Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:45:55.089Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Getting Out and Getting On: Scottish Highland Migration in the First Half of the Twentieth Century1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Catherine Maclean
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.

Extract

This paper draws on data collected for the author's doctoral thesis (Maclean, 1997), which examined migration and social change in remote rural areas. The research took place mainly in 1995–6, and consisted of tape-recorded interviews and 18 months' ethnographic fieldwork in a parish in the Scottish Highlands, and the use of data including the Census Small Area Statistics and Register of Sasines. Although informed by the research as a whole, the central focus of this paper is data drawn from twenty interviews with members of fifteen families, most of whom were born in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A further ten people provided supplementary data in interviews in which family migration patterns were not the main focus (see table 1 for details). Places and people involved in the research have been given pseudonyms to protect anonymity, privacy and confidentiality, in accordance with the British Sociological Association's Ethical Guidelines.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bolton, N. and Chalkley, B. 1990. ‘The Rural Population Turnaround: A Case Study of North Devon’, Journal of Rural Studies 6, 2943.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brody, H. 1973. Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland (London).Google Scholar
Champion, A.G. (ed.). 1989. Counterurbanization: The Changing Pace and Nature of Population Deconcentration (London).Google Scholar
Dean, K.G., Shaw, D.P., Brown, B.J.H., Perry, R.W. and Thorneycroft, W.T. 1984. ‘Counterurbanisation and the Characteristics of Persons Migrating to West Cornwall’. Geoforum 15, 177190.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Department of Agriculture for Scotland. 1954. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Crofting Conditions (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Fielding, A.J. 1982. ‘Counterurbanisation in Western Europe’ in D.R. Diamond and J.B. McLoughlin (eds.) Progress in Planning 17, 152.Google Scholar
Hunter, J. 1976. The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Hunter, J. 1991. The Claim of Crofting: The Scottish Highlands and Islands 1930–1990 (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Jamieson, L. 1990. ‘Rural and Urban Women in Domestic Service’ in Gordon, E. and Breitenbach, E., The World is Ill-Divided: Women's Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Jamieson, L. and Toynbee, C. 1992. Country Bairns: Growing Up 1900–1930 (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Jedrej, M.C. and Nuttal, M. 1995. ‘Incomers and Locals: Metaphors and Reality in the Repopulation of Rural Scotland’. Scottish Affairs 10, 112126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jedrej, M.C. and Nuttal, M. 1996. White Settlers: The Impact of Rural Repopulation in Scotland (Luxembourg).Google Scholar
Jones, G. 1999. ‘ “The same people in the same places”? Socio-Spatial Identities and Migration in Youth’. Sociology, 33, 122.Google Scholar
Jones, H., Ford, N., Caird, J. and Berry, W. 1984. ‘Counterurbanization in Societal Context: Long Distance Migration to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’. Professional Geographer 36, 437444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, H., Caird, J., Berry, W. and Dewhurst, W. 1986. ‘Peripheral Counter-Urbanization: Findings from an Integration of Census and Survey Data in Northern Scotland’. Regional Studies 20, 1526.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Knight, J. 1994. ‘Questioning Local Boundaries: A Critique of the Anthropology of Locality’. Ethnos 57, 213231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumb, R. 1980. ‘A Community Based Approach to the Analysis of Migration in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’. Sociological Review 28, 611627.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumb, R. 1982. ‘The Demography of Small Communities: Stable Numbers and Fragile Structures’ in Jones, H. (ed.) Recent Migration in North Scotland: Pattern, Process, Impact, SSRC North Sea Oil Panel Occasional Paper 13 (London).Google Scholar
Macdonald, S. 1997. Re-imagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance (Oxford).Google Scholar
Maclean, C. 1997. Migration and Social Change in Remote Rural Areas: A Scottish Highland Case Study (doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Macleod, L. 1995a. Why Do Young People Leave the Highlands? (undergraduate project, University of Glasgow).Google Scholar
Macmillan, G. 1996. Land, People and Government in Northern Scotland: An Evaluation of Crofting Policy as a Tool for Maintaining the Welfare of Rural Populations in Marginal Areas. Report to the Crofters Commission.Google Scholar
McCrone, D., Stewart, R., Kiely, R. and Bechhofer, F. 1998. ‘Who are we? Problematising National Identity’. The Sociological Review 46, 4, 629–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mewett, P.G. 1982. ‘Associational Categories and the Social Location of Relationships in a Lewis Crofting Community’ in Cohen, A. P. (ed), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester).Google Scholar
Mewett, P.G. 1982. ‘Exiles, Nicknames, Social Identities and the Production of Local Consciousness in a Lewis Crofting Community’ in Cohen, A.P. (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester).Google Scholar
Mills, C.W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination (New York).Google Scholar
Myklebost, H. 1984. ‘The Evidence for Urban Turnaround in Norway’. Geoforum 15, 167–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Parman, S. 1990. Scottish Crofters: A Historical Ethnography of a Celtic Village (Chicago).Google Scholar
Richling, B. 1985. ‘“You'd never starve here”: Return Migration to Rural Newfoundland’. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 22, 236–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, B.W. 1990. ‘In Bondage: The Female Farm Worker in South-east Scotland’ in Gordon, E. and Breitenbach, E., The World is Ill-Divided: Women's Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth centuries (Edinburgh).Google Scholar
Silvasti, T. 1999. ‘Born to be a Farmer? Farm Family, Intergenerational Relations and the Process of Socialisation’. Paper to the International Conference of Rural Studies, Somero, Finland, 30.7–1.8.99.Google Scholar
Sireni, M. 1999. ‘A “dream job” and “the good life” in a Remote Home Region? A Study of Young Adults’. Paper to the International Conference of Rural Studies, Somero, Finland, 30.7–1.8.99.Google Scholar
Smailes, P.J. and Hugo, G.J. 1985. ‘A Process View of the Population Turnaround: An Australian Rural Case Study’, Journal of Rural Studies 1, 31–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strathern, M. 1982. ‘The Place of Kinship: Kin, Class and Village Status in Elmdon, Essex’ in Cohen, A.P. (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester).Google Scholar
Strathern, M. 1982. ‘The Village as an Idea: Constructs of Village-ness in Elmdon, Essex’ in Cohen, A.P. (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester).Google Scholar
Williams, N.J. and Twine, F.E. 1991. A Research Guide to the Register of Sasines and the Land Register in Scotland: A Report to Scottish Homes (Edinburgh).Google Scholar