A History of the Highland Clearances

Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746-1886

Eric Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000081619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1982, A History of the Highland Clearances looks at the forcible clearance of tenants from land they had farmed for centuries by landlords in the Highlands of Scotland in the early nineteenth century. It examines the general context of historical change, provides a full narrative of the clearances and offers a critical evaluation of the documentary sources upon which the entire story depends.

By placing his subject in its historical perspective and into the context of the rest of Britain and Europe, Eric Richards vividly illustrates the realities of the Highland experience in the age of the clearances.

PART ONE

THE WIDER FRAMEWORK

1 HIGHLAND AGRARIAN TRANSFORMATION IN PERSPECTIVE

‘The diminution of cottagers, and other small occupiers of land, has in every part of Europe been the immediate forerunner of improvement and better cultivation.’

Adam Smith, quoted in Earl of Selkirk, OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE HIGHLANDS ( 1805).

In 1851 in the streets of London there were men, dressed in the rags of Highland dress, playing bagpipes for the toss of a half-penny. These people were refugees from the ramshackle economy of northern Scotland. They were discovered by Henry Mayhew, that remarkable explorer of the lowest strata of life in proletarian London(1), and were drawn no doubt from what Marx called the capital’s slum ‘colonies’. The beggarly Highlanders on the London streets were living symbols of a dispossessed peasantry. Their kinsmen and counterparts were to be found across the globe – in the cotton factories of Glasgow, in the wynds of Edinburgh, in the migrant hospitals of Quebec and the shepherds’ huts of New South Wales. They were a people set adrift in an alien world by the forces of agrarian transformation in the far north of Scotland. Some of them became extremely successful members of the expatriated race, while others died in the effort to re-establish an independent life far from their homeland. For many decades the common people had left the Highlands, seeking to escape the intolerable conditions at home, or attracted by the magnetic prospect of better conditions elsewhere. But in many cases the departure of the people from the Highlands was accelerated by a class of landlords who ‘cleared’ their lands in order to introduce more profitable methods of production. The clearances, and the plight of these refugees, are part of the tragic and perplexing history of the Scottish Highlands.

The story of the Highland clearances is often told in terms which are deceptively simple. The clearances happened mainly between 1780 and 1855 when the common people were swept off their traditional lands, and replaced by sheep of the new commercial breeds developed in the south. In the well-known version of this historical process, the clearances are represented as an unmitigated disaster for the Highlands, in which evictions were perpetrated by landlords who had become intoxicated on the potent doctrines of Adam Smith. The owners of the land were an old social elite, which had been thoroughly anglicised in the years after the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1746. They turned their ancestral territories over to great capitalist sheep-farmers, colonists from the south who extracted large profits from the lucrative new pastoral economy, and rejected altogether the values of the older society which they supplanted. The sheep-farmers lived aloof from the Highland community and contributed nothing to the cohesion of the society. The solidarity of the old Highland community, especially its ties of kinship, once its most characteristic feature, was demolished by the clearances. The clearances therefore represented the death of the clan system, the precise antithesis of the old paternalist, benevolent and communal system of social and economic life. The sheep-farmers were the harbingers of the individualist, profit-maximising, hedonistic philosophy of nineteenth-century liberalism, a creed which denied the validity of reciprocal obligations in society, and gave little recognition to ordinary humanitarian concern.

This standard version of the story has it that the clearances were condoned by the theorists of classical political economy, comfortable in their armchairs in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. The destruction of the old Highland society was conducted with unexampled brutality and unconcern for the present or future welfare of the native people. Some of the ugliest scenes of Scottish, or indeed British, history, were witnessed during the Highland clearances. The people were evicted from the estates, and the Highlands were depopulated until only a small residue of the Celtic race remained. Living in some of the worst rural slums of the British Isles, deprived of their lands, these people became vulnerable to famine, and to the crippling of the human will. The other Highlanders dispersed, to become factory fodder in the south of Scotland and in England, or, as part of a wider diaspora, emigrants to the New World in North America and the Antipodes. The Scottish Highlands became a beautiful, tragic wilderness, a culture erased. Scottish politicians, the British newspapers and legislature, and the public at large, chose to ignore the events. The Highland clearances, therefore, were one of the most shameful episodes in British history: they entailed the destruction of the old Highland society, the defeat of a unique Celtic civilisation by the more advanced technology and ideology of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the triumph of English ways over those of the Scots. This received history of the Highland clearances is a saga of agrarian revolution, of political domination, of internal colonisation, even of genocide. And today the story of the clearances has become one of the most powerful symbols to inspire the revival of the Scottish nation.

