With the Auchindrain farm township, south of Inveraray, known last summer [2013] to have hit the buffers in its attempt 
to keep alive what is, in its entirety, a unique historic artefact testifying to the nature of rural agricultural communities in the Scottish Highlands, many have been surprised to see it still in operation today, in the Spring of 2014.
What has happened is that the nation’s guardian of the physical evidence of our archaeological, architectural and industrial heritage – the last including the agricultural – has been persuaded by the calibre and dedication of the Trustees and staff of Auchindrain to give it sufficient funding for two years, at the end of which a review will be carried out to determine the way forward.
Historic Scotland has given the Auchindrain Trustees a series of headings under which its efforts and achievements will be evaluated. The headings to which the Trustees will continue to devote themselves include matters like fundraising, marketing and the raising of Auchindrain’s profile. The results of that review will help determine how Auchindrain and Historic Scotland proceed into the future.
Why does Auchindrain matter?
Auchindrain is a uniquely valuable link to the historic Highland tradition of collective farming. As a representative of life rather than art, it defies easy classification, yet its value, recognised in its status as part of the distributed national collections, is unchallengeable.
Along with the now gentrified residential hamlet of Achnagoul, once a sister farm township a little further up the road to Inveraray, Auchindrain may well have been the last of the traditional joint tenancy farming settlements to survive in Scotland, using a ‘runrig’ approach to communal land management. Auchindrain was certainly the last of these farm townships to persist in relatively unimproved agricultural practices. The last indigenous Auchindrain family, the McCallums, left the township in 1964.
Rigs were sinuous strips of land, around 5.5 yards wide, following the form of the natural landscape. Each family in a joint tenancy group was allocated a number of rigs sufficient to provide them with an equal share of the land. Every year, one-third of the rigs were reallocated in a ‘lotting’ – drawing numbered lots from a bag – so in all likelihood the rigs one family was working one year would have passed to another in a year or two; and they would be working different ones.
The system was designed to ensure that no family could permanently colonise the best land or get stuck with the worst. However, it was inherently inefficient because it was geared around a presumption of manual work with absolutely no incentive – even where it might have been technically feasible – for anyone to improve land that in a year or two’s time was likely to have passed to a neighbour.
The system tied people to subsistence farming, and was a key target of the ‘improvers’ from the mid 18th century onwards.
The recent report demonstrating the new successes of community land ownership in Scotland has been heartwarming – but communally managed farm tenancies were, in a way, where the notions of today originated; and Auchindrain is incomparably Scotland’s most complete and best preserved example of such tenancies and practices in their most unevolved form.
On a good day, Auchindrain can easily persuade you of the idyll of such a life. In unrelenting rain, with the clay soil sodden from previous days of it, with condensation running down the inner stone walls green with lichen, the rooms permeated with the smell of damp and a chill wind whistling below the doors and in the gaps between door and window frames and walls – the romance fades fast. The latter will have been the norm.
These were lives of acceptance of the imperative to work, hard and uncomplainingly – simply to survive. Such lives were never about progress, careers, profit. They were about getting by. Pleasures were simple – music, dance and tales, the longer the better, with the oral tradition keeping genealogies, traditions, practices, events and names on the record, so to speak.
We need Auchindrain today for the factual insights it carries into our collective rural past – and we need it as much to remind us that the myth of the golden age was just that. In a generic sense, tomorrow is always better than today and today better than yesterday. Auchindrain teaches us to respect profoundly but never to envy.
‘Improvements’ lost and made
In 1789 the township’s landowner, today’s Argyll Estate, through the surveyor George Langlands, came up with an improvement scheme for Auchindrain. This would have seen 26 individual tenanted crofts and an agriculture moving from cows to the more profitable sheep. The result would have been a long way from the random scatter of the unimproved site we still see today.
The proposed improvement scheme obviously never happened. We do not know if there is any record of the tenants’ views on it, but it appears not to have been felt to be a worthwhile venture for the Estate. So Auchindrain and Achnagoul carried on in the old way into the 1840s. From the 1830s to the 1860s some elements of improved practices were introduced – of a very rudimentary nature:
- like digging field drains, with the team at Auchindrain today discovering and reopening those original drains;
- like making the change themselves form cattle to sheep, with a sheep fank erected on the hill above the township;
- and like using threshing barns – with the walls of Martin’s Barn having recently been rebuilt as a project by the West of Scotland Stone Dry Stone Walling Association, and reroofed using locally-grown Scots Pine from the Ardkinglas Estate.
Partners and Trustees
The Auchindrain Trustees are developing a series of mutually beneficial partnerships for the farm township – such as with Scottish Agricultural College Commercial, the consulting arm of skilled agricultural advisers, where Auchindrain is offering itself as a venue for winter training courses.
Another such relationship is with the National Museum of Rural Life at Wester Kittochside in East Kilbride.
Other possible partners, with specialisms equivalent to Auchindrain’s, are the National Mining Museum of Scotland; the Scottish Maritime Museum; the Scottish Fisheries Museum; Dundee Industrial Heritage with its focus on the jute industry; and the Scottish Railway Preservation Society at Bo’ness.
A matter of serious interest to the Trustees is building up the collective skills base of their own number. They believe that there is untapped and often high level expertise in Argyll, with some degree of time available to enjoy the challenge of bringing particular and relevant skillsets to bear on Auchindrain.
The Trustees are aware of the areas where their collective resources need strengthening and would very much welcome people with skills to offer that are relevant to the management and promotion of the site and to fundraising for it.
Anyone interested to explore this possibility – or anyone with someone to recommend to the Trustees as one of the number of this capable and professional team, should email the respected Chair of the Trustees, Alison Hay: alison.hay@auchindrain.org.uk and arrange to discuss the possibilities.
Endgame
For Auchindrain, its staff and Trustees, the achievable endgame will knowingly involve endless hard work and volunteered assistance – but within the security of sufficient funding to ensure its sustainability into the future.
From 2011 onwards, the staff team at Auchindrain began to identify and to articulate the value of the site. The bare bones of that narrative contained in this article testify to the work done and the continuing work in progress.
The wider reality is a relationship of mutual need between Auchindrain and the Scottish Government.
The Scottish Government obviously greatly values the indigenous Gaelic heritage of the Scottish Highlands which Auchindrain uniquely personifies. The Trustees therefore warmly welcome the energetic contribution of local MSP, Michael Russell, a man with a pronounced cultural hinterland in the Gaelic traditions, in helping them persuade his cabinet colleagues and Historic Scotland of the need to give Auchindrain some time to demonstrate its worth.
Auchindrain will always need funding – not because it is profligate – it is anything but that, but because it is a complex site to preserve – with more serious recovery to be done – and one whose physical nature could not entertain large numbers of visitors – even if they were to be found in serious volume – without damage to its fragile infrastructure.
It will need money to get the place and its significance properly understood by the funding bodies and by its audiences; and to reinforce that significance.
If the Trustees can satisfy Historic Scotland in the review of progress to be carried out in 18 months’ time – and the Trustees are rightly clear that Auchindrain’s problems cannot be solved in two years so the review will be a question of progress, not arrival – there will still be a gap in its funding, not an enormous but an inevitable one.
It is to be hoped that a successful review will see the Scottish Government and Auchindrain continue its partnership into the future.
Note: The photograph above exemplifies the philosophy of the team at Auchindrain. It shows the Ferguson tractor that served the last family to work Auchindrain, found, restored and in use today on the site, ploughing and furrowing. Here it is bringing in a load of logs to fuel Auchindrain’s Visitor Centre’s underfloor heating – and to be sold in another of the site’s ongoing earning strategies.
