Alistair Livingston

W l Lorimer looked at the evidence for the survival of Gaelic in Galloway and Carrick into the eighteenth century in Scottish Gaelic Studies Volume VI Part 2 September 1949. He found very little support for the various claims he analysed. This is the first part of Lorimer's important study.

This is the sixth economic audit of Dumfries and Galloway commissioned by the local enterprise company, Scottish Enterprise Dumfries and Galloway. Following an Executive Summary, it is organised in four sections covering the people of the region, their involvement in work, the economy and business, and similarities and differences between geographical areas within the region.

Between 1760 and 1800, improving landowners inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment transformed the landscape of southern Scotland. An industrial revolution led to a further transformation north of the Southern Uplands Fault. To the south, Dumfries and Galloway remained a rural region with agriculture as its main industry. The perception of the region as ‘quintessentially rural’  has led to the neglect of the region’s significant role in the development of the industrial revolution in north-west England.  In the late eighteenth century, a group of young men from Dumfries and Galloway moved south in search of employment.  Some arrived in Liverpool where they became wealthy merchants, others became innovative and successful cotton manufacturers in Manchester. Through business partnerships and marriage links, some of the profits of the Manchester cotton factories were then re-invested in the Scottish iron industry.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, agriculture shaped the economy and society of Scotland’s western lowlands - Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, Galloway and Dumfriesshire. Then came two industrial revolutions. The first involved  the rapid growth then decline of the cotton industry. The second saw the rapid growth and slower decline of the iron industry. The resulting division of the region between an industrialised and urbanised north and a rural and agricultural south has persisted to the present.

While the tragedy of the Highland Clearances has never been forgotten, it was the less dramatic Lowland Clearances which had the deeper impact. Economic migrants from southern Scotland first helped shape and drive the industrial revolution in north-west England before helping the revolution take root in Scotland. However, despite bold plans for canals and iron rail-roads in Galloway and Dumfriesshire, the lack of ironstone and coal saw the southern districts population decline after 1851 while that of the northern districts continued to grow.

The price of economic success was paid by the new working class as they lived and laboured under appalling conditions in the iron companies’ towns and miners’ villages. These new towns and villages bore little resemblance to the planned towns and villages of the Enlightened improvers. By the 1880s, just as steel was beginning to replace iron for shipbuilding and construction, supplies of Scottish ironstone began to run out. The shortfall was made up by imports of iron ore, but from then on the inland location of the iron and steel industry became a disadvantage.

The major nineteenth century changes in the rural south saw sheep farming extend across the uplands and dairy farming, pioneered by Robert Burns in Nithsdale, spread from Ayrshire across the more fertile lowland farms. In the twentieth century it was hoped that the Galloway hydro-electric project in the 1930s and forestry in the 1960s would stimulate rural employment, but they did not.

Looking forward to the twenty-first century, the different histories of both parts of this region have created difficult challenges to overcome. In the north, the passing of the age of industry has left in its wake areas of acute deprivation. In the south, the absence of industry has created different problems as young people move away to be replaced by retired people attracted by a quiet, as in all but lifeless, countryside. Yet if  the strength of the Yes vote in Scotland’s former industrial heartlands implies a recognition of the need for change, the strength of the No vote in the south and other rural areas suggests a poverty or failure of the imagination, rooted in the conservatism of rural Scotland.

The value of this comparative study is that can provide a fuller and better understanding of the present by tracing the historical paths through which the political and cultural differences of that present emerged. In particular, how two very similar regions of Scotland were set on different trajectories by the industrial revolution. Although the industrial revolution are now the subject of industrial archaeology, it forged a modern and dynamic Scotland. The contrast with the rural south, a region still shaped by the aspirations of eighteenth century improvers is stark.

Across industrial Scotland, generations of struggle in a hostile and unforgiving environment created a passionate desire for social and economic justice  It was this passion rather than nationalism which inspired and informed the grassroots Yes campaign. Those areas of Scotland, like the rural south, which had not undergone the ‘trial by fire’ of industrialisation lack this historical consciousness and so chose to vote No.

Between 1760 and 1800, Improving landowners inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment transformed the landscape of southern Scotland. An industrial revolution led to a further transformation north of the Southern Uplands Fault.  To the south, Dumfries and Galloway remained a rural region with agriculture as its main industry.  The perception of the region as ‘quintessentially rural’  has led to the neglect of the region’s significant role in the development of the industrial revolution in north-west England.  In the late eighteenth century, a group of young men from Dumfries and Galloway moved south in search of employment.  Some arrived in Liverpool where they became wealthy merchants, others became innovative and successful cotton manufacturers in Manchester. However, as the rapid and chaotic growth of  Manchester in particular came to symbolise the challenges posed by industrialisation, critics of  the new order also emerged from Dumfries and Galloway. Thomas Carlyle is the most well known, but Newton Stewart born Dr. Peter McDouall, who became a radical Chartist, was another. Finally, James Clerk Maxwell’s work pointed beyond Carlyle’s Mechanical Age to the  present Electrical Age .

