Crofting
A croft is a small farm of a sort peculiar to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Today there are some 17,000 crofts in all.

Crofts are small-holdings which came into being in an ad hoc way as part of the process known as the Highland Clearances. Coastal strips, and other marginal land, were used to re-settle Highlanders pushed out of their traditional holdings in the name of economic reform. An almost unique form of rural settlement was created. But individual families continued to be venerable to eviction. And many such families - confined, as they often were, to the diminutive plots on which were settled those victims of the Highland Clearances who had neither emigrated overseas or moved south - were desperate to obtain more land.

Grievances of this type fuelled the protest campaign which convulsed the Highlands in the 1880s. Masterminded by a political organisation known as the Highland Land League, this campaign featured rent-strikes, illegal occupations of sheep farms and other manifestations of popular discontent. Here and there, especially on Skye and elsewhere in the Hebrides, there were pitched battles between the crofters and their families on one side, police and troops on the other. The eventual outcome in the shape of the Crofters Act of 1886, was a tremendous victory for Highlanders. Passed by the United Kingdom parliament in response to Highland discontents, this Act, by giving legally-guaranteed security of tenure, brought the Highland Clearances finally to an end.

It was as a result of those occurrences, incidentally, that there took shape the legislative frame which continues to govern crofting in the Highlands today. Like all other such smallholdings the Highland Folk Museum 's croft at Newtonmore is subject to rules and regulations dating ultimately from 1886. These mean, for instance, that the croft has to be registered with the Inverness based Crofter's Commission which administers crofting.

Occupying 28 acres (11 hectares) of the Museum's 80 acre-site, the croft is fully functioning. What distinguishes this croft from others is the fact that instead of being equipped and managed in the manner of its 21 st century counterparts, it is operated strictly in accord with the practices of the mid-1930s.

Some parts of this croft's remarkable air of authenticity derives from the way it's been kitted out with machinery, implements and tools of exactly the sort you'd have come across in the Highlands in the mid-1930s. But this croft is no static exhibit. Its fields are cultivated in the way that fields were cultivated all those decades back; it's stocked with hens, with ducks, with sheep and with other livestock. It smells, as well as looks, the genuine article.

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