Simplicity and historical realities often diverge and yet, in different measures, most of the propositions stated above embrace considerable truth about the events in the Highlands in the age of the clearances. For, despite the shrill and unending controversy that surrounds the story, most people will agree that the clearances were possessed of tragic proportions, and that the events are properly invested with great symbolic importance.

Nevertheless these simple initial propositions about the clearances conceal too much about the nature of the events and the meaning of the process. For instance, the word ‘clearance’ was itself a relative latecomer to the story. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘The clearing of land by the removal of wood, old houses, inhabitants, etc.’ and its general usage in this sense is credited to Henry Mayhew in 1851. It was a word with somewhat more emotional force than its early synonym, ‘eviction’, and possessed a substantially different connotation from the landlords’ word, ‘removal’, which was the standard usage in the Highlands until the 1840s. The term was used, on occasion, long before Henry Mayhew spoke of the clearances. In 1804 a sheep-farmer in Sutherland faced a clause in his tenancy agreement which, on its expiration, required him to have ‘the Farm cleared of any followers (as is now the case)’.(2) In the same county in 1819, in the midst of one of the greatest clearances, an estate agent used the word in the same sense: ‘To give you some idea of the extent cleared I subjoin a list of the numbers removed in the different parishes.’(3) One of the ministers in Sutherland, protesting about these events one year before, had also employed the phrase: ‘From what I know of the circumstances of the majority of those around me,’ he wrote, ‘since so many were sent down from the heights to clear Sellar’s farm, I do not perceive how the great addition, which is intended to be made to their number, can live comfortably as you anticipate.’(4) In 1821 one of the main architects of the clearances, James Loch, spoke of ‘the policy of clearing the hills of people, in order to make sheep walks’.(5) In 1827 Duncan Shaw, writing from the island of Benbecula, spoke of the need ‘to clear particular Districts particulary well calculated for pasture, where the poorest of the people and most of the subtenants reside’.(6) In that year also, the Rev. Thomas Malthus, whose influence certainly extended into the Highlands, spoke of the ‘clearing of the farms’ in Ireland in his testimony before the Select Committee on Emigration.(7) It is evident that, by 1843, the word ‘clearance’ had emerged as the general and derogatory term to denote the methods of Highland landlords.(8)

But even then much ambiguity remains in the application of the word. It was not self-evident that the word clearance should be reserved for the ejection of entire communities of large numbers of people at a single time, or whether it could be also applied to individual cases of eviction (or even to the termination of a tenancy agreement). The Reverend Gustavus Aird, in his evidence to the Napier Commission in 1883, drew ‘a distinction between removal and eviction. I call it eviction when they have to go off the estate and go elsewhere. Some of those removed may have been removed out of their places and found places upon the same estate. I make a difference between eviction and removal.’ (9) To add to the confusion, William Skene insisted that the proper sense of the term clearance was ‘the extension of the land of the large farms and the removal of the former occupants of the land unaccompanied by emigration’. (10) As it happens the phrase ‘the Highland clearances’ has become an omnibus term to include any kind of displacement of occupiers (even of sheep) by Highland landlords: it does not discriminate between small and large evictions, voluntary and forced removals, or between outright expulsion of tenants and resettlement plans.

The span of time over which the clearances stretched was much longer than is usually reckoned. Even on a narrow definition, there were clearances much earlier than 1780, and much later than 1855. Clearances were by no means exclusive to the Scottish Highlands; nor were Highland proprietors uniquely prone to evict their tenants and squatters. Clearances were not restricted to purposes associated with the introduction of sheep: landlords shifted tenants in order to extend cattle production, to develop villages, for sporting purposes, and for changing forms of arable cultivation. Nor is it at all certain that the older form of society in the Highlands was in a condition of vitality on the eve of the sheep clearances: it was probably moribund before the ‘45. Even before the great population expansion of the latter part of the eighteenth century, the ability of the economy to support its people is questionable. The reciprocity and benevolence of the old order must be balanced against the arbitrary ruthlessness of an extremely hierarchical and bellicose society, one in which pre-industrial mortality rates were accompanied by low levels of welfare and literacy. Not all landlords cleared their people, and not all clearing landlords were insensitive to the human needs of their people. In many cases elaborate, extraordinary provision was made for the people displaced by the sheep farmers.

