Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" is set partly in the world of the small croft — the modest, enclosed holding of a coastal village — whose modest scale concentrates the poem's emotional weight on the domestic and the particular; A Scottish poet might write "the croft held everything a life required — the house, the kailyard, the field for oats, the hill grazing beyond — a world entire in five acres"; The croft's smallness is part of its poetic significance: the entire economy of a family concentrated in a space that a strong person could walk around in minutes, making it an image of both sufficiency and vulnerability; In poems about the Highland Clearances, the croft stands as the central image of what was lost — not just a house but an entire way of life organized around the small holding, the particular relationship to a particular piece of ground; Contemporary Scottish poetry continues to draw on the croft as a symbol of cultural identity and resistance — the small self-sufficient holding as an alternative to the economies of scale that have transformed modern agriculture; The croft's enclosure — its hedge or dyke separating it from the common land — makes it an image of the private within the communal, the family's particular claim within the shared landscape of the township.