What was Robb's Land?

[myyran]

Hi Littlejaffa,
I realise that your post is a few years old, but with the new  Scotlands Census 2011 having recently been published, and to help anyone  tracing their family tree,I feel I should say that Duntocher did have tenements.  This is why you could have different families living under the same address.
Old Street had three storey flats, two storey plus the Attics.
 New street was the same.
Chapel Road had three storey flats on one side  accessed by the tenement close,Two storeys on the other,  the upstairs flats of the two were accessed from the back via stone staircase with outside toilets at the top of the stairs,downstairs had toilets under the stone staircase.  There is one building still standing,next to that was the Police station which was also two storey.

Bremmners Cottages were again two storey which stretched from The Village Tavern (filshies,Westend bar)  and joined the main house where the Bremner family lived,which still stands today,and can give you an idea of how the other houses looked.  The upstairs flats were accessed through an entrance called the Penn  and again by stone staircase.
Also most  of the districts of long ago  came under the parish of Old Kilpatrick, some came under New Kilpatrick. Duntocher and Faifley  by far the oldest .

[myyran]

....oops..forgot about Main Street ,which had two storeys on both sides the duntocher Post office building is how they would have looked (google earth).  Then there was Veitches court another two storey L shaped building ,accessed by the tenement closes.
 All along the Main Street were the' Land's' Walkers,Bremner's,Connolly's  etc.

[Forfarian]

In an urban context, and specifically the late 19th and early 20th century industrial and shipbuilding towns, a land is exactly what would be called a tenement or a block of flats these days. Usually with a single entrance close and a stair or stairs giving access to one or more flats/apartments/dwellings on each floor. The name might be that of the owner, from whom all the occupants rented their homes, or it might be the name of a prominent or important citizen who lived in it. This does mean that in some cases, even though the actual building is still in existence, its name may have changed.

The word 'tenement' has undergone change; in the 18th and early 19th century it also meant a small, usually rented, piece of ground. So, for instance, during the Enlightenment between 1750 and 1850, when it was fashionable for landowners to establish new planned towns to replace the huddled old villages, the ground for the new town or village would be divided into tenements and then rented to the tenants. Some landowners might build houses on each tenement; more often they would simply rent the tenements and expect the tenants (or tenementers) to build their own houses on their tenements. In many cases the landlord specified the sort of house that was to be built, for example they might specify that it was to be 2 storeys high, and with its long elevation on the street frontage.

In towns and cities there was obviously much more demand for housing, so what would be called a tenement now is a development of this idea, where the building on a tenement was much larger and intended to accommodate many households, not just one as in more rural tenements. A tenement building did not need to be umpteen storeys high - it might only be a ground floor and say two storeys in places where the pressure on building space was less intense than in the big cities.

The lands in Edinburgh (and several other towns and cities) are a stage further than the more general land because not only are there tenements built on the street frontages, but what would originally have been garden ground in the closes behind has all been built up, so that the close doesn't give access to one tenement, but also to several more tenement buildings and houses built on the original tenement of ground.

The (former) village of Duntocher is indeed a couple of from the (former) village of Old Kilpatrick (if you can really call either of them villages these days) but both are in the parish of Old Kilpatrick. So 'Duntocher in the parish of Old Kilpatrick' is an exact and 100% correct description. New Kilpatrick is the next parish to the east.

The parish boundaries have little or no relevance these days, but they are very important for finding older records, because these were arranged by parish. According to Fullarton's Gazetteer (1842) Old or West Kilpatrick is "bounded on the north by Stirlingshire; on the east by East Kilpatrick and Lanarkshire; on the south or south-west by the Clyde, which divides it from Renfrewshire; and on the north-west by the parish of Dumbarton". East or New Kilpatrick is "partly in Dumbartonshire and partly in Stirlingshire; bounded on the north by Killearn and Strathblane; on the east by Strathblane and Baldernock; on the south by Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire; and on the west by Old Kilpatrick".

[yokerbrian]

Robbs Land was an area of ground adjacent to the pub (THE LOVAT) which current sits near the Glasgow Clydebank Boundary on Dumbarton Road

Robb is the surname of the publican Colin Robb, who ran an older hostellry on this site - if the Original Poster wishes to contact me I can provide more details (i have some photos of the area from the early 1900s)

The older pub COLIN ROBBS INN - was an old staging post - and was a white washed thatched cottage.

[Debbie in B.C.]

Interesting!  Thanks for posting the info yokerbrian. 

[longshanks]

Land may be ground named after the current owner on which there are tenanted properties. As distinct from a tenement, if considered as a multi-occupation building, a land might contain small houses in a yard accessed from the street. In England it would be called a court. Often these were one up/one down or otherwise small with shared privvies and outbuildings and sometimes small factories or industrial undertakings.

The problem with such names is they are transient. Such tenanted property was sold on as speculative investment, so a few years later it would be Smith's Land or McGrogan's Land. The way to track these down is to look at valuation rolls and rate books around that year, that would show the owner as well as the tenant (the weakness of the census is that it seldom distinguishes owner occupier and tenant).  The other source is the seisins in Edinburgh Records Office.

Some Scottish villages were made up of lands whereby groups of tenanted cottages were built on owned land that provided a means of distinguishing them from other groups of cottages.