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The Highland Potato Famine (Scottish Gaelic: Gaiseadh a' bhuntàta) was a period of 19th-century Highland and Scottish history (1846 to roughly 1856) over which the agricultural communities of the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands (Gàidhealtachd) saw their potato crop (upon which they had become over-reliant) repeatedly devastated by potato blight.
Until 1750, potatoes had been relatively uncommon in the Highlands. With a crop yield four times higher than oats, they became an integral part of crofting. [5]: 49 After partial crop failures in 1836 and 1837, a severe outbreak of potato blight arrived in Scotland in 1846. Blight continued to seriously affect the Highland potato crop until ...
The European potato failure was a food crisis caused by potato blight that struck Northern and Western Europe in the mid-1840s. The time is also known as the Hungry Forties . While the crisis produced excess mortality and suffering across the affected areas, particularly affected were the Scottish Highlands , with the Highland Potato Famine and ...
Scotland suffered its last major subsistence crisis when the potato blight reached the Highlands in 1846. In the twentieth century Scottish agriculture became susceptible to world markets. There were dramatic price rises in the First World War , but a slump in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by more rises in the Second World War .
Crofting (Scottish Gaelic: croitearachd) is a form of land tenure [1] and small-scale food production peculiar to the Scottish Highlands, the islands of Scotland, and formerly on the Isle of Man. [2] Within the 19th-century townships , individual crofts were established on the better land, and a large area of poorer-quality hill ground was ...
In 1846, the Highland Potato Famine caused a crisis in the Highlands and the islands of Western Scotland, an area already struggling with overpopulation [2] [3] [4] and the upheavals of the Highland Clearances. The deaths from starvation were so high that, in 1848–1849, the government delivered shipments of oatmeal to locations along the ...
The traditional system of agriculture in Scotland generally used the runrig system of management, which had possibly originated in the Late Middle Ages. The basic pre-improvement farming unit was the baile (in the Highlands) and the fermetoun (in the Lowlands). In each, a small number of families worked open-field arable and shared grazing.
Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete or water mold, a fungus-like microorganism that causes the serious potato and tomato disease known as late blight or potato blight. Early blight , caused by Alternaria solani , is also often called "potato blight".