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Notes and Sketches Illustrative of Northern Rural Life in the Eighteenth Century, by the Author of Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk
Notes and Sketches Illustrative of Northern Rural Life in the Eighteenth Century by the Author of Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk Author:William Alexander General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1888 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. TOPOGRAPHICAL AND SOCIAL -- ABERDEENSHIRE POLL BOOK -- A PICTURE FROM IT HEATHER AND DUB BUILDINGS -- AN OLD FASHIONED HAMLET. For the purpose of arriving at a reasonably distinct notion of our country districts in their general features a century or a century and a-half ago, we shall do well to bear in mind that, along with the prevailing paucity of passable roads and absence of bridges on the larger streams, much of the surface of the land remained in its natural state. Cultivation was more picturesque than systematic in its developments; bogs, "mosses," and marshes continued undrained, covering in the aggregate a greater extent of the superficies of the country than it is easy now to realise. Natural forest grew in some places now bare enough of trees, but thousands of acres of the most valuable timber-land planted in the latter half of the eighteenth century had, prior to that date, produced little but stunted heather and clumps of broom. If we go on to inquire how the rural population were distributed and how they were occupied, the contrast between the life of the people then, and what it has become since, is found to very marked. There is perhaps no county in Scotland in which materials fitted to illustrate this point are more abundant than in Aber- deenshire. By the aid of the Poll Book alone, and a The " List of Polable Persons within the shire of Aberdeen," printed by the gentlemen of the county in 1842, with the sanction of the Spalding Club, and under the editorial care of Dr. John Stuart, from MS. in the possession of General Gordon of Cairness, is almost unique in its w...« less