The end of Gaelic in Galloway is as obscure as its beginnings. It is likely that the survival of Gaelic was intimately bound up with the survival of a distinct Galwegian identity. The persistence of this Galwegian identity was a recurring source of conflict with Scottish kings from David I to David II. Crucially, it led Galloway’s Gaelic kindreds to support the Balliols against the Bruces in a struggle for the Scottish crown which lasted from 1286 to 1356, when David II prevailed over Edward Balliol. Even then, it was not until after Archibald Douglas established his lordship of Galloway in 1372 that the power of the Galwegian kindreds was diminished through the plantation of Scots speakers in Galloway. Under the Douglases, Scots began to displace Gaelic as the language of Galloway. By the end of Douglas rule in 1455, the once powerful Galwegian identity had faded into insignificance and the region was peacefully absorbed into Scotland. This acceptance of Scottish identity suggest that Scots had also replaced Gaelic as the language of Galloway.

After the collapse of Northumbrian power in south-west Scotland, in the later ninth century, Gaelic speakers with links to the Vikings became the dominant force in the region. Some moved south from around the Firth of Clyde, others north and east from Dublin and Ireland. By the eleventh century a large part of south-west Scotland including Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, Nithsdale, Wigtownshire and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright made up a Gaelic speaking 'greater Galloway'.

In the early twelfth century, Fergus of Galloway established himself as ruler of part of this territory- modern Galloway plus Carrick in south Ayrshire.

The importance of Galloway's Gaelic clans (or kindreds) on the medieval and later history if south-west Scotland has been neglected. The research presented here re-assesses their importance and significant influence on the history of the region.

From the 10th to the 16th centuries, Gaelic was the language of Galloway. Gaelic was introduced by the Gall-Ghaidheil and other Norse-Gaelic, Hiberno-Norse settlers. From Fergus of Galloway in the 12th century to Edward Balliol in the 14th century, Gaelic kindreds supported their 'special lords'. The Douglas lordship of Galloway(1369-1455) began the language shift to Scots and by 1600 Gaelic was extinct in the region.The Scottish Reformation encouraged this language change.  However, the medieval farming system of Gaelic Galloway survived until the late 18th century and so several thousand Gaelic farm and other place names were preserved.

Rationality is also the real, the actual. What is not rational is not real.  Therefore the endless now of capital is not real. It has been maintained by low entropy energy. The low entropy energy has been used to freeze time, to create the information which generates micro-second  by micro-second a representation of reality as a commodity (or spectacle).  But as the sources of low entropy energy are consumed, so the moment of frozen time must pass over into history. As history becomes real again, so does the future – and so does the potential for rationality.

The purpose of this study is to cast fresh light on the uprising of the Galloway Levellers in 1724. To achieve this objective, the study takes as its starting point patterns of land use and land ownership inGalloway as they evolved through from the late sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century.The important influence of the plantation of Ulster on the development of Galloway's cattle trade isdiscussed in this part of the study. Since the society of Galloway in 1724 was still deeply influencedby the religious and political conflicts of the later seventeenth century, this background is thenconsidered. Local responses to the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 are discussed within this context sincethere was an anti-Jacobite element within the rhetoric and actions of the Galloway Levellers. Fromthese foundations, and having established a chronology for the events of 1724, much of theconfusion which previously surrounded the actions of the Galloway Levellers and responses to their actions can be clarified. It has been possible to identify and provide a history for most of the peopleand places involved, including some of the Levellers themselves. This evidence in turn has revealedthat the actions of the Galloway Levellers did have an impact on the later eighteenth centurydevelopment of Galloway through a more cautious approach to agricultural improvement and thecreation of industrial settlements to provide employment for surplus labour. Finally, a previouslyunrecognised connection between late eighteenth century Galloway and the theory and practice of the industrial revolution is explored.

Local variations aside, what was the fate of those who were no longer required on the land that once fed them? More than Adam Smith, more than any of the other Enlightenment theorists, it was the ex-Jacobite, James Steaurt, who foresaw their fate. As Marx recognised, 'He ...

Lit by gaslight and powered by steam, by 1815 the cotton spinning mills of Ancoats in Manchester represented technology at the leading edge of the industrial revolution. Side by side on the Rochdale canal, two huge cotton spinning factories dominated Ancoats, each employing over 1000 workers (Kidd, 1993, p.24). Remarkably, the founders of these two mill complexes, partners John Kennedy (1769-1855) and James McConnel (1762-1831), and brothers Adam (1767-1818) and George Murray (1761-1855), all came from Kells parish in the Glenkens district of Galloway. The industrial revolution, which transformed Britain between the 1780s and 1830s, drew many thousands of people from similar rural backgrounds into fast growing towns and cities. Very few, however, were able to succeed and prosper by mastering the technological and economic challenges of these new environments. Why were the Glenkens group able to do so? To answer this question requires an understanding of the social and economic background from which they emerged. A key argument will be that the development of the cattle trade with England led to the early advent of capitalist farming in Galloway. By the later eighteenth century, the social and economic environment of Galloway had been shaped by market forces'for the best part of a century. Although this was a form of agricultural rather than industrial capitalism, it meant that when Kennedy, McConnell and the Murray brothers began their businesses in Manchester, the market place was a familiar rather than alien environment.