Marginal Settlement and Land UseAuthor(s): Brian RobertsSource: Area, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1972), p. 69Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20000643 .

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Annual Conference 69

was an interim report on student surveys in these counties. The authors identified three types of marginality: convergent marginality, where a number of environmental factors reach limiting values and there is a progressive diminution in the range of economically feasible enterprises; particular marginality, where a single factor limits the choice of enterprise; and contingent marginality, where a change of enterprise resulting from the operation of economic and other causes produced a changed re lationship with environmental factors. A major conclusion of the paper, confirmed by the preceding study, was that agricultural marginality was meaningful only if both structural and environmental factors were considered.

Not surprisingly, the discussion ranged widely, Mr R. Macdonald, Land Develop ment Officer of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, questioned the empha sis on farm enlargement, quoting Sir Robert Grieve's view that crofting was a most effective way of maintaining population; it would be better to concentrate on intensifi fication and on the provision of supplementary employment. Other speakers drew attention to differences in the perception of marginality by older and younger members of the community, the former not seeing themselves as marginal (a cause of the low participation under schemes such as those promoted by ARDA, which depend on self selection), while the judgment of the young, that farming was sub-marginal, was expressed in emigration. Other comments touched on the difference between unecono

mic farms and uneconomic enterprises, the fragmentation accompanying farm en largement and the development of linked farms under the same management.

J. T. Coppock

Marginal settlement and land use

Dr Ian Adams (Edinburgh) convened this symposium of the Agrarian Landscape Research Group. Four papers were read, of which three-The identification offrontier zones in the Welsh rural landscape by Colin Thomas (New University); Secular climatic change and marginal land by Martin Parry (Edinburgh); and Recent forest history and land use in Weardale, Northern England, by Brian Roberts (Durham)-were all con cerned with fluctuations in the boundary between improved land and waste in the upland margins, particularly between the Middle Ages and the present day, but also, in the cases of Wales and Weardale, extending back into prehistory. The papers emphasized very different aspects of the work; Colin Thomas was particularly con cerned with the use of place-names and old field areas; Martin Parry emphasized the climatic parameters controlling oat production in the Lammermuir Hills and Stow

Uplands in south-east Scotland, and the impact of climatic change on the possible upward limits of cultivation; while Brian Roberts, presenting a paper based upon work financed by NERC and done in collaboration with Mrs Pamela Ward and Dr Judith Turner, examined the correlations between the documentary and archaeological evi dence for a moving frontier and the evidence from two small peat bogs chosen because of their proximity to deserted fields and settlements. All the papers demonstrated the importance of three particular points; first the vital role of climatic change, second, the difficulty of producing precise documentation of such frontier zones, and third, the importance of physical traces of former cultivation in reconstructing particular high

watermarks. James Lindsey (Edinburgh), in the final paper on Woodland in the Highland rural

economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was concerned with a particular aspect of the upland economy-the woodlands. Increasing pressures on the surviving woodland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries resulted in a change from a largely pastoral usage to managed coppiced woodlands, but the failure to exclude grazing nevertheless resulted in the degeneration of many areas into scrub.

The Committee wish to thank all contributors to this symposium. Will members who wish to receive the discussion papers please notify Dr Roberts by 31 March, 1972. After this date they will not be available because we will only print those required.

Brian Roberts

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