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Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster is best known for both initiating and, more importantly, seeing to its conclusion, the Statistical Account of Scotland. Between 1790 and 1797 he wrote to each parish minister of the Church of Scotland with a list of 160 questions. The answers formed the basis for the Account which he presented to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1799. The document continues to serve as a unique source of social history of the period.
Educated at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Oxford he worked as an advocate in Scotland and a barrister in England between 1775 and 1782. He was first elected to parliament as the member for Caithness in 1780 and continued as MP for Lostwithiel (1784) and for Petersfield (1796-1811) when he had to resign his seat on being appointed Commissioner of Excise. He effectively founded the Ministry of Agriculture when serving as the first president of the Board of Agriculture in Pitt the Younger's government. he lived on George Street in Edinburgh from 1815 until his death in 1835.
He was a genuine "Improver" on his own land of 100,000 acres in Caithness. He drained wetland, improved stony ground, experimented successfully with new manuring techniques to bring land under cultivation and discussed improvement both in terms of increasing income from the land and of giving work to people. He saw the folly of ever more tenants trying to eke out a living from ever smaller parcels of land and let medium-sized farms at fair rents. He did not forget the small farmer who had not the finance nor the resources to manage a farm of this size and, in the division of land into crofts at Bainstown (and his suggestions for combining small sheep farms), he came close to establishing workers' co-operatives.
His lasting agricultural legacy, sadly, is the introduction of the Cheviot sheep to Caithness. Five hundred breeding ewes and a proportionate number of rams were brought to one of his farms at Langwell in 1791 and,
'To the astonishment of the Shepherds, who were strangers to the country, and of the natives who thought that sheep were so debilitated an animal that they ought to be housed in the winter season, not one of the flock died from cold, disease or hunger; and as they throve equally well in the year 1792, I resolved to carry on the plan with all the vigour and attention that was possible for a man immersed in so many avocations.'
He immediately saw the potential of this:
'The Highlands of Scotland may sell, at present, perhaps from £200,000 to £300,000 worth of lean cattle per annum. The same ground will produce twice as much mutton, and there is wool into the bargain. If covered with the coarse-woolled breed of sheep, the wool might be worth about £300,000, the value of which can only be doubled by the art of the manufacturer; whereas the same ground under the Cheviot or True Mountain breed will produce at least £900,000 of fine wool.'
Sir John Sinclair became chairman of the British Wool Society and argued for a gradual change in agricultural practice in the Highlands: the training of local shepherds; the continuation in possession of existing small tenants who should be encouraged to buy a small flock and join their holdings with their neighbours, hiring a common herdsman; the partial payment of rents in wool and mutton. His voice was lost in the clamour for quick profit and his dreams of progress became bitter,
'Nothing can be more detrimental .... The first thing that is done is to drive away all the present inhabitants. The next is to introduce a shepherd and a few dogs; amd then to cover the mountain with flocks of wild, coarse-woolled, and savge animals which seldom see their shepherd or are benefited by his care.'
The picture is the well-known portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn, painted around 1795. Sinclair is wearing the uniform of the Caithness Fencibles, the regiment he founded in 1794.
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