, and encouraged them to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. [Some stayed, so Babylon became a major centre of Judaism for at least 1500 years].

For his efforts, Cyrus is described as a ‘messiah’ (liberator) in the Old Testament http://www.hope.edu/bandstra/RTOT/CH10/CH10_2D.HTM and it seems likely [Boyce:1984: 51] that Zoroastrian ideas were absorbed into Judaism - and then Christianity.

2. A Missing Link/ Idea of Progress

In Bruce Rich : Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development: Earthscan : 1994 I thought there was a link but can’t find it. It is that in the 17th century thinkers like Descartes and Bacon had the idea that through science the original divine blueprint - the ‘menog’ stage of Zoroastianism- of the created world could be recovered; and then applied through technology to the world as it is in its current ‘getig’ stage and thus restore its perfection. [As a way to immanentize the eschaton - which I have discussed in posts below]

Bruce Rich [1994: 214] located the origins of the World Bank/ International Bank of Reconstruction and Development idea of ‘progress through development’ in the work of Claude-Henri Saint-Simon.

The danger of this idea of progress is that it treats ‘traditional’ knowledge and practice as flawed and irrational. This ignores the possibility that traditions become established through trial and error, that they evolve to adapt geographic communities to their particular environments. The ‘inefficiencies’ of such traditions are the checks and balances necessary for them to be sustainable over time.

The end result of ‘progress’ is not a finally perfected world, but a world which can only be sustained through constant modernisation, an unsustainable world.

“So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image…” as Thomas Carlyle put itin Sartor Resartus or “All that is solid melts to air” as Marx had it.

3. Some Debord, to illustrate his take on shift from cyclical to irreversible linear time.

127
Cyclical time is already dominant among the nomadic peoples because they find the same conditions repeated at each stage of their journey. As Hegel notes, “the wandering of nomads is only nominal because it is limited to uniform spaces.” When a society settles in a particular location and gives space a content by developing distinctive areas within it, it finds itself confined within that locality. The periodic return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a sequence of activities. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture marks the end of an idle and contentless freedom and the beginning of labor. The agrarian mode of production, governed by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully developed cyclical time. Eternity is within this time, it is the return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary mental construct which guarantees that the cosmic order conforms with the order that this society has in fact already established within its frontiers.

141
The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.

145
With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under the sway of this time’s development. But this history that is everywhere simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and thus also to the global spectacle.

Anarchic-Punk Questionnaire

These are my answers to a questionnaire sent out by John Simpson.

His contact details are at end.

Anarcho-Punk, Society and the Falklands War Questionnaire

N.B. Please bear in mind that the focus here is history as the individual remembers it, feel free to elaborate as much as you can. You may, of course, for convenience or otherwise, choose not to answer any of following the questions. Thank you in advance for any assistance.

Name: Alistair Livingston

Occupation 1980-1986 (or thereabouts):

I worked for the London Rubber Company [Durex condoms] as a draughtsman and engineering estimator from 1977 to 1983, ran All the Madmen record company 1984/5 [sole employee], and helped look after a young child 1985/6.

Email address (entirely optional):alistairliv@aol.com

Please provide a sentence or two indicating the circumstances of your life during this period:

It was pretty intense – working full time in factory and training to be an engineer, living in bedsit in Ilford to begin with, going to gigs and anarchist meetings (Persons Unknown Trial support group), then becoming a punk at weekends as part of the Kill Your Pet Puppy Collective, going to various anarchy centres etc, moving into a Black Sheep (punk) Housing Co-op house, giving up a well paid job to run a record company, meeting my future wife [married in 1988, had four kids by 1991] who was a Greenham Woman and Stonehenge Campaign person by 1986 living with her and son in a council flat in Hackney. With various events in between... it was an incredibly intense, creative and chaotic few years.

1. How effective do you feel artistic responses to political issues are? (i.e. how political can music be?)

That is a skewed question, implying art and politics have a cause and effect relationship. Art and politics arise together out of the experience of everyday life – and you can have political reponses to artisitic issues – for example when the Nazi's exhibited 'deviant art', or when religious groups try to ban 'blasphemous' art.

Self-consciously political art works as propoganda, but obvious propoganda is usally pretty cheesy -for example USSR socialist realism – which was countered ideologically (and quite effectively/ not cheesily) by the USA (CIA) who financed shows of abstract expressionism.

