Social, economic, religious and political changes affecting Arbuthnott

Image: © Adrian Diack Taken: 17 Jul 2025

The photo shows a combine harvester at work in a field on Peat Hill beside the Lewis Grassic Centre in Arbuthnott, Aberdeenshire. While the photo can be taken at face value as a modern farming scene, the wider setting of Arbuthnott village and parish illustrates aspects of the place that have long remained fairly constant and other aspects where great changes have taken place or are poised to do so. Long-standing fundamentals of the area include the shape of the land, aspects of the weather like haar rolling in from the sea and wild birds like “whaps”, “peesies” and “laverocks” (curlews, lapwings and skylarks, respectively), which are enduring constants and were certainly present at the turn of the 20th century and around the time when Lewis Grassic Gibbon published Sunset Song in 1932. However, great changes have also taken place since then, and in Arbuthnott they include the planned closure of the parish church, where an unbroken period of worship has taken place since before the Scottish Reformation in 1560. Due to a combination of factors, including social change, declining church attendance in a secular age and current debt by the Church of Scotland, the church is planned to be sold or leased before the end of 2025; such an event would end a period of continuous religious worship that has lasted for approximately 900 years. Another change that has taken place and continues to do so is the ongoing agricultural revolution, where farm machinery, such as the combine harvester seen in the photo, has replaced earlier farm implements, with some of those on display as exhibits at the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott. Farming remains at the heart of economic activity in the parish, but the old Mearns dialect and its use of descriptive Scots words have given way to a more uniform style of modern spoken English. The fields of the Mearns, where livestock was once commonly reared, have in many cases now been reallocated for growing arable crops, and especially cereals like barley and wheat, with that transition helping to contribute to the closure of local livestock marts where “roups” took place, as in Laurencekirk. A political change affecting Arbuthnott, and indeed all of the Mearns, that was formerly in the county of Kincardineshire, was that boundary changes resulted in it being absorbed into the Kincardine and Deeside District of the Grampian region in 1975, and subsequently, in 1996, it became part of Aberdeenshire. If the fictional protagonist, Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song, were able to return to Kinraddie, that was based on Arbuthnott, she would find that there were no religious services at the local church, that the farm tools she knew in her daily life were now exhibits in the museum and that the county of Kincardineshire no longer existed by that name. Despite these sweeping changes, however, she would still recognise the red clay and black loam soils beneath her feet, clouds racing overhead as they mark the passage of time, age-old standing stones as markers of permanence and the unmistakable cry of “whaps”, “peesies” and "laverocks" as they guard their nests against the approach of strangers.

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