The Highland Clearances and Resistance
In 1750, a third of Scotland’s population still lived north of the Highland Line; today it is just 5 percent. In 1811, there were 250,000 sheep there; by the 1840s there were almost a million. Within that period sheep replaced people driven from their homes by direct eviction or through hunger and destitution. After the sheep and overgrazing came deer and the creation of hunting grounds for the elite. By 1884, a tenth of Scotland’s land was given over to deer forests, an area greater than the size of Wales, and taking up the great majority of the land in the crofting counties.1 These bald facts are the result of the darkest chapter in Scottish history – the Highland Clearances.
At the time of Culloden, townships existed across the Highlands and Islands, even in what are now remote glens. Their ruins can still be found among the bracken and the heather. These were made up of clachans, a collection of stone-and-turf houses and their outbuildings. Close to them lay the best land on which the people grew crops. Outside the settlements was a mix of arable, grazing and fallow land, and beyond that common grazing land. Cattle were sold or traded, alongside horses and butter. This was a feudal society and hunger was never far away. The land was allocated by the tacksman, who was the main leaseholder from the landowner, and rent was paid to him.
Culloden was not followed immediately by the Clearances, but it did bring fundamental changes. Already the Duke of Argyll leased his lands to those who’d pay best, rather than to his supposed Campbell kin. Mass evictions had already taken place. After the battle, the feudal rights of the Highland nobility were destroyed and the Highlanders disarmed, and the clan chiefs now sought to maximise revenues either to improve their estates or to pay for a lavish lifestyle far away in Edinburgh or London. ‘Improvement’, another term for profitability, was carried out by landowners with no respect for the wishes of their tenants.
In Perthshire and Argyll, land was sold or leased to small or middlesized farmers who could make a living off it, but that was not the case farther north. Here, tenants were evicted from the good arable land and moved onto what was once regarded as common land, and here new townships were created.
These new townships were based on the assumption that crofting was not sufficient to support a family and therefore the workers would need to seek employment from the landlord in order to feed their families. There was little incentive to improve the land, because too often that would mean a rent increase. In coastal areas crofters were encouraged to work in fishing and in making kelp – the burning of seaweed to make soda ash, which was sold to the southern manufacturers of glass and soap. Both industries boomed during the Napoleonic Wars when imports were cut off by the French occupation of much of Europe. Wartime demand for fish and beef also ensured a degree of prosperity.
The communities of the south and east experienced modest population growth, but that of the western seaboard and islands was more pronounced, growing by 55 percent between 1801 and 1841.2 Ullapool was established in the 1780s by the British Fishing Society on land bought from the Cromartie Estate, in order to provide employment in the fishing fleets. But from 1815 the decline in demand for kelp and beef coincided with a sudden fall in the herring catch, and the return of young men from the armed forces pitched a fragile economy into crisis. The potato, which until now had never been central to Highland life, now became the main form of sustenance for many and an easy crop to grow.
Meanwhile, the landlords continued to develop large sheep-grazing farms, with Cheviot and Blackface sheep – bigger sheep that needed more grazing land – that were imported from the Lowlands along with shepherds, factors and estate managers. These new sheep needed to be brought down from the hills, onto what had once been arable land, and they took over pasture where Highlanders had raised their cattle and their smaller breed of sheep.
There had already been opposition to this. More than two decades before Waterloo, in 1792, Bliadhna nan Caorach (Year of the Sheep), there was a virtual uprising in Ross against the new sheep walks, it being reported: ‘… a Mob of about four hundred strong are now actually employed in collecting the sheep over all this and the neighbouring county of Sutherland.’ By early August some 6,000 sheep were being driven south. When troops intervened, the men simply melted away. A few were captured, some banished from Scotland and one transported to Botany Bay. The commander of the troops wrote to London, however, that ‘… no disloyalty or spirit of rebellion, or dislike to His Majesty’s Person or His Majesty’s Government is in the least degree concerned in these tumults.’3
The collapse of the Highland economy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars meant landlords now looked to turn over all their lands to sheep grazing, removing the crofters all together. The most infamous Clearances were on the huge estate of the Countess of Sutherland. Her husband, Lord Stafford, removed between 6,000 and 10,000 tenants between 1807 and 1821. The Strath of Kildonan was cleared of its people between 1813 and 1819, with such savagery that it provoked a reaction.
