Liff, Angus
Liff is a town in Angus, Scotland, situated west-northwest of Dundee on a south-facing slope north of the River Tay. It had a population of 568 in 2011.
Surrounded by farmland, it has been described as 'haunted by wood pigeons and the scent of wild garlic' and having a 'wonderful view over the firth '. east lies the site of the former Royal Dundee Liff Hospital, now given over to private housing. Further east lie Camperdown House and Park. south is House of Gray, a large eighteenth-century mansion house in the neoclassical style, currently standing empty. The village contains twelve listed buildings, with others nearby.
For several centuries the name Liff denoted a large area, not a village. It comprised the parish of Liff together with its united parishes of Benvie, Invergowrie, Logie, and Lochee, and so included substantial parts of the city of Dundee. The village around the church was known as Kirkton of Liff or simply the Kirkton.
An ancient site in the village called Hurly Hawkin was regarded for several centuries as a palace of King Alexander I.
The placename features in the title of a bestselling book by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff. It is defined there as 'a book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover'.
History
Early history
Name
The origin of the name Liff is uncertain. Many older writers repeated the suggestion that it might come from the Gaelic word lighe, meaning deluge, flood, or spate. They also claimed it might be a variation of 'Isla', a river to the north, which has been spelt Yleff, or Yleife. On this theory river names such as Liffey and Liffar or Liver might have the same origin. However, the theory is hard to credit since there is no river or flood in the vicinity of Liff.A modern expert on placenames suggests that 'Liff' comes from Gaelic cliathach, meaning side or slope of a hill, since the main feature of the landscape is the slope upwards from the Tay. This may derive some support from the names of two old farms, Ochterlyf above the village and Netherliff which may have lain below it. On this theory those names would signify 'upper slope' and 'lower slope' respectively, which would fit with the lie of the land. This explanation is attractive but remains unproven.
Hurly Hawkin
Just to the west of Liff Churchyard, on a promontory formed by the confluence of two burns, are the remains called Hurly Hawkin, now on private property. This is the 'supposed palace of King Alexander' as it was described by many writers and on older Ordnance Survey maps. This story originates with John of Fordun and Walter Bower who in Scotichronicon tell how Alexander I was given the lands of 'Lyff and Invergowry' at his baptism and began to build a palace 'at Lyff' after he became king. On one occasion when he was there, rebels made an attempt on his life. With the help of a loyal chamberlain, Alexander escaped via the privy, embarked at Invergowrie, and reached safety. In gratitude for his deliverance, says Scotichronicon, the king founded the Monastery of Scone and donated the lands of Liff and Invergowrie to it.This account may well contain some truth. However, a ten-year archaeological investigation beginning in 1958 showed beyond doubt that the structures at Hurly Hawkin are far older than the time of Alexander. The earliest building of which evidence remains was a pre-historic promontory fort. Its location gave a commanding view over the eastern Carse of Gowrie. The fort was later partly built over with a broch, which was in turn succeeded by a souterrain. The broch, with walls that were mostly thick and an inner courtyard in diameter, has been dated to the first half of the second century AD and appears to belong to the Tay-Forth-Tweed group of brochs established during the withdrawal of the Roman army at that time. Many artefacts were found during excavation of the site.
The 'Battle of Liff'
Early chroniclers and historians, including Boece, Holinshed, and George Buchanan, relate the story of a battle between Alpin, King of the Scots and Brudus, leader of the Picts. The accounts are memorable because of a stratagem Brudus is said to have used, disguising camp followers and women as soldiers, mounting them on pack horses, and revealing them at a crucial phase of the battle to deceive his opponents into thinking they were facing a strengthened force. This is said to have prompted a personal intervention by Alpin that led to his capture and beheading. The place of his death and burial was named Pitalpin or Pas-alpin. A possible location was to the east of present-day Camperdown, Dundee.In the nineteenth century several writers of popular history took to calling this the 'Battle of Liff', using Liff as the name of the extended parish.
Chalmers in his Caledonia insists that the account of King Alpin given by most writers is wrong and they have conflated the story of the Pict Elpin, who died in 730, with the Scoto-Irish Alpin, who died a century later at Laich Alpin in Ayrshire.
Whatever the truth about this battle, there is no evidence that it took place very close to present-day Liff.
