The countryside in which the workers laboured and cultivated their gardens changed out of all recognition between the middle of the eighteenth century and the start of the twentieth. Increasingly intensive and scientific farming transformed the landscape, not only bringing in unprecedented profits but also depriving most of the people of the tiny patches of land from which for centuries they had scratched a semi-independent living and marshalling them into disciplined, closely supervised armies of wage-earners. T. M. Devine has characterised the break with the past in Lowland Scotland in the later eighteenth century as ‘more decisive and [the] social transformation therefore more disruptive’ than in England or even the Highlands. This transformation did not only affect agriculture. Industries, mines and railways also took over the countryside and demanded equally large, closely supervised workforces.

It was no accident that the Eastern Lowlands became the most prosperous and innovative agricultural area of Scotland – the envy of Europe by 1830, in T.C. Smout's words. This gently undulating landscape – a narrow coastal strip in the north widening to cover half the country further south – is sheltered from the north and west winds by a series of mountain and hill ranges: the Cairngorms and Grampians in the north, the Sidlaws and the Ochils in lowland Angus and Perthshire and the Pentland, Lammermuir and Border hills in the south-east. These ranges help to make for a relatively dry and temperate climate. In the Carse of Gowrie, between Dundee and Perth, the Sidlaws protect the most favoured stretch of farming land in the country from the cold dry easterly winds. ‘There is no country in Scotland, which enjoys a climate so mild and favourable to vegetables as this’. The districts along the Moray Firth in the north, between Stonehaven and Dundee, the Forth basin and the south-east have the best soil for arable farming: deep rich loam and workable clay.

In spite of its advantages, the latitude of the Eastern Lowlands keeps it a good deal chillier than England – two degrees cooler than the south of England on average. During the eighteenth and a large part of the nineteenth centuries the Little Ice Age still held Scotland, more so than England, in its grip, although it was the north and west of Scotland that felt it the most.