In the year 1695 the Scotch Parliament passed an Act allowing anyone “coterminous heritor” owning a share in a “commonty” to have his portion separate from the rest, and to enclose it; and a series of cases established a defined system of computing the share of the “commonty” to which the lord of the manor as such was entitled in lieu of manorial rights. This caused the process of the separation of intermixed properties in open fields to proceed without the intervention of special Acts of Parliament, except for Royal burghs. Also while in England under Enclosure Acts or agreements to enclose the three processes of (_a_) the separation of intermixed and intercommonable properties, (_b_) the separation of intermixed and intercommonable holdings, and (_c_) the hedging or fencing of the separated properties, were accomplished by one continuous series of actions on the part of those concerned, in Scotland it was otherwise. The separation of properties where necessary was first accomplished, and for long afterwards the system of run-rig was followed by groups of tenants on the same estate. After run-rig had been abandoned, the separate holdings remained open and unenclosed, and the process of building dykes or planting hedges was carried out at a later date, and by slow degrees. The abandonment of run-rig was general, according to the reports to the Board of Agriculture, in the lowlands of Scotland about the year 1730. In the county of Perth up to the year 1744 “the land was always occupied in run-rigg, either by the different tenants on the same farm, and sometimes by coterminous heritors. The houses were in clusters for the mutual protection of the inhabitants.” (James Robertson, D.D., “Agriculture of the Southern District of Perth,” 1794, pp. 22, 23.) In the northern and Highland counties the transition was naturally later. Sir John Sinclair (“General View of the Agriculture of the Northern Counties and Islands of Scotland”) describes the cultivated land of the Islands as being open almost everywhere, except in the case of the “mains” or manor farms, the glebe lands, and the farms of a few principal tacksmen. Of Caithness he says, “The greater part of the arable land in this county is occupied by small farmers who possess it in _run-rig_, or in _rig and rennal_, as it is here termed, similar to the common fields of England, a system peculiarly hostile to improvement” (p. 207). But in the Orkneys “Much of the land that formerly lay in the state known in Scotland under the name of run-rig land has been divided, but much still remains in the same situation” (p. 227); and the process of enclosing had begun even in the Shetlands (p. 252).