Later history
The land around Liff was part of the endowment of the Abbey of Scone from the time of Alexander I's gift until the Reformation. As a consequence of the Reformation the Abbey of Scone feued its land. This led to the development at Liff of a kirktown, that is, a clachan associated with a church, a clachan being 'a small hamlet grouping where the joint-farming activities of its people gave a kind of social and economic unity'.This croft system lasted for around 200 years. The history of the adjacent parish of Fowlis shows that some land holdings in the area were as small as. In the course of the eighteenth century they were swept away by the development of large estates. Of Fowlis it was said that
as the process of amalgamation proceeded, the houses of the crofters, &c., were cast down. Even in the remembrance of those now living have sixty-houses been pulled down, and their occupants forced to seek refuge in towns, a form of proceeding now happily at an end.
By the time of the First Statistical Account of Scotland in 1791, more than were divided into 12 farms. Rotation of crops was then on a seven-year cycle: oats; fallow; wheat; turnip and potatoes; barley; and two years of grass. Besides farming, however, the weaving of coarse linen cloth had by then 'become the principal employment'. 1789 and 1790 also saw extensive contract work on 'the new roads leading from Perthshire through this county', which drove up day-labourers' wages.
In 1842, at the time of the Second Statistical Account, there were 26 families in the Kirktown of Liff. Again it was noted that many people of the parish did agricultural work during spring and harvest but worked at the loom in winter. Potatoes had by then become an important crop and dairy farming was also gaining ground, while crop rotation was usually on a five-year cycle: oats; potatoes and turnip; wheat or barley; then two years of grass.
By the 1880s 'Liff' was said to cover and contained substantial parts of what is now the City of Dundee. One consequence was that the Kirk Session of Liff and Benvie was responsible for the poor of that populous industrial area.
Twentieth century
In the early twentieth century Liff was a thriving and economically diversified community. At this time there were a farrier and blacksmith, a joiner, wheelwright and undertaker, a cobbler and shoemaker, a stonemason, a publican, at least two shopkeepers, a doctor, medical, nursing and administrative staff at the nearby hospital, the minister and the schoolmasters, as well as all the farmworkers.The village was also well supplied with itinerant traders. A baker came twice weekly, there was an Arbroath fish cart and a fish wife with a creel of haddock, a grocery van from Abernyte and a butcher from Newtyle. A tailor from Alyth took orders and measurements and delivered on his next visit.
A bus service started in 1932 between Muirhead, Liff and Dundee. Until then, it was a walk to the nearest high street shops in Lochee.
The 1940s were years of austerity and difficulty. Mains electricity arrived just after the Second World War but the need to collect water in buckets from nearby wells and springs continued until 1961. Only then were clean piped water and underground sewage and drainage systems available for most householders.
During the second half of the twentieth century local trades and skills died out, the pub closed its doors, the joiner shut shop, the cobbler stopped making and repairing boots, the farrier shod the last horse and the smithy shut down the forge. Spinkie Den became overgrown and the only remaining shop closed in 1980. Machines were replacing people on farms and in other trades; paid manpower, so needed in March 1947 after one of the worst blizzards of the century to clear the roads out of the village, was replaced by snowploughs. Jobs disappeared and many people found work beyond the parish as cars replaced carts and the train. By 2001, despite some 1970s and 80s house building, there were only 410 in the village population and the school and church were the only public buildings.
The first decade of the 21st century saw Liff reverse the population decline with new housing and farm steading redevelopment. By 2011, the village had turned into a commuter settlement of 568 people.
Geography and geology
Liff lies on a south-facing slope at an elevation of between. To the north of the village the ground rises towards the lower slopes of the Sidlaw Hills. Liff Church is north of the River Tay; the top of the slope above the village is north of the Tay. Rev. Thomas Constable, Minister of Liff from 1785 to 1817, wrote:The appearance of the surface is in general highly pleasing. The ground rises with an easy ascent for the space of 3 miles from the River Tay... Along this agreeable exposure, are interspersed houses, trees, and fields in culture.That description holds largely true today.
The main rock types in the area around Liff are sandstones, siltstones and shales of Devonian or Old Red Sandstone age. Local nineteenth-century quarries produced a grey sandstone used as a building/walling stone. A little west of Liff at Balruddery, fragments of fossil fish and a huge 'lobster' have been collected.
Some of these remnants can be viewed in the National Museum of Scotland. To the north in the Sidlaw Hills volcanic rocks of similar age outcrop. However, the bedrock is almost entirely covered by much younger geological deposits in the form of glacial till. The soils are quite rich, for the most part, dark loams.