Appin and Duror Map

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2 comments on “Appin and Duror Map
  1. Graeme Macaloney PhD says:

    Hello Denis,
    Thank you again for this incredible and invaluable body of work that you have undertaken. It will be a tremendous resource for generations to come.

    I just came across a description of the extent of Lismore & Appin Parish that shows it extended beyond Appin to King’s House (presumably via Glen Etive) and into Rannoch as far as Cruach, and included Kingairloch.

    This can be found on p.151 of Ian Carmichael’s ‘Lismore in Alba’, published by D. Leslie in 1948. Ian was Minister of Lismore & Appin and this work appears to be thorough and considered. The quote on the extent of the parish of Lismore and Appin relating to a previous parish Minister is as follows:

    “Donald McNicol worked under many disadvantages. His parish was large and extensive. The Kingairloch section was 16 miles long by 4 miles deep, and from the Shian Ferry to King’s House and then on to the utter most boundaries of the parish at Cruach or Rannoch Moor was a total of 48 miles with no roads to speak of. The average depth of the Appin area was about 10 miles. The total area of the Parish of Lismore and Appin was 559 square miles.”

    I wonder if this might correlate in part with the Gillaspik mac marten 1/3 of land below Benderloch and 1/3 of Rathnach (recte Rannoch) mentioned by you from Sheriff MacPhaill’s Highland Papers iv., p.16?

    As to Gillaspik’s 1/3 of land below Lorn, I wonder what your thoughts are on what might be contiguous with these other two 1/3’s?

    best regards
    Graeme Macaloney

    • drixson says:

      Dear Graeme Macaloney
      Firstly, many thanks for your contribution and kind comments. I will answer at some length because I think you touch on important points.
      You have quoted from ‘Lismore in Alba’ which is always a book I would recommend. In particular you have raised the issue of how far a parish might reach.
      When deciding on a format for my analysis of land-assessment one of the first decisions was how to organise it. I could have used other units such as baronies, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, counties. I settled on parishes because they are found all over Scotland and we almost always have some evidence for their extent and history. All the other units I have mentioned have their own drawbacks. Sometimes it is simply absence of data. Sometimes it is because of the extra difficulties they introduce. My favourite example, if we were to arrange by county, would be how to deal with the complexities displayed in Thomson’s map of Ross and Cromarty. Seeing how Cromarty is dispersed and scattered across the broad extent of Ross-shire would deter anyone.
      The problem of course is that parishes have their own history, many hundreds of years of it. Their origins are usually obscure and, in the centuries since, they have changed boundaries, merged, split, or been absorbed by others. Reasons might include the policies of great families, or the church, population change, or appropriation by another ecclesiastical organisation. Many of these processes are hidden from us. Post-Reformation we may be lucky enough to have surviving synod minutes; pre-Reformation all evidence may be lost.
      Parishes and land-assessment data help each other. In some parts of Scotland there is evidence of a standard 10-davach parish. Many parishes can be seen as aggregates of davachs. Accordingly, davach boundaries often give sections of a parish boundary. There are pennyland endowments of church-sites on the west coast. Likewise, there are half-pennyland chapel sites. Some churches were undoubtedly bigger and more important and might be described as mother-churches. They might fiercely protect their rights and privileges against upstart chapel-sites perhaps newly famous for some miracle-working. Some sites, or areas, or families might be associated with a particular saint. There were undoubtedly local loyalties and some household idols. Knowledge of local land-assessment, family and church history can all help each other.
      These long centuries of obscure history mean that every single one of my parish maps is vulnerable. Resting my data within a framework of parishes is akin to building on sand. Parishes were mutable. I am currently engaged in researching the situation in Renfrew. Some parishes such as Greenock and Port Glasgow were carved out of earlier parishes. Paisley’s boundaries are frayed – with farms swapping parishes over the years. The farm of Garvock belonged to Houstoun but is completely separated from it by the parish of Kilmacolm. The parish of Renfrew stretches north and south of the Clyde. Cathcart parish is actually split between two counties: Lanark and Renfrew.
      In the case of Lismore we have an island which you might expect to be self-contained and separate. And yet it is linked to Appin which was presumably an area of mainland set aside to maintain the early Christian monastery. In later times Lismore would have been relatively favoured by the presence of the bishopric. In some areas, how a parish fared depended on the support of the local landowners – support which might fluctuate with each generation.
      The other drawback is that land-assessment gives us the fiscal units of laymen. Parishes are the organisational units of churchmen. The trouble with looking at individual davachs or pennylands or carucates is that they are too small to let us also see the bigger picture. Parishes allow that. But we should also recognise that the larger territorial units devised by laymen defined themselves rather differently. Instead of being, from that burn, to that standing-stone, to that other burn etc; they reckoned in terms of watersheds and drainage-basins. The larger units certainly existed. We have district, area and county names like Cowal, Lochaber, Lennox or Caithness. They may have been created with reference to the number of davachs they contained but their boundaries were more likely to be defined by mountain-ridges than by specific burns.
      Fortunately, the number of davachs, pennylands, territories and earldoms was finite. We can use arithmetic to make sense of it all. The objective is to map out the land-assessment situation in all Scotland, something which will require many years, and, probably, many hands.
      You have mentioned some early one-third divisions. Trying to identify such portions is fascinating. We have exactly the same issues with early fractions of the earldoms of Lennox and Caithness, or Somerled’s half of the Isles. How were these portions decided? Was it by area or by value? I suspect it was more likely to have been the latter, whether in terms of davachs or ouncelands, or whatever the local unit. The trouble is that there were other forms of division. Sometimes what happened, for instance near Inverness, is that when great estates were partitioned between heiresses they might each get a fraction of each farm. So instead of division into coherent blocs, we find one-quarter of this farm plus one-quarter of that one etc. But mapping these constituent portions allows us a clearer view of the whole.
      So, I think that in future we may be able to answer the questions you have posed; it’s just that I don’t think we are in that position yet. I could make a guess, but I find I am becoming increasingly cautious about land-assessment. It is an empirical process. I have no doubt it will unlock much of our early history, but I think we are still in the early stages of understanding the variables. Argyllshire is complicated because I suspect the Dalriadic invasion removed nearly all traces of an earlier system of davachs. The only way we can reach them is through the overlaid systems of pennylands and merklands. Trenching through these by using arithmetic allows us to relate them to each other rather as different currencies can be exchanged via exchange rate mechanisms.
      Apologies for length, but it is an intriguing subject. I have used parishes as my prism, but of its very nature this prism is erratic and sometimes faulty. Working down to the base-level of the units themselves, whether davach, pennyland, arachor or merkland, would be better, but we perhaps need the framework of parishes for organisational purposes. Ideally though, they should be transparent.
      Best wishes
      Denis

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