Tomintoul is the highest village in the Highlands and sits on a plateau above the River Avon (pronounced A’an) in the upper reaches of old Banffshire at about 345m above sea level. Tomintoul derives its name from the Gaelic tom-an-tsabhail, ‘the barn on the hill. In 2026, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our village’s founding.
Why was Tomintoul created?
The ‘spirit of improvement’ in 18th-century Scotland was the practical dimension of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, encompassing a widespread drive to modernise the nation’s agriculture, economy, infrastructure, and society.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Scotland saw the establishment of 490 planned villages and small towns. For landowners, new planned villages provided opportunities to diversify income from their estates and create employment and industry for a rural population that had become displaced by agricultural improvement. It was also a more efficient way to collect rent from tenants.
In the 1770’s Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon decided it was his duty as an improving landlord to establish a village on the land at Tamantoul. This location was strategically chosen around the existing military road constructed in 1754 under the command of General George Wade. This existing infrastructure, built to pacify the Highlands, provided the crucial transport link that made a new settlement viable. The Duke’s intention was to provide employment by developing a local linen industry. Thomas Milne surveyed the land in 1773, which marked the beginning of Tomintoul’s formal planning around the axis of this old road.
Tomintoul’s early days
Tomintoul’s layout features a grid design, with a central Main Street flanked by parallel streets on either side. It stands as one of the most well-preserved planned villages in Scotland and is unique in retaining its associated lotted lands, or ‘feus’.
A ‘feu’ was a historical form of land tenure in Scotland where a feudal superior granted a piece of land to a feuar (vassal) in perpetuity in exchange for a perpetual annual payment. The main purpose of lotted lands was to give households enough land to grow crops like oats and turnips, as well as provide grazing for cattle and horses. The anticipated development of a linen industry in the local area, based on lint cultivation, did not materialise, leaving tenants increasingly dependent on their leased land to sustain their livelihoods.
