Even on those estates where such especially long leases were uncommon, as in the Earl of Panmure’s Angus lands, the mean tack length in the first two decades of the eighteenth century had already reached fifteen years. This development was by no means universal throughout Scottish rural society. In pastoral areas, such as the Border counties and the Highlands, the granting of longer tacks to the lower peasantry was much less common, even if it was de rigueur among the gentlemen of the clans.
