Chapter 4 - POTATO GROUNDS

Summary

Rejoice, ye bodies, ane and a’

Lang hae your backs been at the wa’;

But ye may clap your wings and craw,

Nae mair to grieve,

There's taties now at ilka shaw

As big's your nieve. [fist]

…

For taties mak a gusty meal

Whan they are chappit up wi’ kail

An half a pound o’ butter hale –

Flung in the pat;

A hungry chield wi’ that I’ll bail,

Will no’ find fau’t.

Be glad, ye poor throughout the land,

That siccan plenty's come to hand,

The markets high will get a stand,

They’ll all be down,

And disappoint the wicked band

O’ half a crown.

James Thomson, the weaver poet of Kenleith in Midlothian, wrote this poem in 1796 in expectation of a good potato crop. The following year the minister of lowland Bendochy in Perthshire wrote, ‘The potatoe is the true root of Scarcity, which promises to set Famine at defiance.’ The failure of the 1794 harvest, grain hoarding by speculators, the activities of English agents and fear of bringing produce to markets on the part of farmers had all led to rocketing prices and outbreaks of violent protest. There were over thirty food riots in towns and villages from Angus to the Borders in the late 1790s.

The minister of Bendochy was writing between the two grain crises that led to these riots – 1794–6 and 1799–1801 – and it was the first of these that prompted the newly constituted Board of Agriculture to promote potato cultivation to feed the poor. Sir John Sinclair, its first president, took cautious credit for the Board having – probably – been ‘the happy instrument of preventing the risk of scarcity and famine in the ensuing season’.

Potatoes were first grown in the gardens of landowners in Scotland in the late 1600s and soon after in those of larger tenant farmers. There are at least three stories about their subsequent adoption as a field crop. According to one account, it was the factor of an estate in Kilsyth who experimented successfully in 1739, and then demonstrated the method to agriculturists in Dundee, Perth and Edinburgh. Another version has Thomas Prentice, a labourer in the same parish, planting potatoes on his plot in 1728 and being copied by his neighbours.