The Highland Clearances

Eric Richards

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857905246
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Highland Clearances stands out as one of the most emotive chapters in the history of Scotland.This book traces the origins of the Clearances from the eighteenth century to their culmination in the crofting legislation of the 1880s. In considering both the terrible suffering of the Highland people as well as the stark choices that faced landowners during a period of rapid economic change, it shows how the Clearances were one of many 'attempted' solutions to the problem of how to maintain a population on marginal and infertile land, and were, in fact, part of a wider European movement of rural depopulation. In drawing attention away from the mythology to the hard facts of what actually happened, The Highland Clearances offers a balanced analysis of events which created a terrible scar on the Highland and Gaelic imagination.

1

The Distant Coronach

I. Suishnish in Skye in 1854

SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE WITNESSED a Highland clearance in Skye in 1854. Geikie became a distinguished Scottish geologist who made his reputation with work on the complicated and contentious geology of the west Highlands of Scotland in the late nineteenth century.¹ In later life he wrote his autobiographical Scottish Reminiscences in which he looked back over his earliest career among the rocks of his native Skye, an island of great beauty and tragedy as well as scientific fascination. Geikie recalled his youthful geological enthusiasm and knowledge which gained him the attention and friendship of Hugh Miller (himself a pioneer geologist in the Highlands and a challenging political figure in his own right).

Skye in mid-century was pitched into radical economic change which broke into Geikie’s own wakening consciousness as a boy. In Kilbride an innocent and vulnerable community was about to be destroyed and Geikie was eyewitness to the infamous clearance at Suishnish in 1854 which, some sixty years after the events, he brilliantly recaptured:

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.

It was odd that Geikie made no mention that Skye, like much of the western islands and Highlands, 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 or 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 possible out of the rents, so as on one hand, to satisfy the creditors, and on the other, to hasten the time when the proprietor might be able to resume possession. The interests of the crofters formed a very secondary consideration. With these aims, the trustees determined to clear out the whole population of Suishnish and convert the ground into one large sheep farm, to be placed in the hands of a responsible grazier, if possible, from the south country.

The geologist then recalled the actual moment of eviction:

I had heard some rumours of these intentions, but did not realise that they were in process of being carried into effect, until one afternoon, as I was returning from my ramble, a strange wailing sound reached my ears at intervals on the breeze from the west. On gaining the top of one of the hills on the south side of the valley, I could see a long and motley procession winding along the road that led north from Suishnish. It halted at the point of the road opposite Kilbride, and there the lamentation became long and loud. As I drew nearer, I could see that the minister with his wife and daughters had come out to meet the people and bid them all farewell. It was a miscellaneous gathering of at least three generations of crofters. There were old men and women, too feeble to walk, who were placed in carts; the younger members of the community on foot were carrying their bundles of clothes and household effects, while the children, with looks of alarm, walked alongside. There was a pause in the notes of woe as the last words were exchanged with the family of Kilbride. Everyone was in tears; each wished to clasp the hands that had so often befriended them, and it seemed as if they could not tear themselves away. When they set forth once more, a cry of grief went up to heaven, the long plaintive wail, like a funeral coronach [a Highland dirge], was resumed, and after the last of the emigrants had disappeared behind the hill, the sound seemed to re-echo through the whole wide valley of Strath in one prolonged note of desolation. The people were on their way to be shipped to Canada. I have often wandered since then over the solitary ground of Suishnish. Not a soul is to be seen there now, but the greener patches of field and the crumbling walls mark where an active and happy community once lived.²

Geikie’s vivid evocation of the Suishnish clearance was an eloquent and graphic testimony to the plight of a small community of peasants on the south-east corner of the island of Skye. It was a singular episode in a remote corner of the region. But it carried most of the main themes in the much wider history of the Highland clearances. Suishnish encapsulated the pathos of the clearances, the tragic end of a simple community in a stark and beautiful landscape overlooking the Atlantic ocean. It highlighted the problem of landlord bankruptcy and irresponsibility. It called attention to the unpreparedness and passivity of the people, to their subsequent emigration, and to the general pathos of the event and its consequences. And Geikie clearly pointed the bone at the landlord’s agents, and at the influence of alien forces on this distant place and its fate; his silence on the condition of the people of Suishnish before the clearances invited his readers to assume that, before their dramatic eviction, they had been well-fed, contented and resilient.

In 1854, Suishnish was one of the last episodes in the long history of the Highland clearances; it was also an example of small pre-industrial communities which, across the world, have fallen beneath the implacable demands of economic development. The people of Suishnish stand, in symbolic form, for the rural past which most of the modern world has lost.

II. The rage

The Highland Clearances is one of the sorest, most painful, themes in modern Scottish history. The events have now receded into the distant past, beyond the direct memory of any living person or even their parents. But the passionate indignation lives on, swollen rather than weakened by the passage of time. A rage against past iniquities has been maintained, fed by popular historians and every variety of media construction. A line of denunciation flows from the oral tradition of the early nineteenth century – the samizdat of an oppressed and angry people – to the electronic graffiti of the present day in the webs of retrospective indignation. The latter orchestrates the uninhibited passions and prejudices of a worldwide network of Highland sympathisers, many desperate to right past wrongs, some wanting to reverse the steps of their migrant forbears and regain a foothold in their former clanlands. They see the Highlands as a potential escape from the anomie of modern society, a beckoning prospect of pre-industrial renewal on ancestral lands. And, somehow, the story of the Highland Clearances also provides fuel to the cause of Scottish nationalism.