Music can be as overtly political as you care to make it. However overtly political music – like national anthems [UK one has unused line about “Rebellious Scots to crush” , written in response to Jacobite threat] – is less effective because it is like in your face adverts saying 'YOU MUST Buy this product'. Music works because it evokes emotions and feelings - not rational thought. Even if you mix strong words in the music, the repetition of the words as the piece of music becomes familiar will blur and fade the impact of those words.

Where the music is heard is important too – a piece of music played at a demonstration or political rally will have a different impact to hearing it as background music on a radio, or on an mp3 player.

2. Does this response change when considering music as a reaction to war?

(Consider the US folk revival and Vietnam protests)

No. Music can also be part of war, can, if used as part of nationalistic propoganda create the conditions for war by evoking patriotic fervour. The US troops in Vietnam listened to rock music and probably sang along with Country Joe and the Fish's 'Feels like I'm fixing to die'...

3. Do you feel the aims of anarchism were properly represented through the anarcho-punk movement? What role did the structure of the music industry play?

This is an unhelpful question. Firstly, there was no 'anarcho-punk movement'. The phrase 'anarcho-punk' was first used by journalist/ muscian David Tibet in a review of a gig by Kukul in 1984. It was never used by any of the participants at the time and has only retrospectively been applied to give the illusion of coherence to one part of punk in the period 1979/1985.

Since even today there is debate and discussion amongst self-confessed anarchists about what the 'aims of anarchism' are, it is not possible to assess the representation of such undefined aims in punk.

This question requires that something called 'anarchism' existed then as a clearly formulated set of beliefs and ideas which punks could try to represent 'properly'. But there was no such one true anarchism, rather there were (and still are) several different anarchisms. Some punks took ideas from various of these anarchisms, but never in any straightforward way and those borrowings were mixed with situationist thefts, bits n bobs of marxism, a hefty chunk of nihilism, a wiff of fascism/nazism and so on.

The role played by the structure of the music industry was to encourage a DIY approach to producing and distributing music. The stucture of the music industry means it is only interested in commercial products. By 1980 punk was in (mainstream) commercial decline, becoming a niche market like heavy metal. Even if a group had wanted to 'sell-out' they would not have been able to since no major record label was interested in boring old punk.

So a DIY – at its most basic a network of people swopping tapes – 'home music industry' emerged, mixed in with fanzines. Within this DIY scene the 'music industry' was irrelevant. There was no mass market and so no need for mass production.

4. How do you feel anarcho-punk effected mainstream culture on the whole?

a) Was this important to you and others around you?

b) How do you feel mainstream culture effected anarcho-punk?

Oh dear.... struggling to get through this. Since I have suggested that there never was an 'anarcho-punk movement', it follows that it could not have had an effect on mainstream culture. There were 'anarchic punks' , who did have an effect on mainstream culture, but as part of a continuing countercultureof which punk was a part. The continuing counterculture had an effect on mainstream culture during the early eighties by strongly opposing attempts to heighten the Cold War – for example the deployment of nuclear Cruise missiles.

This was very important because it could not be ignored I.e. it was popular enough to become part of mainstream culture - and challenged the whole idea that 'we' were engaged in a life or death military struggle with an 'evil empire'.

What might have happened if there had been no such anti-nuclear/ peace movement then?

No opposition would have led to a build up of nuclear weapons (eg Molseworth was planned as a second base after Greenham) and there may even have been popular support for taking a hard line with the Russians – along patriotic/ nationlalistic lines.

This would have increased Russian paranoia, so they would have acted more agressively, increasing western fears... the end result could have been a sprial into war – but a nuclear war...

Which answersd part b. - the influence of mainstream culture on anarchic punks was to make us think - “These nutters could kill us all”and so overcome the more nihilistic aspects of punk.

5. What sort of legacy do you feel the anarcho-punk movement of the 80s maintains? How much does this matter to those involved in the movement itself?

The legacy is that we are not all dead in a nuclear war... which matters quite a bit to those of us who have survived.

6. What was your own reaction to the Falklands War? Was this consistent with other members of your band and/or the anarcho-punk scene?

I thought the Falklands War was a total farce. I don't remember anyone getting very excited about it.

7. What do you remember of the Crass releases ‘Sheep Farming in the Falklands’ and ‘How Does it Feel…’?

No memory at all. Never bought them, never listened to them. I thought Crass had wilfully misunderstood punk then and still do now. Vastly overrated, far too authoritarian to be punk.

