County

Early Stuart Denbighshire, rather like its western neighbour Caernarvonshire, was subject to political tensions that owed much to its topography. ‘Denbighshire’, HP Commons 1604-29. Running southwards from the Irish Sea and the county’s border with Flintshire is what was described in the 1670s as ‘a pleasant and fertile vale, reaching in length from south to north 17 miles and in breadth about five, called the Vale of Clwyd ... much inhabited by gentry’ and ‘begirt with high hills’. R.

Regarded as ‘the most impassable, barren country of all Wales’, Caernarfonshire was described in the 1670s as

The Linlithgow shires were grouped on the eastern shores of the Firth of Forth, with Linlithgowshire to the south, Stirlingshire to the north and Clackmannanshire sandwiched between the two. The economy of the region prospered in the early seventeenth century, thanks to its coal and salt industries and its position at the intersection of trade routes, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and, through the port of Bo’ness, to other parts of Britain and the continent.

The shires of Forfar and Kincardine formed the area between the River Dee and the River Tay on the east coast of Scotland. Forfarshire was the larger of the two, and the more prosperous, as it included good farming areas and the mercantile centre of Dundee, although the northern half of the shire was mountainous, with the Braes of Angus forming the edge of the highland region. Atlas Scot.

The ‘kingdom’ of Fife, between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth and bounded to the east by the North Sea, was separate in identity as well as geography from the rest of Scotland. Its smaller appendage, the inland shire of Kinross, was sandwiched between Fife and Perthshire. Fife was dominant, both in size and wealth, and in the assessments of the later 1650s was rated at nearly 40 times the levy imposed on Kinross. A. and O. Fife was also the more aggressive of the two when it came to politics and religion.

Inverness-shire stretched about 120 miles from the city of Inverness in the east, down the Great Glen to Inverlochy on the west coast, and across to the Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke xlvii, unfol.: 5 Mar. 1656. Bounded by Ross and Cromarty to the north and Argyll and Perthshire to the south, Inverness-shire formed the heart of the highland region of Scotland, and was controlled by a number of important clans, such as the Frasers, McIntoshes, Camerons, Urqhuarts, McLeods and the McDonalds of Glengarry, Clanranald and Sleat.

Dumfriesshire, between Roxburghshire and the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, was an area of strategic importance, including not only the ports of Dumfries and Annan but also the main roads into the Scottish interior from Carlisle. Historically, the shire was divided into three more-or-less equal parts, named after the three valleys which led from the mountains southwards into the Solway Firth – Eskdale, Annandale and Nithsdale – and each division became the powerbase for an influential earldom in the middle ages.

As the name suggests, Edinburgh Shire surrounded the Scottish capital, but it also covered a large area of prime agricultural land between the Firth of Forth to the north and the foothills of the Pentland, Moorfoot and Lammermuir ranges to the south. Atlas Scot. Hist. 27. In the assessments of the 1650s, Edinburgh Shire was the third most heavily taxed shire in Scotland, exceeded only by Fife and Perthshire. A. and O. ii.

The shires of Ayr and Renfrew in the south west of Scotland had much in common. They were geographically contiguous, although Ayr was by far the larger of the two, paying nearly three times the assessment of Renfrew in the 1650s; and in the middle ages both shires had been incorporated into the Stewart principality, divided (from north to south) into the baronies of Renfrew, Cunningham and Kyle Stewart, and the earldom of Carrick. Acts Parl. Scot. vi, pt. 2, p. 837; A. and O.; Atlas Scot.

The archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland, and the shire of Caithness on the Scottish mainland, form the most northerly part of the British Isles. In 1654-9 they were the largest constituency to return members to the Westminster Parliament: from the far north of Shetland to the south of Caithness is a distance of over 200 miles. Despite this geographical spread, the conglomeration made some historical sense, as all three parts were Norse, rather than Scottish, in culture, and remained dependent on the sea for travel and trade, especially with Scandinavia.