Why Act of Union was breached by the abolition of Scotland's counties

These were just some of the questions that arrived in my inbox after I mentioned last week that I had received a couple of most interesting emails asking me about county towns. Regular readers know I am always happy to answer interesting questions when I can, so I said I would be interrupting my series on ancient towns to give a brief history of the county towns of Scotland. In came more queries, and now I need a whole column to explain about county towns and counties themselves.

To write about county towns, you first of all need to write about counties. I have not previously attempted to chronicle the fascinating history of Scotland’s counties – some of which are very ancient indeed, and all with their own place in Scottish lore – but I’ll have a go today.

Is any of this relevant to modern Scotland, I hear you ask. I maintain that the concept of counties is still alive and kicking and that is easily proved. All you have to do is look at the names of various local authority areas around Scotland and the clue is there in the word “shire”, as I’ll explain later.

There’s North and South Lanarkshire for instance, the three Ayrshire local authority areas, plus East and West Dunbartonshire – the only case where the former county town is spelled differently in the name of the shire, and I still haven’t found out why that really happened.

South Lanarkshire is a case in point as next week I will be writing about Hamilton, which houses the headquarters of that authority and was for decades the county town of Lanarkshire – but there has never been a “Hamiltonshire”.

Even though it was much larger than Lanark, certainly by the 19th century, over the preceding centuries Hamilton had to play second fiddle to the smaller town which gave its name to the county and was indeed the administrative centre for the whole county.

Whatever the boundary commissions, politicians and civil servants have decreed down the ages, a lot of people do still feel an attachment to their ancient county name. I used to live in Peeblesshire and people there were inclined to use the name of the county in their current address even though the county of Peeblesshire legally ceased to exist when local government was re-organised in both 1975 and 1996, when Peebleshire was replaced with the Scottish Borders local authority area.

Curiously, if you go online, many organisations and companies still ask you to include the name of your “county” in your address. I don’t know why they do that – perhaps it’s some form of security check to show that you live where you say you do.

One reader asked me why so many people still use the word “shire” when referring to their home area, as undoubtedly “shires” were an English concept long before they were introduced into Scotland.

That is just a matter of history. “Shire” is an Old English word derived from the Germanic sćira or scir, and was first used in England in the 11th century.

The sense of “administrative areas” derived from an individual being in overall charge of the area, and he – they were always men – became known as a “shire reeve” or sheriff.

The first King of Scots to import the concept of sheriffs was Malcolm III (Canmore) who probably got the idea from the Atheling royal family of his wife Queen Margaret (above), who came to Scotland to evade the clutches of William the Conqueror.

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It was his son, David I, who really revolutionised Scotland’s governance through the establishment of royal burghs and sheriffdoms. Previously the country north of the Firth and Clyde had been organised into thanedoms, but sheriffdoms gradually replaced them and the shape of modern Scotland began to emerge during David’s reign from 1124-53. The use of the word “shire” also dates from the reign of David I, as there are references in royal records to Stirlingshire and Haddingtonshire.

Successive kings carried on David’s improvements to the governance of Scotland, but I am sad to say it was an English King, Edward I, who categorised Scotland’s ancient shires.

I always get annoyed with those who claim Scotland was never conquered, and point to Longshanks and Oliver Cromwell (above) as two English conquerors of this nation. Longshanks was by far the worst. Having deposed King John Balliol and conquered almost all of Scotland by 1298 – the uprising by Sir William Wallace and Andrew de Moray was a mere temporary blip, as Longshanks saw it – by 1305 Edward was so in control of Scotland that he reorganised the country’s sheriffdoms.

An English royal document from that year lists the 23 shires then existing and Edward either appointed new sheriffs or continued heritable sheriffs in office – only after the incumbents had sworn oaths of allegiance to him, of course.

In alphabetical order the shires were: Aberdeen, Ayr (which was divided into the bailiwicks of Carrick, Cunningham and Kyle), Banff, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Clackmannan, Cromarty, Dumbarton, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Elgin and Forres, Fife, Forfar, Haddington, Inverness, Kincardine (the Mearns), Kinross, Linlithgow, Peebles, Perth, Roxburgh, Selkirk, and Stirling. Robert the Bruce won our independence but carried out no wholesale alteration of the governance imposed by Edward I, so if you live in any of those shires I’ve just listed, then you probably have the Hammer of the Scots to thank.

It is important to note that almost all of the Highlands and Islands had nothing to do with counties or shires during the centuries when clans held sway. It was only towards the end of Scotland as an independent nation that such governance was imposed on the Highlands.

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More shires were added either by royal decree or parliamentary legislation until the Act of Union of 1707, when the new UK Government decided to impose the English way of local government on Scotland.

