The Colony was a squatters' community on "commonty", or common land, on one side of Bennachie, a range of hills near Aberdeen, in Scotland. From the beginning of the nineteenth century common land in the parishes of Chapel of Garioch and Oyne on the east side of Bennachie became home to a community of squatters. This settlement was known locally as the Colony. Various estimates have been made of when the colony began with some citing 1825 but according to Fagen the first documentary evidence is from 1831. A small number of families led a crofting life supplementing it by doing skilled work, such as dyking, quarrying and knitting.