Ferrintosh Privilege – The great decrease in the number of inhabitants in this parish, which appears from the above difference of its population in the years 1779 and 1789, began to take place in 1786, and was occasioned by an event of general notoriety, and which was at that time the subject of Parliamentary discussion. The lands belonging to Mr Forbes of Culloden, which go by the name of Ferrintosh, and form the central and largest division of the parish, possessed from 1690 to 1786, an exemption from the duties of excise on spirits distilled from grain of their growth. This privilege was originally granted to the present proprietor’s great grandfather, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, one of those patriots, who at the glorious period of the Revolution, stood up in defence of the religion and liberties of their country. By opposing the disaffected, and supporting the loyal subjects in his neighbourhood, at much expense, he was materially instrumental in quashing a rebellion, which at that time threatened the north of Scotland. Going some time thereafter to Holland in prosecution of the same patriotic plan, the Popish faction, during his absence, laid waste his estates, particularly the barony of Ferrintosh, and destroyed extensive distilleries, of which it was the seat at that time, and before the introduction of the Excise into Scotland. In compensation for the losses, which he had thus sustained in the service of government, the Parliament of Scotland, by an Act passed in 1690, farmed to him and his successors, the yearly excise of the lands of Ferrintosh, for the sum of 400 merks Scotch, subject, as explained by a posterior Act, to a proportion of any additional duties of excise, that might be thereafter imposed by law upon the kingdom. This privilege his successors enjoyed without interruption, till the year 1786. As a mark of public favour, it was not more honourably acquired at first, than it was amply merited afterwards, by a continued succession of important services in their country’s cause. In 1715, the original granter’s son, adhering to the principles of the Revolution, raised all the men upon his estates, and deeply impaired his private fortune, by keeping them in arms at his own expense, till that rebellion was happily quelled. The services rendered to Government in 1745, by that great man and ornament of his country, the Honourable Duncan Forbes of Culloden, President of the Court of Session, are universally known. At the breaking out of that rebellion, he applied himself with zeal to nip it in the bud. He successively invited the chieftains to Culloden house, and whilst he delighted them with his conversation and winning manners, he so wrought on them by his persuasive eloquence, that he was the happy instrument of keeping thousands from joining the Pretender’s standard. His exertions at that critical conjuncture, whilst they brought his own liberty, and even his life into imminent hazard, involved his family in a debt, double to that which he had found it loaded, from his predecessor’s zeal in the same cause, and amounting together to upwards of £30,000 Sterling. About two thirds of that sum, and less than 16 years purchase of its proven increasing value, was the allowance made by Government to the present proprietor, on their resumption of this immunity in the year 1786. The singularity of this privilege, and its great influence, in a statistical view, on the condition and number of the inhabitants of this parish, have led to this short account of its origin, and of the services by which it was earned.

Upon the extinction of this right, many of the people, being deprived of employment, were obliged to seek elsewhere for that support, which they had no expectation that the place could any longer afford; and in a little time thereafter, the inhabitants of the parish were found to have decreased some hundreds in number. Few of them, however, left the kingdom; their supposed superior skill, in the business to which they had been inured, occasioned a demand of hands from Ferrintosh, wherever distilleries were erected under the new act of Parliament, respecting that branch of revenue which took place about the same time with the deprivation of their privilege. This decrease of inhabitants ceased, however, in the course of two or three years after the event to which it had been owing. Since that time, the population of the place has been uniformly advancing, and amounts at present to little short of what it has been at any former period. The extent to which their original occupation, though stripped of its former advantages, is now again carried on, partly occasions this returning increase of the population; but it is owing, to a still greater degree, to that attachment to the natale folum, which induces the poor people to settle in the moor grounds in the skirts of the parish, rather than to seek for subsistence by emigration, and because the proprietors were beginning to see (what is to be hoped, they will see still more) the good policy of giving them all due encouragement in their little improvements. But it was not solely the population of the parish that was affected by Government’s resuming the Ferrintosh privilege. The people of that district, who constitute the great body of the parish, underwent in general a great deterioration, as to their circumstances and mode of living, from that event, against which few of them comparatively had made any provision. The monopoly they enjoyed, and the acknowledged superiority of the spirits produced from their small stills, occasioned a demand for them from all quarters, and a constant circulation of cash in the place, which brought the people in general an ease in their circumstances, and a fulness of the necessaries of life, beyond what commonly falls to the class of farmers. A transition in these respects to the level of their neighbours, so abrupt, would have been more severely felt, had it not found some mitigation in the distinguished humanity of the proprietor of these lands. But the business of distillation is now resumed in Ferrintosh, and diffused throughout the parish in general, to an extent that requires a very considerable annual importation of barley, and gives employment to 29 licensed stills. There are, however, very few who derive from it any benefit; but the mischief resulting from it is manifest; and there is too much cause to apprehend, from the low price of spirits, and the restriction as to a foreign market, that the country in general may furnish multiplied instances of the pernicious tendency of this trade, as an inlet to intemperance, and a bane to the industry and morals of the people.