This was fiercely resisted and was not fully accomplished until 1890, when the Westminster Parliament passed a law “creating” 34 counties for Scotland, including Zetland, the ancient name of Shetland. Almost all bore the name of previous ancient counties.

With a couple of minor changes, these counties held firm until local government reorganisation in 1975 following the Wheatley Report. Regionalisation – an experiment which history shows was an abject failure – and the creation of district councils still saw some of the ancient county names retained, and after local government was reorganised again in 1996, it is remarkable how so many of the new local authorities retained some or all of the ancient county names.

In this series I have mentioned that some of our most ancient towns were at one point county towns but some were not. The best example, perhaps, is Paisley (below) – Scotland’s largest town by population. It has always been part of the county of Renfrew, and is now the administrative centre of Renfrewshire, but in historical terms that is a relatively recently acquired status.

To explain county towns: from the earliest days of counties, each county had to have a town which acted as the central focus, both in political and legislative terms. Even today, some parliamentary constituencies still preserve the name of the county and quite a few constituencies are centred on county towns.

Martyn Day, for example, was SNP MP for Linlithgow and Falkirk East and at the General Election will contest the reorganised seat of Bathgate and Linlithgow, so note that it’s Linlithgow which is preserved in the constituency name having once been the county town of Linlithgowshire So what about county towns?

The following list is the most complete I could find of designated county towns of Scotland during the era of the counties from 1890: Aberdeen (Aberdeenshire); Alloa (Clackmannanshire); Ayr (Ayrshire); Banff (Banffshire); Cupar (Fife); Dingwall (Ross and Cromarty); Dumbarton (Dunbartonshire); Dumfries (Dumfries-shire); Duns (Berwickshire); Edinburgh (Midlothian); Elgin (Moray); Forfar (Angus); Glasgow (Lanarkshire); Golspie (Sutherland); Haddington(East Lothian); Inverness (Inverness-shire); Kinross (Kinross-shire); Kirkcudbright (Kirkcudbrightshire); Kirkwall (Orkney); Lerwick (Zetland); Linlithgow (West Lothian); Lochgilphead (Argyll); Nairn (Nairnshire); Newtown St Boswells (Roxburghshire); Paisley (Renfrewshire); Peebles (Peebleshire); Perth (Perthshire); Rothesay (Buteshire); Selkirk (Selkirkshire); Stirling (Stirlingshire).

Does it matter which county or which county town you may have lived in? Apart from Lesley Riddoch’s brilliant analysis of why local government is so poor in Scotland, I have never heard it put better than by Dennis Canavan, when he was Labour MP for West Stirlingshire, during the debate on the Local Government (Scotland) Bill in January 1975.

Canavan (below) told the House of Commons: “If local government is to be good government, it must be as local as possible and as democratic as possible. There must be local representation and local participation. There must be local decision-making and local responsibility and a certain element of local financing.

“In recent years many people experienced in local government in Scotland have expressed concern about what they would call the erosion of the rights and liberties of local government. We have seen, for example, conflict between central government and local government over the implementation or non-implementation of comprehensive education.

“Also in education we recently saw how the government could override the rights of local authorities in the provision of free school milk.

“Recently in my part of Scotland there has been concern about reorganisation of local government. Many people are dreading its coming into effect in May. It is not just the size of the local authorities which concerns them. It is not just the remoteness, although that is an important point.

“Part of my constituency is to go into the Central Region, while part of it is to go into Strathclyde. The difference in attitude is quite amazing between those who are to go into the Central Region, who are fairly happy with their lot in a compact geographical set-up, and those who are to go into Strathclyde, who are most upset.”

However. it all went sailing through, and the counties of Scotland, and the county towns, ceased to exist. For the avoidance of doubt here’s the actual wording: “For the administration of local government on and after 16th May 1975, Scotland shall have local government areas in accordance with the provisions of this section.

“Scotland (other than Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles) shall be divided into local government areas to be known as regions, and those regions shall be the regions named in Part I of Schedule 1 to this Act and shall comprise the areas respectively described in column 2 of the said Part I, being administrative areas existing immediately before the passing of this Act.

“Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles shall be local government areas to be known as islands areas, and shall comprise the areas respectively described in column 2 of Part II of the said Schedule, being administrative areas existing immediately before the passing of this Act.

“On 16th May 1975, all local government areas existing immediately before that date, that is to say, all counties, counties of cities, large burghs, small burghs and districts, shall cease to exist, and the council of every such area shall also cease to exist.”

That Act, like so many passed by Westminster about Scotland, was a clear breach of the Treaty and Acts of Union