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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the indeterminacy in the relationship between common grazing shares and property formation in the Scottish Highlands through the mutable unit of the ‘souming.’ The souming determines the right of each tenant to use the common grazing but only through indeterminate boundaries.

Paper long abstract

Crofting is a small-holding tenure system in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, characterised by diverse agricultural activities and the tenancy of parcels called crofts under the regulation of a specialised body of law. Crofters of a given township have shares in the local common grazing. These shares are calculated using the ‘souming.’ The souming is a mutable unit which in sum determines the carrying capacity of the land. One souming is either the number of livestock a crofter can graze or the area they can use to graze a certain number of livestock. Neither iteration of the souming unit entirely maps onto the common grazing land because all of the crofters' animals graze together. I argue that the souming, at once a right and a measure that predates the establishment of crofting tenure in 1886, organises crofting land use. How so? I understand crofting as a set of relationships that appear and disappear through a palimpsest of parcels. Crofters use parcels of non-croft land to make their crofting viable. They also divide parcels out of their croft land to build houses and agricultural structures and apportion their common grazing shares. Parcellisation then becomes a complex process of indeterminate, transient, and temporary property making. Through my ethnography of a crofting township and the historical debates on whether souming can be used as evidence of stocking levels, the souming folds into the moving picture of parcels that make up a world of crofting in the Highlands.