The book Arran; - Cook Clan

IMPROVEMENT AND EMIGRATION 211
went on Carts or on horse-back by the road, those who rode having
their wives seated behind them, and with their scarlet mantles they
commonly formed a picturesque sight.
Already, however, the social structure behind such scenes
was in process of dissolution, and greater changes than that
from scarlet mantles to calicoes or muslins and Leghorn
straw hats, were putting their stamp upon the island life.
II
We have viewed Arran in the eighteenth century, its
communities of joint-farmers, its open fields laboriously
yielding what would now be considered very scanty crops,
its waste intervals between the twisting rigs, its potatoes
in lazy-beds, its unsown and unweeded meadow, its pasture
crowded with stock, for which as the winter drew on there
was but the alternative of death or starvation ; all things
in the grip of the routine of ages, paralysed by the suspicion
that any improvement might tend only to the advantage
of others—of the other members of the group or of the
owners gathering where they had not strawed.^
On a conservatism so rooted it was hard to exercise any
stimulating influence. Burrel, among the things he had
done, had not allayed suspicion of motives, as we have seen.
1 William Alton, reporting for the Board of Agriculture, writes in 1810 as
follows :— 'It will no doubt be found, that the inhabitants are blamefully ignorant,
indolent, and wedded to many prejudices and bad habits. But so were those on every
other estate at the beginning, and even till after the middle of last century ; and it is
the fault of the proprietor alone, that those in Arran have not become as intelligent,
industrious, and liberal as people in their rank on the other side of the frith. They
and their forefathers have been always kept, and to this day they are uniformly
placed in a situation that debars all improvement on the soil or their own condition,
intellectual or pecuniary. When any of the inhabitants of Arran are placed in
advantageous circumstances in any other quarter, they are as active and intelligent as
those of any other county : and if the proprietors of land in the neighbouring
counties of Ayr and Renfrew, etc., had managed their estates till now in the way that
that of Arran has been conducted, the inhabitants would have been to this day as
ignorant, indolent, and prejudiced as those of Arran.' General View of the Agriculture
of the County of Bute, by William Alton, Glasgow, 181G, p. 81.
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