In Scotland, the first mention of the potato occurs in the household book of the Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth. From Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh we learn that the price in 1701 was half-a-crown a peck. Robertson, of Irvine discovered what he thought the earliest evidence of potatoes in Scotland in the household book of the Eglinton family. The date of this entry, however, was 1733, and Robert Chambers showed that the date in the Buccleuch book was thirty-two years earlier.
Further information is given by the Duke of Argyle in Scotland As It Was, And As It Is. There we learn that, until long past the middle of the eighteenth century, little or nothing was known of the potato in Scotland, although in after years it brought about the most prodigious effects on the population. The Celts of Ireland first began to use it as an adjunct, and then as a main article of food. From them it passed over to the Celts of the Hebrides, and was introduced into South Uist by Macdonald of Clanranald in 1743. The Highlanders, always suspicious of novelties, resisted the use of it for some years; and the neighbouring island of Bernera was not reached until 1752. It was soon found, however, that the tuber would grow luxuriantly almost anywhere--even on sand, and shingle, and in bogs. It was quickly planted in those patches of ditched-off land known in the Highlands as 'lazy beds'--a not inappropriate term, which in Ireland is applied to patches of potatoes not sown in drills.
In Ireland and in the Highlands it quickly came to be the main food of the people during the greater portion of the year; but in the Lowlands of Scotland, and the rural districts of England, it was only used as a food accessory, though it soon became an important article of commerce. It has often happened that the potato crops have realized higher prices than any other product of the farm.
It has been sometimes stated that the man who planted the first field of potatoes in Scotland died within the last forty years. This is an error. The first field planted in the Lowlands was at Liberton Muir, about the year 1738, by a farmer named Mutter, who died in 1808. An attempt had been made some years earlier by a farm-labourer, named Prentice, near Kilsyth, but not as a farming operation.