In the 1730s a dispute arose between the Earl of Breadalbane and the (new) feuars of estates in Glenlyon over grazing rights in the Forest of Mamlorn, a Royal Forest that covered land approximately 37 km2 at the head of Glenlyon and Glenlochay. The dispute exemplifies the conflicts that arose over the use of upland resources that were previously regarded as marginal in an age when agricultural production and estate management were becoming more and more commercialised.
The Earl was Keeper of the Royal Forest, and new landholders in Glenlyon, Menzies of Culdares and a feuar of two fermtouns, MacDonald of Kenknock, began to push the limits of his tolerance by intensifying their tenants’ grazing in sheilings on the north side of the forest. Culdares also rented some pastures out to drovers. This opened a legal can of worms, as the boundaries of the feuars’ properties and the Forest were in dispute and there was limited documentation to clarify the extent of the territories in dispute.
At this time, Highland lords were more prone to legal rather than military action to resolve disputes, but even so there were armed stand-offs between Glenlyon tenants and Earl’s foresters. Each side argued robustly for their rights, and in the course of the dispute exposed attitudes towards land ownership and assumptions of rights that illustrate both the long standing challenge for Gaelic chiefs to align the Duthchas (traditional lands and rights) of their clan with their Oigreachd (charter-based ownership and rights), and also the increasing pressure on lords to maximise the commercial return on land to support increasingly expensive lifestyles.
The dispute rumbled on for more than a decade and was heard no less than three times in the House of Lords. Both sides employed a range of tactics and arguments and at times the dispute appears to have been particularly bitter, despite long standing generally good relations between the tenants of Glenlyon and Glenlochay and the Earl’s foresters.
You can read more about the dispute in my paper presented to the Ruralia XIII conference at the University of Stirling and recently published in the conference proceedings, Seasonal Settlement in the Medieval and Early Modern Countryside, Edited by Piers Dixon and Claudia Theune: This piece of singular bad neighbourhood: the Mamlorn Forest Dispute, Scotland,c. 1730-1744.
Thair spririts to reioyis 