PANALBA

The Highland Clearances

Scotland Magazine 07/24/2010 05:00 AM

FROM the peak of Ben Bhraggie in the far north of Scotland, a mighty 100 foot high statue stares majestically out across the North Sea. Largely paid for by his sorrowing tenants, it is a memorial raised in 1834 to the first Duke of Sutherland. He invested huge sums of money from one of the greatest fortunes in England into replacing people with sheep to improve both his income and the lot of the remaining population across his wife's vast estates. Instead of wealth, he created bitterness.

Between 1807 and 1821, thousands of families were evicted from the land, often at sword point, their cottages burned before their eyes, and forced to emigrate to the industrial cities of the south or overseas. Many died of hunger or disease on the emigrant ships and the so-called improvements failed, leaving those left behind in abject poverty. These were the greatest and most notorious of the Highland Clearances which are still raw in the Scottish psyche a people brutally ejected from their ancestral homes by their chiefs, a culture destroyed, one of the great wrongs of history.

Today, when one looks at the Highlands of Scotland, it seems extraordinary that this chilly, damp, infertile, inhospitable - but breathtakingly beautiful - landscape could support the hundreds of thousands of people who once wrested a living from it. Glen after glen, which now supports no more than the odd shepherd, gamekeeper or forestry worker, is littered with the tumbled ruins of deserted villages. The old way of life in the Highlands was hard beyond modern comprehension, and starvation an ever-present threat. Great years of hunger continued well into the nineteenth century.

But, in the minds of its people, the land belonged to those who lived on it and worked on it. A Chief held it in trust for the members of his clan, his kinsmen, and they fought alongside him to protect it from interlopers and usurpers.

This was never reality, but it suited all concerned that the myth was perpetuated for it cemented bonds between landlord and people. In fact, at the very time that the clan system was evolving, King David brought the feudal system to Scotland. In order to hold land, the chief needed a charter from the king which gave him sole possession of his territory in exchange for military and other services to the crown.

However, the clan system was ultimately destroyed by the Government-led repression that followed the 1745 Jacobite Uprising. The warriors who had been so important in keeping clan territory secure became mere tenants, and the chiefs wanted cash rents from them rather than their swords. Later in the eighteenth century, and early in the next, some chiefs, such as the Duke of Argyll, sank great sums of money into their estates to create new industries to create the infrastructure for them to thrive. But the Industrial Revolution to the south undercut them as it undercut traditional rural craftsmen everywhere.

In the south, the dispossessed moved to nearby towns and their new factories, but there were no nearby towns in the Highlands. The Napoleonic War ended; young men could no longer join the army and perhaps send their wages home. The price of Highland produce fell back - first cattle, then sheep. The kelp industry, the one great hope for the future, was destroyed by the import of cheap foreign potash. Profits from its good years, which could have been reinvested, were dissipated by the landowners who were too often disinterested in their people. And the country folk resented the changes and resisted co-operation with any of the lairds' improvements which might have given them a future.

The greatest catastrophe of all was the increase in population. In other times, people had had to leave the land or face starvation, but the introduction of the potato allowed many more to pack the townships in desperate poverty with no way to improve themselves. Those chiefs and lairds who tried to resist the agricultural rationalism that would clear their lands were themselves swept away by the crash in produce prices and their estates were taken over by harder men with no attachment to the tenantry. Others, like the Duke of Sutherland, an English-born Liberal politician, saw it as their duty to employ their capital as efficiently as possible. Sentiment held little sway when the greatest profits came from breeding sheep.

For the majority, the only answer was emigration. Sometimes the chiefs tried to ban it; sometimes they encouraged it. The great majority of those who left the land did so voluntarily, sufficiently enterprising to risk them unknown in search of a better life for their families than the sparse Highlands could ever provide. But the terrible catalogue of cruelty and brutality that arose from so many of those forced evictions was carried from the Highlands by its departing population and still stains memories of the homeland - even today.

Public opinion throughout Great Britain condemned compulsory clearing from the start and continued to do so throughout. But is was legal. In a society that had yet to ban slavery, how could the law come between landlord and tenant? All the critics could do was hope that public condemnation would shame the perpetrators into changing their conduct. Sir Walter Scott said that the Highlanders were being 'dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will one day be found to have been as short sighted as it is selfish and unjust.' David Stewart of Garth in his influential Sketches of the Highlanders, published in 1822, stated that 'It was a cold-hearted spirit of calculation, from which humanity and every better feeling, shrank, that induced men to set up for sale that loyalty, fidelity and affection which ,as they cannot be purchased, are above all price.'

In 1843, the Sheriff of Tobermoray in Mull visited emigrants aboard The Humberstone , a ship on its way to Quebec. 'I spoke to one or two among them, one Macdonald with all the old feelings of attachment towards his Chief - "If he had his own," said the poor fellow,"we would not have been here today." How unworthy of his position in life has this wretched and contemptible trifler proved himself; by his folly and vanity he has ruined an honourable and ancient family, and almost exterminated a faithful and noble race of followers.'

In 1854, the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe published Sunny Memories in Foreign Lands in which she recalled her stay with the Countess of Sutherland (prior to the Countess's husband being made a duke). It earned a ferocious riposte - Gloomy Memories written by Donald McLeod, who had twice been evicted from the Countess's Highland estate. The former book is largely forgotten; the latter is rarely out-of-print.

The grossest injustices were not addressed until the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. This gave the remaining Highlanders security of tenure, but it discouraged investment and froze them on the marginal land to which they had been driven.

For the tiny surviving population of the old Highland farmers, a living is still hard to obtain and the trauma of the Clearances remains unhealed.