In December 1812, an agent for Lowland sheep farmers visited the Strath, asking questions of the tenants, who proceeded to run him off their land. He immediately claimed he had been threatened with his life, and the Marquess of Stafford grabbed at his claims to mobilise his male estate workers as special constables and to summon a detachment of soldiers. Faced with this resistance, the locals desisted and the Upper Strath was cleared within three months. The crofters were offered re-settlement in the town of Helmsdale or emigration. Many of the young chose to leave for Canada.4
However, Stafford’s agent, a Lowland Scot named Patrick Sellar, believed this response had been too soft. And so worse was to follow in the parishes of Farr and Kildonan. Later in the century the Highland historian Alexander Mackenzie wrote a History of the Highland Clearances, published in 1883, which described Sellar’s ill-treatment:
As the lands were now in the hands of the factor himself, and were to be occupied as sheep farms, and as the people made no resistance, they expected, at least, some indulgence in the way of permission to occupy their houses and other buildings till they could gradually remove, and meanwhile look after their growing crops. Their consternation was therefore greater, when immediately after the May term day, a commencement was made to pull down and set fire to the houses over their heads. The old people, women and others, then began to preserve the timber which was their own but the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all before them, and when they had overthrown all the houses in a large tract of country they set fire to the wreck. Timber, furniture, and every other article that could not be instantly removed was consumed by fire or otherwise utterly destroyed. The proceedings were carried on with the greatest rapidity and the most reckless cruelty. The cries of the victims, the confusion, the despair and horror painted on the countenances of the one party, and the exulting ferocity of the other, beggar all description. At these scenes Mr. Sellar was present, and apparently, as sworn by several witnesses at his subsequent trial, ordering and directing the whole. Many deaths ensued from alarm, from fatigue, and cold, the people having been instantly deprived of shelter, and left to the mercies of the elements. Some old men took to the woods and to the rocks, wandering about in a state approaching to, or of absolute, insanity and several of them in this situation lived only a few days. Pregnant women were taken in premature labour, and several children did not long survive their sufferings.5
In total, 2,000 people were removed from Kildonan. When Sellar was charged with murder, for burning down an old woman’s house, a hand-picked jury of landowners found him not guilty, but he had brought bad publicity to the Sutherland Estate and lost his job.
James Loch was an Edinburgh lawyer who, from 1812, for forty years was commissioner for the Marquess of Stafford. He would write an apology for his employers but his loathing for their tenants was never far from the surface, with him complaining: ‘… [their] habits and ideas, quite incompatible with the customs of regular society, and civilised life, a
dding greatly to those defects which characterise persons living in a loose and unformed state of society.’6 His concern was to provide wool for the ‘staple manufactory of England’ and to convert the people to ‘the habits of regular and continued industry’.
A young journalist sent by the Scotsman to the Highlands exhibited the same antipathy, writing in 1847 that the Highlanders were ‘an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon’.7 Robert Knox, the Edinburgh surgeon who bought the bodies stolen by the grave snatchers Burke and Hare, believed in the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ and wrote that the Highlanders ‘must be forced from the soil’.8 Sellar would have concurred with this because he regarded the Highlanders as racial degenerates. In his view they were ‘the aborigines of Britain shut out from any general stream of knowledge …’9
In the preface to his History of the Highland Clearances, Mackenzie raised this question, and answered it: ‘Some people ask “Why rake up all this inquiry just now?” We answer that the same laws which permitted the cruelties, the inhuman atrocities described in this book, are still the laws of this land.’10
It might be argued that the Clearances on the Sutherland Estate were the most excessive, and most people were removed with less savagery and on a smaller scale, but they were coerced off their land. At the height of the Clearances there was resistance but it was never organised or effective. Obedience to the clan chief still counted, even when it was he who was ordering you onto the emigrant boat, while ministers stressed obedience to the law, even when they sympathised with their flock.
