A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
clachan
A clachan is a small settlement in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and in parts of Ireland, a cluster of houses without a formal plan, laid out around the ground rather than around a street. Traditionally the households worked the surrounding land in common, in shared strips, and moved stock to summer grazing together. In Ireland, the same arrangement was a rundale settlement.
Etymology
The word is Gaelic and it is built on clach, stone. Which stones it originally meant is argued over. One reading takes it as the stone buildings, another as a set of standing stones or a stone church, since a clachan often meant the place where the church and the burial ground were, and going to the clachan meant going to church. In parts of Scotland, it later came to mean the village inn, which is a fair record of what the settlement was actually organized around.
Notes
Clachans were the ordinary form of Highland settlement before the clearances rearranged the land into single-tenant farms, and most of the ones on the map now are ruins with the rigs of their fields still visible in low light.