Talk:Demographic history of Scotland

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External links modified
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I have just modified 2 external links on Demographic history of Scotland. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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Demographic Concentration
"Compared with the distribution of population after the later Clearances and the Industrial Revolution, these numbers would have been relatively evenly spread over the kingdom, with roughly half living north of the River Tay"

I see this included a lot in demographic related Scotland articles but is it actually even remotely accurate? There is vast differences in the quality of land in an agricultural sense in Scotland. I think it's absolutely impossible that the population density of the mountainous inland central and western Scotland (which is a significant percentage of Scotland's landmass) was the same as that of Lothian and the eastern coast, for instance. Hillfort density during Roman times would also seem to suggest the land between Hadrian's Wall and the Antontine Wall was significantly denser in settlement than north of the Antonine Wall.

While later urbanization did exacerbate the divide in population density between regions I really don't think it rewrote the map entirely. A population surviving on subsistence agriculture is going to be denser in areas of fertile low lying land and coastal areas. It just seems ridiculous to suggest the population north of the Tay was 50% of the entire population of Scotland, especially when the burghs became a thing, which would only have increased the density of already denser areas of settlement.