Views over The Carse towards Stirling

The River Forth marks the southern boundary of Perthshire. The flood plain it winds through is the Carse of Stirling, a semi-fluid peat bog four miles wide by fourteen miles long. The swamp was totally impassible over most of its 35,000 acres.

The Carse remained an impenetrable, peat bog covered with dense marsh vegetation, inhabited only by wildfowl and the most desperate of outlaws until 1766 when Agatha Drummond inherited the ancestral estate of Blair Drummond. Agatha was married to the learned, but eccentric, Henry Home, Lord Kames, a judge of the Court of Session. He was over 70 when he and his wife took up residence at Blair Drummond. They found that over 1500 acres of the soaking moss lay within the inherited estate and he turned his undoubted intellect towards the problem of draining it. Beneath the moss lay rich, alluvial clay which would produce fertile and valuable farmland.

Lord Kames cut a three-mile channel right across the Carse from Blair Drummond to the Forth and diverted a mill lade into it. With a team of workmen, he began draining the moss; but to continue with hired workmen proved too costly and Kames advertised for tenants in the Callander area and offered them a lease of eight acres for thirty-eight years. They were to be provided with timber to build a house and enough oatmeal to sustain them for a year. They would pay no rent for seven years; in the eighth, one merk; in the ninth, two merks; and thereafter they would pay 12s for each cleared acre and 2/6d for each acre of moss. This was quite a bargain when the best farmland at this time had a rent of 30s.

In 1768, the first tenant settled on the Low Moss, near to Blair Drummond, and by 1774 another eleven were established. The moss here was only three feet thick, and the new settlers quickly stripped this off. Within a year the first crops were produced and when Lord Kames died in 1783, aged 86, over 29 tenants were living on 400 acres of cleared moss.

The Carse of Stirling today is a flat, fertile area famous for its dairy cattle and the production of Timothy grass, much valued as hill fodder. Some of the complex of ditches and channels which drained the Carse are still visible today.

Henry Home, Lord Kames, and his son George Home Drummond, lie in the little graveyard of Kincardine-in-Menteith and beside them lie the Moss Lairds who left their Highland homes to begin a new and strange life on the bog.