Ayrshire was divided by rivers into three districts, the ‘bleak and moorish’ Carrick in the south, and the ‘predominantly lowland’ Kyle and Cunninghame in the centre and north. Agriculture in Kyle and Cunninghame had undergone ‘vast improvement’ since the 1780s and dairy farming was widespread; sheep were raised in Carrick. There were extensive coal deposits in the lowland areas, and Ayrshire became second in importance only to Lanarkshire for mining in Scotland.
North Berwick was a small castellated town and port on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, 22 miles north-east of Edinburgh. It had no guildry or incorporated crafts and was dominated by the largest proprietors, the Hamilton Dalrymples, who in the 1820s spent over £700 on improving the harbour. Its population was 1,694 in 1821 and 1,824 in 1831 and it had a council of 12.PP (1831-2), xlii. 211; (1836), xxiii.
Appleby, Westmorland’s assize and county town, was a castellated pocket borough on the River Eden, in the parishes of St. Lawrence and St. Michael, 13 miles south-east of Penrith. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), i.
Kirkcudbright Stewartry was the eastern portion of Galloway. In its improving agriculture the raising of cattle was a speciality. It contained the royal burghs of Kirkcudbright, on the Dee estuary, and New Galloway, inland on the Water of Ken. The other principal settlements were Castle Douglas, Creetown, Dalbeattie, Gatehouse and Maxwelltown, which was separated from the burgh of Dumfries by the River Nith, the Stewartry’s eastern border.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), iv.
Richmond, a ‘wealthy and substantial’ market town, was situated ‘in the midst of an agricultural district’ known as ‘Richmondshire’, at the entrance to Swaledale in the North Riding of the county, 44 miles north-west of York. It was reported in 1831 that the ‘higher class’ of the population was ‘composed in a great measure of persons ... wishing to live a retired life’; there were ‘no manufactures’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 1049-50; PP (1831-2), xl. 157-8. The borough was coextensive with the parish.
Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, was spectacularly situated on a series of parallel igneous ridges and hollows two miles from the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, and was dominated by its castle, to the south and east of which the labyrinthine mediaeval town was clustered.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), ii. 467-524. In this period it underwent continued expansion and improvement, particularly in the Georgian New Town, north of the Nor’ Loch, where the most significant development was that of the Moray estate, north of Charlotte Square, 1823-8.
Sutherland exhibited a mainly ‘desolate’ landscape of mountain, moorland, lochs and peat bogs. Sheep rearing was the ‘staple business’, having been reinforced by the notorious policy pursued in the early nineteenth century by the principal landowner, Elizabeth, countess of Sutherland, and her husband, George Leveson Gower†, 2nd marquess of Stafford, of removing the crofters to the coasts. It was stated in 1831 that 180,000 fleeces and 40,000 animals for meat were being exported annually.
Dornoch, the county town of Sutherland, situated on the south-east coast near the Dornoch Firth, was ‘extremely insignificant in every particular’, being ‘literally a village, consisting of a church, a gaol and a very few houses, without trade or manufactures of any kind’. There was no harbour, as the estuary was too shallow. Its population declined from 630 in 1821 to 504 in 1831, and its council numbered 15, of whom eight had no property in the burgh.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), ii. 362, 363; PP (1823), xv. 690; (1831-2), xlii. 48, 49; (1835), xxix.
Ipswich was a garrison town and port situated on the Rivers Gipping and Orwell, 12 miles from the North Sea. William Cobbett† described it in 1830 as a ‘fine populous and beautiful place’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, ii. 619; W. White, Suff. Dir. (1844), 89. Its shipbuilding industry was then in decline, and legislation for new docks was not enacted until 1837.
Great Grimsby, a seaport with ‘several good streets, the houses of which are well built’, was, according to Oldfield, ‘second to none in the history of corruption’. White’s Lincs. Dir. (1826), 133; Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iv. 155. Political events turned on the rivalry between the Whig Blue party of the Anderson Pelham family of Brocklesby, Barons Yarborough, and the Tory Reds, headed by George Tennyson† of Bayons Manor, Tealby, who had inherited the old interest of the Clayton family.
