The areas the boundaries show relate to specially identified areas for hill farming.

16 Agricultural Area Offices provide local support for agricultural issues. This information then feeds into Agricultural Headquarters in Edinburgh.

This dataset comes from an amalgamation of classes 1 and 2 of the MLURI Land capability classificaton. LCA Class 1 - Land capable of producing a very wide range of crops LCA Class 2 - Land capable of producing a wide range of crops Land Capability for Agriculture maps at 1:250K scale were produced and published in 1982. These maps provided a national and regional appreciation of the location and areal extent of the Land Capability for Agriculture classes and were specifically designed for strategic planning purposes. More detailed maps of the main arable areas of Scotland were carried out and published in the mid 1980's. These covered classes 1, 2 and 3.1. The purpose of these maps was to assist planners and agricultural officers in assessing cases made for development and determining priorities in relation to retaining areas of high quality agricultural land.

Agricultural parishes are based on Civil Parishes which were abolished as an administrative unit in Scotland in 1975. Agricultural parishes continue to be used for boundary and statistical purposes. There are 891 agricultural parishes in Scotland and they are used in the Agricultural Census and for the payment of farming grants and subsidies. The dataset contains parish boundaries, parish names and parish codes.

This download service provides spatial data relating to land cover held by the Scottish Government.

The fragile area dataset was digitised in 1998 on behalf of the Agriculture Department. There is no defintion of 'fragile' land for the context of this dataset. A fragility index has been applied to the LFA designation since 2003. This is part of the payment mechanism for lfass, it is set at parish level and changes from year to year. It is not known whether the fragile land and fragility index are linked.

This download service provides spatial data relating to land cover held by the Scottish Government.

This view service provides spatial data relating to land cover held by the Scottish Government.

This download service provides spatial data relating to land use held by the Scottish Government.

This download service provides spatial data relating to land use held by the Scottish Government.