8. What kind of progress do you feel has been made in sub-cultural/countercultural movements and music? Could a band or song have more or less impact today than in 1982?

There is no such thing as progress, only change. The idea of progress is the enemy, it justifies all manner of idiocies. Subcultural/ countercultural movements and music are no better and no worse than they were in 1982 – only different. Back then, nuclear war was the big threat – today it is global warming. A band or song could have more or less impact today than in 1982... Might have more impact. Might have less. I could be wrong. I could be right...

My contact details:

Js243@sussex.ac.uk

Or

Johnpaulsimpson@gmail.com

Or Mobile:

07870 600 331

Thanks again,

John Simpson

Triumph of Olympic Will

The Olympic torch nonsense was invented for 1936 Nazi games.

The Nazi's also had a weird fascination with Tibet.

Galloway Levellers- draft - events 1724

This is first draft ( 14 March 2008) - to be edited and completed

Events of 1724

In late August 1721, Sir John Clerk of Pencuick and his son travelled to Galloway to visit James Stewart, the 5^th earl of Galloway who was Clerk’s brother-in-law. Clerk kept a record of the visit.¹ After overnight stays at Dolphinton and Drumlanrig, the Clerks followed the old pilgrim’s route to Whithorn via the ‘Old Clachan’ (St. John’s Town of Dalry) below which they forded a swollen Water of Ken, before reaching New Galloway. Clerk noted that the late Viscount of Kenmure’s house is near to New Galloway and that “this house is now in the hands of the Commissioners of Enquiry for the Publick, being forfeit by the Viscount’s rebellion in 1715”. Beyond New Galloway, the Clerks’ travelled on through ‘mountains wild beyond imagination so that scarce any thing in the Alps exceeds them’ and where ’Galloway horse are bread’ to reach Minnigaff. Here they crossed the Cree by boat to Newton Stewart before finally arriving at the house of Brigadier General John Stewart’s house at Sorbie in the Machars of Wigtownshire. The Brigadier was the 5^th earl of Galloway’s brother and so also brother-in-law to Clerk.

After recovering from the ‘great distress’ of his journey through the wild mountains of Galloway, Clerk and lord Garlies (eldest son of the earl of Galloway) set their servants to work “to remove some stones from an old cairn where we were told Roman sepulchral urns had been found”. The servants soon found an urn ‘made of a coarse sort of clay’ and containing burnt bones, ashes and the head of a ‘brass javelin’ - suggesting a Bronze Age rather than Roman burial. Fortunately, Clerk took as much interest in contemporary affairs as he did in his antiquarian pursuits, providing a ‘description of Galloway’ ( or at least of the Machars peninsula of the shire of Wigtown) which can be compared with that of Symson ² who wrote his ‘Description of Galloway’ 40 years earlier.

For a description of Galloway what follows shal suffice.This shire is more properly called the shire of Wigtoun, for Galloway comprehends in it the Stuarty of Kirkcudbright. It begins at the Water of Cree and takes in a large part of peninsula of abut forty miles in circumference or more. The country is generally plain except towards the northmost parts of it. The soil is warm but thin and brings all sort sorts of garden fruits to perfection than any country of Scotland. The surface of the ground is full of small rocks and in many places covered with whins, broom, fairns etc. However there is good feeding for all sorts of cattle. Their grain is nigh bear and oats black and white. Barley they have none , nor for ordinary any pease. Their culture of grains seems a little odd, for their bear sets as they cal them are never changed…There are very little improvements here in planting, for their industry runs only on inclosures for black cattle which indeed brings them in from England a great dale of profit. Their diks are of stone without mortar, very thinly built together . [Clerk here suggested quick set hedges would be more useful].

By these inclosures such as they are I had occasion to compute they brought in ten thousand guineas to their country, for the price of their cattle is commonly payed in gold. Sometimes they drive them to the English fairs and sometimes they sell them at home to English men who come down and pay them readie monie for what they carry off. By the bye, all this is not above a tenth of what Scotland gains from England upon this time upon black cattle, for I have good reason to believe there is above 100 000 lib ster yearly payed us on that score. The inhabitants of Galloway [Wigtownshire] are much lessened since the custom of inclosing their grounds took place, for there are certainly above 20 000 acres laid waste on that account.

