page_title: Housing in Scotland
section_title: Agricultural improvement
hierarchical_section_title: Housing in Scotland / Improvement and Industrial Revolution / Agricultural improvement
caption_attribution_description: English: Parliament House from the Cowgate shortly before the demolition of the old Parliament Stairs, known colloquially as the Back Stairs.
context_page_description: Housing in Scotland includes all forms of built habitation in what is now Scotland, from the earliest period of human occupation to the present day. The oldest house in Scotland dates from the Mesolithic era. In the Neolithic era settled farming led to the construction of the first stone houses. There is also evidence from this period of large timber halls. In the Bronze Age there were cellular roundcrannogs and hillforts that enclosed large settlements. In the Iron Age cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a drystone construction. The largest constructions that date from this era are the circular brochs and duns and wheelhouses.
  After the First World War, the government responded to urban deprivation with a massive programme of council house building. Many were on greenfield sites of semi-detached homes or terraced cottages. In the 1930s, schemes tended to be more cheaply built, but a survey of 1936 found that almost half of Scotland's houses were still inadequate. There was also extensive private building of sub-urban "bungalow belts", particularly around Edinburgh.
context_section_description: In the eighteenth century there was a conscious attempt to improve agriculture among the gentry and nobility. The Society of Improvers was founded in 1723, including in its 300 members dukes, earls, lairds and landlords. Enclosures began to displace the runrig system and free pasture. New farm buildings, often based on designs in patterns books, replaced the fermtoun, and regional diversity was replaced with a standardisation of building forms. Smaller farms retained the linear outline of the longhouse, with dwelling house, barn and byre in a row, but in larger farms a three- or four-sided layout became common, separating the dwelling house from barns and servants quarters. Hundreds of thousands of cottars and tenant farmers from central and southern Scotland were forcibly moved from the farms and small holdings their families had occupied for hundreds of years. Many small settlements were dismantled. Of those that remained many were now crofters: poor families living on "crofts"—very small rented farms with indefinite tenure used to raise various crops and animals, with kelping, fishing, spinning of linen and military service as important sources of revenue. Many lived in blackhouses with double thickness walls about 6 feet (2 m) high, made of local stone and packed with rubble and earth and thatched with reeds. They were unfaced inside and were usually warmed by a peat fire on a slab floor, the smoke from which gave them their name. Others were forced either to the new purpose-built villages built by the landowners such as John Cockburn at Ormiston and Archibald Grant's Monymusk, to the new industrial centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, northern England, or to Canada or the United States.
caption: The rear of tenements at the back of the Parliament House, shown in 1820
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