On a more general plane, it may be said that the causes of the undoubted economic problems of the Highlands were complex and cannot be attributed simply to the clearances. The problem of the Highland economy has hardly yet been solved today. As to the depopulation, it is undeniable that the number of Highlanders continued to rise throughout the period of the clearances. The migration of the Highlanders pre-dated, and post-dated, the sheep clearances, and many people left the Highlands of their own volition, attracted by the palpably better prospects of life in the new urban civilisation in the south. Moreover, many of the sheep farmers were Highlanders. In opposition to the conventional interpretation, it must be said that not all the classical economists favoured the clearances. Many newspapers made very loud noises against the clearances, and the House of Commons was the scene of several eloquent denunciations of the Highland lairds. The legislature passed a number of measures designed to ameliorate the condition of the Highlanders. Public opinion became increasingly critical of events in the north and eventually helped to curb the excesses of the lairds. The episodes of brutality during the clearances were, in proportion to the dimensions of the events, relatively few, and, in any case, scarcely unprecedented. Nor, in the final analysis, is it at all clear that the levels of welfare – economic, social, even psychic – were lower after the clearances than before.

Most of all there is proper doubt about the historical significance of the Highland clearances. Rather than a potent myth for latter-day Scottish nationalism, the story of the clearances may be better understood as the consequence of seemingly inexorable demographic and economic forces, operating upon a dependent and insecure society, and beyond the influence of local agency. It may be argued that its prime significance lies within the pattern of relations between a region and a metropolis, between small and large communities, or a fortiori, in the study of age-old shifts in land use which recur in all human history.

This chapter is written with two assumptions in mind. One is that the Highland clearances were part of such a recurrent theme in agrarian history: of repeated shifts in the use of land, whereby the weaker have been pushed out by the stronger, under the influence of land hunger, technological change, and market forces. Land use has been constantly restructured and one system substituted for another. Such changes sometimes took centuries: sometimes they occurred with cataclysmic violence. The second conviction is to do with universal and particular causes. There exist factors and universal influences which clearly transcend (and may be distinguished from) purely local forces. When circumstances such as a sudden growth of population, or the introduction of certain types of tenurial reforms over many centuries, or de-industrialisation in many areas, happen almost simultaneously across half a continent, it is likely that general rather than local causes will claim priority. The study of the Highland clearances has been dominated by the emotional drama and by local events and circumstances. But to ask the question why did the clearances happen and with what consequences, a local perspective is not enough.(11)

I

Most of the history of the clearances is written as a series of particular episodes. There is a very considerable body of description, both contemporary and reminiscent, of specific events during the clearances, expositions in which there is a very close focus on the details of the moment. These descriptions are sometimes joined together to produce a very episodic but compelling evocation of the Highland experience. A typical piece of such evidence comes from the autobiography, Scottish Reminiscenses, of Sir Archibald Geikie, the distinguished geologist. His memoir was written some sixty years after the events of his boyhood times in Skye, when his youthful geological enthusiasm and knowledge gained him the attention and friendship of Hugh Miller (himself an important source of clearance description). Geikie’s account contains an especially vivid eyewitness recreation of a clearance in Skye in 1854. He recalled that:

In those days the political agitator had not appeared on the scene, and though the people had grievances, they had never taken steps to oppose themselves to their landlords or the law. On the whole, they seemed to me a peaceable and contented population, where they had no factors or trustees to raise their rents or to turn them out of their holdings.

Interestingly Geikie made no reference to the fact that Skye had been repeatedly ravaged by the potato famine during the previous seven years. He continued:

One of the most vivid recollections which I retain of Kilbride is that of the eviction and clearance of the crofts of Suishnish. The corner of Strath between the two sea inlets of Loch Slapin and Loch Eishort had been for ages occupied by a community that cultivated the lower ground where their huts formed a kind of scattered village. The land belonged to the wide domain of Lord Macdonald, whose affairs were in such a state that he had to place himself in the hands of trustees. These men had little local knowledge of the estate, and though they doubtless administered it to the best of their ability, their main object was to make as much money as possib...