Unfortunately, Clerk does not date the ‘custom of inclosing’ for black cattle, but from the itinerary of his journey, he must have passed through the Baldoon Parks first established by Sir David Dunbar of Baldoon sometime before 1682, when Symson described Dunbar’s great cattle park in his Large Description of Galloway. Since Symson notes that other landowners in the Machars of Wigtownshire - the Earl of Galloway, Sir William Maxwell (of Monreith) and Sir Godfrey McCulloch (of Myreton) - had followed Dunbar’s example and since Clerk is describing the Machars rather than the whole of Wigtownshire, the loss of population due to the 20 000 acres ‘laid waste’ by cattle parks is likely to refer only the Machars. The loss of population would have been caused by the conversion of arable farm land to pasture. Until the introduction of cast iron ploughs from 1730 onwards, arable farming involved use of the mainly wooden ‘Old Scotch plough’ which required a large team of oxen or horses to pull it, which in turn required more manpower than cattle minding.³ That Sir David Dunbar’s Baldoon Estate was good arable land is shown by its status as ‘Grange land’ in the list of lands forfeit by the 9^th earl of Galloway in 1456⁴ and its later identification in 1875 by McLelland as good wheat producing land. ⁵

Unfortunately, neither Symson writing in 1682 nor Clerk writing in 1721 mention the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in their discussion of cattle parks. However, from the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds, it is clear that at least two cattle parks existed in the Stewartry before 1692.⁶ This is significant. It means that the dykes surrounding cattle parks in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright which were thrown down in by the Galloway Levellers were part of an extension of existing practice rather than a recent innovation in 1724. Furthermore, if a such a perceptive observer as Clerk had recognised that such enclosures ‘lessened the inhabitants’ of Wigtownshire, the fear that the extension of such enclosures would lead to a similar depopulation of the Stewartry was not an irrational fear.

Clerk’s short description of Galloway also raises the question to what extent was the construction of large cattle enclosures part of a process of ‘improvement’? Clerk himself seemed dubious. As he noted concerning arable farming, “Their culture of grains seems a little odd, for their bear sets as they call them are never changed. That ground which I saw carrying bear has produced nothing else in the memory of man”. Clearly there had been no improvement in this practice since it was noted by Symson, writing forty years earlier that “they sow their beir in the same place every year, and without intermission, which is also peculiar, in a peece of ground which is nearest to their house…”.

Likewise, the cattle enclosures noticed by Clerk in 1721 were first recorded by Symson in 1682. The regional export of cattle to England can be traced back to at least 1621 when “between 2^nd June and 19^th October 1621, duty was paid [at Dumfries on exports of livestock to England] on 4640 sheep, 280 lambs, 65 horses and 2351 nolt (head of cattle)”.⁷ Sir David Dunbar of Baldoon’s great cattle park may well have been an innovative improvement when first constructed circa1670, but by 1721 such enclosures had become part of a hundred year old regional tradition - that of trading cattle for English cash.

This suggests that the conversion of arable land to pasture through the construction of cattle parks enclosed by dykes ‘of stone without mortar’ (as Clerk described them) was not an innovation in the Galloway of 1724. In which case, can the construction of such enclosures in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in 1724 by landowners like Sir Basil Hamilton of Baldoon (Sir David Dunbar of Baldoon’s great-grandson) be considered as innovative examples of enlightened improvement in the knowledge of agriculture - or were they rather a conservative extension of locally traditional agricultural practice? Practice by which Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton in the Stewartry (writing from Killeleagh in Ireland to his nephew) in 1688 considered ‘improvement’ as meaning “not diminishing but rather increasing rents” from an estate which included a cattle park “not to be set to the plough” . Sir Robert also tasks his nephew with pursuing various debts owing to Sir Robert .⁸

Possibly by the time Clerk was writing in 1721, ‘improvement’ had taken on a broader meaning than that which Sir Robert Maxwell gave it in 1688. Certainly Clerk became a key member of the ‘Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture’, founded in Edinburgh in 1723. Whilst Clerk is considered to be the very model of a Calvinist capitalist landowner ⁹, Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton was a devout Roman Catholic and a Stuart loyalist who helped persecute Calvinist Covenanters.¹⁰

