This December's LIBRAL upload is certainly the biggest the e-reindeer have ever been required to haul.

The Scottish reports of The Land of Britain make up the larger part of the printed matter made newly available. The Scottish counties form the first thirty of The Land of Britain sequence, but in fact there are not as many reports as this, as some counties are treated together as a single unit, most notably the Highlands (reports 9-12).

In one sense The Land of Britain reports are merely commentaries to the land use maps organized by L. Dudley Stamp in the 1930s. But they are also free-standing essays giving an account of the landscape and farming of their respective counties. They vary in the detail they contain: some are very long indeed and others are a little scanty. Whilst they offer fine-grained accounts of the state of farming in the 1930s, many of them draw on historical materials to show how farming had changed over time. All of them end by presenting data drawn from the annual agricultural census.

It should be noted that the counties were originally issued as county fascicules with their own pagination. The source of the scanned copies is Dudley Stamp’s own set of the reprinted county volumes, those for Scotland forming the first two volumes. The pagination will therefore differ that sometimes cited.

As on previous occasions, The Land of Britain is made available with the permission of Giles N. Clark.

After this bonanza, what else do we have? To begin, a celebratory account of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford’s first quarter century (1938). This contains both a useful bibliography and short biographies of its staff and students. Then a paper on post-war fertilizer use (1980); Gilchrist Shirlaw’s Agricultural Geography of Great Britain (1966); and A survey of agriculture in Caithness, Orkney and Shetland (1972), published by the Highland Development Board.

General View of the month, weighing in at about 670 pages, is one of the largest in the series: Dickson on Lancashire (1814).

LIBRAL wishes all its readers a Happy Christmas and profitable research in 2026. Whilst we are not soliciting Christmas cards, please do write and tell us how useful you find the site. And we welcome suggestions about what else we should add.

Scanner Claus and the Elf

New on LIBRAL in December