The following article is copied from Jim Bell’s posts on the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright Old Postcards and Local Snippets Facebook page.

Part 1: The World of the Fermtoun

Before the great stone dykes began to snake across the Galloway countryside, the landscape of the Stewartry was dotted with small, communal settlements widely known as fermtouns. The term often confuses modern readers, as we associate “town” with urban areas, but its origins are far more modest. Derived from the Old English ‘tun’, meaning an enclosure or farmstead, a fermtoun was a functional cluster of dwellings housing half a dozen or more tenant families in close proximity. Their lives were dictated by the soil and the seasons. These were not independent farmers on solitary plots, but a collective workforce bound to the land.

Life revolved around the runrig system, in which a tenant’s holding comprised scattered strips of arable land across the toun’s territory. These strips were periodically reallocated, often by lot, to ensure rough fairness: no single family was permanently burdened with stony ground while another monopolised fertile soil. It was a system rooted in communal equity and mutual survival. Houses were humble structures of stone and turf, clustered together for companionship and protection against Galloway’s unpredictable weather. Private fences were unknown in the arable core; boundaries followed natural features or the limits of the toun’s shared grazing lands. To the people of the Stewartry, the fermtoun was the heartbeat of their society.

Yet this rural balance was on the brink of disruption. The Act of Union in 1707 removed barriers to trade, granting Scottish black cattle free and equal access to the more lucrative English markets. This opened the door to expanded cattle rearing, incentivising landlords to enclose lands for large grazing parks and setting the stage for the agrarian changes that would spark the Levellers’ resistance.

Part 2: The Enclosure Catastrophe

By the early 1720s, the ancient fermtoun system faced an existential threat. Scottish nobility and local Stewartry lairds, notably Basil Hamilton of Baldoon (acting often for his mother, Lady Mary Hamilton), who had extensive land holdings in the Stewartry, recognised far greater profits in rearing black Galloway cattle for English markets than in modest rents from tenant farmers. To enable this, they accelerated enclosure: constructing drystone dykes to create large, empty cattle parks. This went beyond simple fencing, it frequently involved evicting tenants to clear land for grazing.

In parishes such as Kelton, Crossmichael, Kirkcudbright, and others, families long tied to the land through runrig holdings faced sudden notices to quit, often linked to rent arrears or non-renewal of leases amid the shift to pastoral farming. The scale of displacement was profound in affected areas; records show instances where multiple families (e.g., 13 documented from Hamilton’s lands in May 1724) were turned out at once, with some cottages demolished to prevent reoccupation. The newly built drystone dykes stood as stark symbols of this change. They not only marked boundaries but severed traditional access to peat bogs, water sources, and communal grazing.

Lairds defended the enclosures as necessary improvements to enhance land value and productivity. To the displaced tenants and cottars, however, these walls represented a direct assault on their livelihoods, forcing hardship and destitution. By 1724, mounting grievances across the Stewartry had pushed tensions beyond words, setting the stage for direct action against the dykes.

Part 3: The Galloway Levellers and the Defence of the Commons

The erosion of common lands and traditional tenancies in the Stewartry culminated in the Levellers’ uprising of 1724, a forceful resistance to an emerging economic order that prioritised black cattle for English markets over the cottars and small tenants long tied to the soil. Following the Act of Union in 1707, rising demand for Galloway beef encouraged local lairds, including Basil Hamilton of Baldoon and the Herons of Kirkmabreck (or Kirroughtree), to consolidate holdings into large enclosed parks. This process dismantled the ancient runrig system of shared cultivation and appropriated common wastes vital for communal grazing.

In response, the dispossessed demonstrated striking communal solidarity: hundreds of Levellers, men, women, and children, took to the countryside to physically demolish the drystone dykes symbolising their exclusion and displacement.

The 1724 campaign turned parishes such as Kirkcudbright, Borgue, and Tongland (along with others like Twynholm and Kelton) into focal points of agrarian protest. Armed mainly with basic tools, iron bars, spades, pitchforks, and wooden stangs, the Levellers moved methodically from estate to estate, levelling enclosures often under cover of night. Local tradition heavily associates these efforts with Billy Marshall, the legendary “King of the Galloway Gypsies,” whose military experience as a veteran soldier reputedly aided tactical organisation and evasion of early capture.

Despite the eventual deployment of the King’s dragoons to quell the unrest, resulting in arrests of some ringleaders, fines, brief imprisonments, and occasional transportation, the uprising concluded with minimal bloodshed and no mass punishments. It endured in local memory as a poignant, defiant stand against land “improvement” that favoured the landed class at the expense of the people, marking the effective enclosure of the Stewartry’s common grounds for private profit.

Part 4: The Shadow Years and the New Order

The suppression of the Levellers in 1724 didn’t usher in an immediate era of prosperity through mills and planned towns in the Stewartry. Instead, it marked the beginning of a protracted and often painful transition for the rural poor. Hundreds of displaced families, evicted to make way for cattle parks, found no swift refuge. The grid-planned streets of Castle Douglas (laid out in the 1790s) and the industrial mills of Gatehouse of Fleet (developed from the late 18th century) lay decades in the future.

In the intervening years, many faced harsh internal migration: pushed onto marginal mosslands or rocky coastal edges where the soil was too poor for profitable livestock, they eked out subsistence livings. Many turned to crime forming roaming bands of vagabonds whilst others gravitated to burghs such as Kirkcudbright and Dumfries, joining the growing ranks of the urban poor and casual labour.

It wasn’t until the latter half of the eighteenth century, and into the early nineteenth, that improving landowners began establishing or expanding planned villages across Dumfriesshire and Galloway. These settlements absorbed surplus rural population by converting former runrig tenants into disciplined weavers, artisans, and mill workers, often in emerging textile industries. While they offered relative stability, housing, and access to modern amenities, they also formalised the shift from communal agrarian independence to structured commercial dependence, re-linking people to the estates from which many had been displaced, now under new terms of wage labour and landlord oversight.

In this way, the shared liberty of the fermtoun gave way to the regimented world of the industrial village. The Galloway Levellers endured in local memory as a final, defiant echo of a vanishing communal way of life, overtaken by the relentless advance of agricultural “improvement” and early industrialisation.

The Highland clearances followed a similar course. They started about 25 years later when their fermtoun clearances began, to make way for sheep principally to service the woollen industries of English mills.. It continued over the next 100 years or so with displaced families often moved to coastal crofts to work kelp or fishing. Eventually a famine set in when the potato crop failed and there was widespread “assisted emigration” to North America and Australia.