1724

The most detailed account of the events of 1724 is provided by Morton¹¹ writing in 1936. Unfortunately, Morton does always give his sources (a defect partially rectified by Prevost and Leopold ¹² ), but this problem aside, it seems likely that it was the actions of Lady Kenmure and Thomas Gordon of Earlston in 1723 which set the events of 1724 in motion. Lady Kenmure was the widow of William Gordon, Viscount Kenmure, executed in 1716 for his leading part in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. In contrast, Thomas Gordon of Earlston had played an active anti-Jacobite role in 1715, leading a group of 200 volunteers from Kirkcudbright to aid the defence of Dumfries in October 1715. In 2003, the banner carried by Gordon of Earlston in 1715 was returned to Kirkcudbright from Australia.¹³

What Lady Kenmure and Thomas Gordon had in common in 1723 were debt ridden estates. First established in the Glenkens district of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in 1408 by Archibald, 4^th earl of Douglas¹⁴, over the next 200 year the Gordon family acquired extensive lands throughout Galloway. During the religious and political turmoil of the 17^th century, a process of contraction set in. The Gordons of Earlston suffered fines and forfeiture for their Covenanting beliefs and actions. The Gordons of Kenmure shifted between supporting and opposing the Stuarts - so that whilst William Gordon of Kenmure was executed as a Jacobite in 1715, his father Alexander had led a regiment against the Jacobite forces at Killiecrankie in 1689.¹⁵

In 1697, a drove road was made and marked out between New Galloway in the Glenkens and Dumfries. Alexander Gordon of Kenmure was amongst the landowners who had petitioned the Privy Council to make this improvement which was also supported by Dumfries Town Council.

"Several debates," the Council record says, "have happened of late in the passage of droves from New Galloway to Dumfries, the country people endeavouring by violence to stop the droves, and impose illegal exactions of money upon the cattle, to the great damage of the trade; whereby also riots and bloodsheds have been occasioned, which had gone greater length if those who were employed to carry up the cattle had not managed with great moderation and prudence." On a petition from the great landlords of the district- James, Earl of Galloway; Lord Basil Hamilton; Alexander, Viscount of Kenmure; John, Viscount of Stair; Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, and others a commission was appointed by the Privy Council, "to make and mark a highway for droves frae New Galloway to Dumfries, holding the high and accustomed travelling way betwixt the said two burghs." ¹⁶

However, neither Alexander Gordon nor his son William appear to have profited by this support for Galloway’s cattle trade. According to McKerlie¹⁷, by 1716 the Kenmure estate “was so much encumbered with debt and claimants, that the Government allowed his widow to make of it what she could…”. McKerlie also reveals that the Earlston estate was no less encumbered with debt, despite the sale of woodland by Sir Alexander Gordon of Earlston to Charles Hope (later Earl of Hopetoun) for 23 000 merks in 1691. In 1708 Sir Alexander ‘disponed’ (conveyed) the estate to his son Thomas. McKerlie gives the valuation of the estate as £300 sterling per year, but as carrying a debt burden of £1687 sterling, and notes wadsets on the estate in 1710, 1714 and 1719. Despite marrying an heiress in 1710 (Ann Boick, whose father was a merchant burgess of Edinburgh and Glasgow), Thomas was unable to clear the debts he had inherited and was declared bankrupt in 1737.

Although Morton¹⁸ does not mention it, the estates of Lady Kenmure and Thomas Gordon lay close to the drove road established in 1697 between New Galloway and Dumfries. From Clerk’s account of 1721, cattle worth £10 000 sterling would have passed along this drove road every autumn. Paid for in cash (Clerk’s English ‘readie monie’) the attraction of the cattle trade for debt-ridden landowners like Lady Kenmure and Thomas Gordon was obvious. So at Whitsun (locally the usual date for ending and starting tacks)1723, rather than having their tacks renewed, one of Thomas Gordon’s tenants, named Robertson by Morton, and an unnamed tenant of Lady Kenmure’s, found themselves and their sub-tenants (cottars) ‘ejected’ and their farms enclosed with stone dykes to create cattle parks.

From analysis of over 320 tacks recorded in the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds between 1623 and 1700, it is clear that changes of tenant and sub-tenants/ cottars at the expiry of a tack (which varied between one and 19 years length) were not unusual. What was unusual at Whitsun 1723 is, as Morton explains “there were several instances where five, seven, and even sixteen families on an estate had to remove” to be replaced by a single tenant. Only a single tenant - or more likely herd - was required where arable or mixed arable and livestock farms were converted to cattle parks by enclosing them within a dry stane ring dyke - as shown by William Maxwell who was sole ‘herd’ of Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton’s cattle park at Netherlaw in 1688.¹⁹ (That Netherlaw was potentially arable is shown by Sir Robert