18831: The Lewis-Harris Boundary Dispute

The unclear demarcation of the boundary between the estates of Lewis and Harris was the cause for two sets of hearings in 1805 and 1851. Initially pursued by Alexander Hume, Esquire of Harris, against The Right Honourable Francis, Lord Seaforth, this was a judicial enquiry with local crofters giving accounts of where they understood the line of the boundary to be, based on information passed down from father to son over many generations.

The second hearing was due to the death of Lord Seaforth in the intervening years and the continuing disputes between the Lewis and Harris crofters.

A Captain Burnaby was in the island in the late 1840s and 1850s surveying for the Ordnance Survey maps; the boundary was finally agreed in 1851.