Farmers & Crofting

The land has always provided food, clothing, income and employment for the great majority of Manx people and was the backcloth to their lives. Between 1885 and 1890 71% of the island was arable or improved land. Today it is less than 50%.

There were many levels of farming including the wealthy quarterland farm with substantial land holdings, the smaller class of farmer who might be managing a split quarterland farm or an intack farm where additional land was enclosed usually in the uplands and finally the crofter who could be found at places like Cregneash in the south of the Island

Native breeds of horses, cattle, sheep and pigs still survived until the eighteenth century. Cattle and ponies tended to be small and stocky. By the nineteenth century breeds imported from England were common. The Loaghtan sheep survives today as a rare reminder of the native breeds of the Isle of Man.

The term crofter refers to a small scale farmer who owned or rented a smallholding and who depended on diverse crafts for his livelihood. Fishing, spinning and weaving, smithying and wood turning often supplemented his meagre resources. Crofting villages were characterised by their thatched dwellings of stone, the narrow strip field systems and their dry stone walls.

Until the beginning of this century, Cregneash was a typical upland crofting village, or clachan, isolated from modern developments in the rest of the Island and preserving the old customs and traditions handed down from father to son through generations of Manxmen. Perhaps the strongest of these traditions was the Manx language itself, for y Ghailck was spoken by all the inhabitants of Cregneash within living memory.

The Grove Museum in Ramsey falls between the croft and the Quarterland. It's threshing mill driven by a horse walk suggests that at one time Duncan Gibb (the head of the house) owned extensive farmland. Displays of agricultural equipment in the original outbuildings provide a picture of farming life in the rich lowland areas of the Isle of Man which contrast markedly with the more basic requirements of the upland crofting community.