husbandry knowledge increased, specialist livestock buildings were erected. This was especially true for pigs and poultry. Long, low buildings with controlled ventilation first went up in the early 1960s. Outside these were metal feed hoppers to automatically feed the livestock; inside, the intensive production of poultry or pig meat was carried out.
For those farms still considered working units, the footprint of the buildings has multiplied several times during the course of the last century as crop storage and livestock production moved indoors.
At the start of World War II, there were some 1,243 farms or landholdings in North-East Fife. Today’s total of viable working farms in the same area numbers less than 300. What has also happened is a congregation into fewer, but larger working units. Quietly, many smaller farms have been taken over.
Often no agricultural use is made of the farm buildings on these smaller units. Many, especially those around St Andrews, where there is a strong demand for accommodation from those working or studying in the ancient university, have been converted into housing. Once a month, the Planning Committee of North-East Fife area of Fife Council meets in Cupar. Almost without exception over the past decade, in the normal list of planning applications there have been bids to convert redundant farm steadings into housing on a regular basis. These are invariably granted. At least in this local authority area there is a requirement that any conversion largely takes place within the original curtilage or footprint of the buildings, with as much of the original building as possible retained.
Other councils take a more relaxed view. They allow old farm buildings to be demolished and then transplant a clutch of largely identical houses or a small piece of suburbia onto the flattened site. Even containing any development into the area previously covered by cart sheds, barns, lofts, cattle courts and neep sheds, sufficient space can be created for a dozen or so houses. So, now, theoretically, we have a repopulation of the countryside.
The reality is different as there is little or no connection between the work of the land and those who live in the steading conversions; the vast majority drive to work early in the morning and return late at night, the week’s shopping achieved at some distant retail park.
It is fanciful to think that the ghosts from the past inhabit these old buildings recycled into modern homes; it is difficult to believe today’s inhabitants, looking out from their floor-to-ceiling windows placed in openings of the old cart sheds, hear the voice of the old grieve shouting across the close about some perceived failing by one of the loons. And as they rush out to their cars to go to work, they will never hear the clip-clop of horseshoes over the cobbles at the start of day, or the sound of the turnip, or neep hasher, getting the daily diet for the cattle.
The past century has also seen a loss of farms and buildings directly as a result of towns and villages expanding their boundaries. Those picking up their ancestral roots often come back to the family farm to find they require to walk the concrete pavements or muddy playing fields of the burgeoning urban landscape.
The scale of change in farming is not easily observed from the traditional view over the hedge or dyke, or even through fence wires on visits along the rural roads. The fields provide permanence, and crops are still grown.
Often, if the rural jungle drums do not beat out the message, the first that even neighbours now know of a change in working the land may come with the arrival of a stranger’s set of machinery entering the fields. Gone too are the smallholdings, including those set up specifically after World War I by the British Government in their repatriation of soldiers – part of their belief that they were creating a land fit for heroes.
In North-East Fife two larger properties were split up to make smaller holdings – Third Part and Easter Pitcorthie. These holdings each had a farmhouse and steading, and approximately 50 acres (or 20 hectares). Today, only two of these original holdings remain, the rest have either been amalgamated or the land sold off to neighbours, leaving a house in the country.
Fields
The old trick of looking at the placement of a gateway to see who owned the field has also gone with the aggregation into larger units. It used to be that the gate was always placed in the corner nearest the farm steading. That was the shortest route for the horse to walk and for any work to be done. Nowadays, with a takeover of husbandry, that trick no longer tells tales.
The youngster who in the mid-1950s perched precariously on the old steading roof, would have been able to look beyond the immediate buildings to see the stackyard, possibly even a pond for water power and then a scutter of henhouses in nearby fields, or even a small paddock in which the tups (rams), or some ailing animal would be kept.
Beyond the buildings and the in-bye enterprises were the cropped and grazed fields. In the early days of the century, when the average size of a farm in Fife was 112 acres, seldom would the field size go beyond 20 acres.
There were still areas of land unfenced up in the rigging or highlands of Fife, but the vast majority of farmland was enclosed. A century previously, it was reckoned that only one-third of the land in Fife had been fenced or hedged into small workable fields. But even if they were enclosed, some fields were in a fairly basic state. In 1917, Mr Watson of Drumrack Farm, Anstruther paid the rector of local Waid Academy some £7 7/6 (£7.37) for the use of a squad of boys to clear the field of whins (gorse). At the same time, he also employed a team of Waid Academy girls to clear up the fields. This latter task was most likely one of hand-weeding crops such as potatoes or turnips, but it might also have included taking weeds out of grain crops.
Following massive investment in this unseen aspect of good husbandry during the previous century, the majority of the improved fields were also drained. Originally, the drains were trenches into which stones were placed, thus allowing water to flow between them. That rough description does no credit to the quality of the stone drainage work that still operates after more than 100 years.
Anyone who has had to repair a stone drain will confirm it is much more difficult than replacing a tile drain. These clay tile drains came into being on land where there were few stones. Generally it was an easier system laying these hollow cylindrical tiles, which – provided there was a run or gradient – would work effectively. Most of the drainage work was carried out in herringbone systems, with leader drains forming the spine and these emptying into open ditches or streams.
Fife is not an area where hedges are common, although 200 years ago the most popular method of creating fields was the combination of ditch and blackthorn hedge. There were also areas where stone was plentiful for building dry-stone dykes, but again, this was not a widespread practice as there are parts of Fife that are stone-free and, in horsepower days, the carting of stone was costly.
Not until fence wire became popular did the enclosure of farms become complete. As an example of the cost of fencing in the early days of the century, at Drumrack Farm outside Anstruther in 1914, Mr Watson paid £38 for the post and wire fencing of 1,000 yards, or just over 900 metres.
One of the first industrial imports from the US was barbed wire, used extensively and controversially to enclose the vast prairie ground. But it did not arrive without its problems, as in 1921 the NFU of Scotland received a communication from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries reminding farmers of the injuries that could be sustained by indiscriminate use of barbed wire. However, barbed wire is still, to this day, an essential part of any new livestock fencing.
Most farm gates were made of wood and, equally, most were just tied or roughly hung on the wooden gateposts. Only the major estates or home farms could afford properly hung metal gates. Almost all these early gateways have been demolished as the width and scale of the farm machinery has increased and now there is