During the decades of the Highland Clearances (mainly but not only between 1790 and about 1855) a large proportion of the small tenantry of the region was shifted from their farms. The evictions (‘removals’ as they were called at the time) affected every part of the Highlands and Islands, from Aberdeenshire in the east to St Kilda on the far edge of the Atlantic shelf, and from Perthshire in the south to the Shetland Isles in the most distant north. The people were shifted off the land to make way for sheep and later for deer; the landlords reaped better rents and reduced the costs of running their great estates. These included some of the greatest territorial empires in the British Isles, and a few of the proprietors were immensely rich. The gap between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless, was greater than anywhere else in the country. But most of the landowners were men of modest wealth and many were on their uppers both financially and socially.

The people evicted in the classic period of the clearances were often relocated within the estates of the landlord; many shifted off to neighbouring estates or counties; many families eventually made their way to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, joining the factory workforce or working in the fisheries or harvests on the periphery of their own region; many of the women became domestics for the wealthy new bourgeoisie of urban central Scotland. Others migrated abroad, becoming the Highlanders of eastern Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Australia. Many nurtured grievances which they passed on to their children and to their children too. The Highlands eventually became a region of depopulation, unable to support either an old population or a modern structure. It became a pastoral satellite of the industrial economy of the south, serving its needs for industrial raw materials, such as wool and kelp as well as mutton and fish. In mid-Victorian times it was partly transmuted into a playground for the rich and, later still, into a sort of national park for the nation at large and its tourists. It signally failed to recover its population or to develop modern industry. This added to the tourist attraction exerted by the twentieth-century Highlands which, naturally, heightened the piquancy of its historical fate.

The question of the Highland Clearances rankles still in the collective memory of Scotland and especially among Scots abroad. This persistent anger is fuelled by a continuing sense of betrayal, and is remarkable for its stamina. Some historians have marvelled at the unhistorical character of the tradition of hatred. The clearances rank with Glencoe and Culloden in the literature of condemnation. It is a subject which regularly raises the chant of ‘genocide’.

More than a century after the events themselves the politics of retrospective apology have entered the unending debate. In Ireland a British Prime Minister in 1998 was moved to apologise for British failings in the Great Famine of the 1840s; on the other side of the globe an Australian Prime Minister resisted widespread public pressure to make an apology for European mistreatment of Aborigines in previous generations. In Scotland landowners in April 1998 considered making a collective apology for the Highland Clearances in a transparent effort ‘to improve the public image of the landowners’. Auslan Cramb reported that ‘the issue of the Clearances keeps coming up. People feel as passionately about them as do former Japanese prisoners-of-war who want the Japanese government to apologise for World War Two. If it is such a stumbling block, we should make an apology. If that is what it takes, we should do it.’³ One minister referred to current landowners as the ‘direct personal beneficiaries of mass eviction’. When the moment of national atonement arrives a nice historical question will arise: who or what was responsible? And if the clearances merit apology would not then every descendant of landlords (Highlander or not, urban as well as rural) need to reconsider the record of centuries of eviction and displacement which mark virtually every system of land and property occupation?

III. Definition

The word ‘clearance’ was a latecomer to the story. It is defined as ‘The clearing of land by the removal of wood, old houses, inhabitants, etc.’ and its general usage in this sense is credited to the great observer of London life, Henry Mayhew, in 1851. It was a word with more emotional force than its early synonym, ‘eviction’, and possessed a 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)’.⁴ 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’.⁵ One of the church ministers in Sutherland, protesting about these events one year before, had also employed the term: ‘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’.⁶ 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’.⁷ In 1827 Duncan Shaw, writing from the island of Benbecula, spoke of the need ‘to clear particular Districts particularly well calculated for pasture, where the poorest of the people and most of the subtenants reside’.⁸ In that year also, the great population theorist Malthus, whose pessimistic influence certainly extended into the Highlands, spoke of the ‘clearing of the farms’ in Ireland, in his testimony before the Select Committee on Emigration.⁹ By 1843, the word ‘clearance’ had emerged as the general and derogatory term to denote the unsavoury methods of Highland landlords.¹⁰

But even so, much ambiguity remained in the application of the word. Should the word ‘clearance’ be reserved for the ejection of entire communities of large numbers of people at a single time, or could it be also applied to individual cases of eviction (or even to the termination of a tenancy agreement)? The Revd Gustavus Aird, in his evidence to the great parliamentary inquiry into Crofting, 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.¹¹

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’.¹² 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.

Eviction or clearance in any poor rural society was always a devastation in the life of a landholder. Livelihood, status and prospects all depended on tenure and continuity of occupation: all social relations were determined by the connection with the land. Modern urban society knows little of the tenacity of poor people in the...