Related topic
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=782272.0Libberton is a rural parish in Lanarkshire (
not to be confused with the parish of Liberton just south of Edinburgh, in Midlothian). There is a small village called Libberton, clustered round the parish kirk.
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NS9942Gladstone and Gladstone Bor(e)land are farms a few miles east of the village
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NT0342Greenshields is a farm about a mile north-west of Gladstone Boreland
http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/NT0243 You can see them, and other farms which are no longer in existence, on the mid-19th century six-inch-to-the-mile map
http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=15&lat=55.6743&lon=-3.5369&layers=5&b=1They were just farms where people lived and worked. People generally lived on the farms where they worked, so where there is just one farm house nowadays there would probably also have been several cottages where the married farm workers lived with their families. Unmarried male workers might live together in a bothy, and unmarried female workers would often live in the farm house.
Most farmers were tenants, that is, they rented their farm from the landowner rather than owning the land themselves.
As for records, it depends on what records you are looking for and when.
Some estates' rental records have survived, others have not. You need, first, to find out who owned the land. You can usually find that out by looking at the Valuation Rolls, which list the name of the farm or house, the name of the proprietor, the name of the tenant, and the name of the occupant. However the detailed valuation rolls don't start until the late 19th century. Some VRs can be accessed at
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.
Once you know who owned the land, you can find out whether they owned it when your people lived there by looking the place or estate up in the Registers of Sasines. A sasine is a record of change of ownership of land or buildings, so there is no point looking there for records of tenants. The Registers of Sasines are not available online. You have to go (or get someone to go for you) to the Historical Search Room in Edinburgh, where there is a computerised list of sasines from 1780 onwards. There are printed indexes to sasines before 1780, but they are organised by the name of the owner so you have to get back to 1780 by other means.
Once you know who owned the land at the time your people lived there, you can search for estate papers via the Scottish Archive Network
http://www.scan.org.uk/ to see whether there are any records of your people.
For background reading try the Statistical Accounts of Scotland
http://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/viewer/osa-vol2-Parish_record_for_Libberton_and_Quothquan_in_the_county_of_Lanark_in_volume_2_of_account_1/and
http://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/viewer/nsa-vol6-Parish_record_for_Libberton_and_Quothquan_in_the_county_of_Lanark_in_volume_6_of_account_2/In this context it may be useful to know that 'heritor' effectively means 'landowner'.
Hope this helps.