In 1846, matters became desperate as the potato blight brought the likelihood of famine to the Highlands. In response, Charles Trevelyan, Under-Secretary at the Treasury, wrote: ‘The people cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.’ Two years later he did the opposite in Ireland, letting hundreds of thousands die, arguing that the famine there was ‘a mechanism for reducing surplus population’.11
As the Highlands tottered on the verge of famine, the Clearances continued, but resistance was growing. In 1852, the Cromartie Estate attempted to remove tenants from Badenscallie in Coigach (Wester Ross) to Badentarbat, about three miles to the west, in order to create a new sheep farm. Eighteen tenants ordered to quit refused to co-operate despite police accompanying the estate’s agent and sheriff officer to serve judicial papers on them. Men and women had lain in wait all night, and in the morning ambushed the party, burning the eviction papers. A second attempt to enforce the evictions ended with the police being driven off, and a further attempt ended with the summonses being seized and burned, and the boat that had brought them dragged onto the shore. When the sheriff officer tried again the following year, his legal papers were seized and he was stripped naked. Reports noted that women were at the forefront of the resistance, despite official claims that they were men dressed as women. The evictions were never carried out.12
There were further instances of resistance in the 1870s after Sir James Matheson purchased the Isle of Lewis and a smaller island adjoining it, Bernera. He appointed a solicitor, Donald Munro, to be his factor, and Munro began clearing the estate in the usual heavy-handed way. In 1874, he sent a sheriff officer to Bernera to serve fifty-eight eviction notices, but when the bailiffs arrived at Tobson they were pelted with a shower of clods of earth. The sheriff officer had his coat torn and he issued a threat that ‘if he had a gun … Bernera mothers would be mourning the loss of their sons’.13 Three crofters were arrested but hundreds of people marched on Matheson’s home, Lews Castle in Stornoway. Matheson claimed Munro was acting without his instruction, and dismissed him the following year. Meanwhile, in a celebrated court case the three arrested men were acquitted.
By the 1880s the battle for the land in Ireland helped inspire resistance in the Highlands and Islands, and soon links were being established. In 1881, Michael Davitt, of the radical Irish Land League, spoke in Glasgow in favour of nationalisation of the land and a taxation of land values. Davitt was leading the fight against absentee landlordism in Ireland, the ‘Land War’.14
The leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, entered the fray too, speaking at a meeting organised by Highland societies in Glasgow’s City Halls in 1881. At that time there were evictions taking place in Skye, and the Irish Land League sent £1,000 to help fund the fight to stop them.15 A Land League was formed in the Highlands, and its leader in Lochcarron, John MacRae, wrote:
Ah then we would know exactly what to do —
We’d drive out the keepers, and the English who come here,
To ruin us and our land for their sport on the hill.
We’d drive the deer that have taken over our ploughing land
Up, high on top of the mountains – And down would come
Nimrod.16
The Braes on Skye was home to a crofting community that eked out a living along the Sound of Raasay. In the summer months the men followed the herring shoals, leaving the women to tend the croft: ‘… a few acres of land, with a few sheep, perhaps a cow or a pig or a horse, and a potato patch’.17 In early 1882 the landlord revoked the longstanding right of these crofters to graze their sheep on Ben Lee. After offering to rent the pasture and being refused, the crofters simply turned their sheep out onto the hillside.
The Sheriff of Invernesshire responded by ordering sixty police from Glasgow to the island. At dawn on an April morning they moved into the Braes, arresting six crofters. But as news spread hundreds gathered to pursue them back to the town of Portree: ‘At one point they rained boulders from the top of a cliff onto the police on the road below. There was hand-to-hand fights, baton charges, split heads. Amazingly no one was killed, but when the police finally reached Portree there were many injuries to be attended to.’18
Disturbances spread to Glendale and the Isle of Lewis, with fences being pulled down and hay ricks set on fire. The authorities, as ever, were desperate to blame ‘outside agitators’, but one report was clear who was to blame for ‘inciting’ the crowd. ‘The women, with the most violent gestures and imprecations, declared that the police should be attacked.’19 The ‘Battle of the Braes’, as it became known, received considerable press coverage, most of it sympathetic, and forced the government in London to appoint a commission to investigate conditions in the crofting areas that would slate the poverty it found.
Despite the efforts of Highland landlords to prevent any legislation coming into effect, the Crofters’ Holding Act of 1886 gave security of tenure to crofters and a system for arbitration of rents, together with compensation for improvements carried out by tenants. The legislation put through by the Gladstone government failed to include one of the commission’s key recommendations, that the crofters had a right to more land. That was a fight for the future.
Gaelic Voices Against the Clearances
Màiri Nighean Iain Bhàin (Mary Macdonald), or Big Mary as she became known, was born on 10 March 1821 at Skeabost in Skye.20 She left for Inverness in 1847 to marry Isaac Macpherson. When he died in 1871, she was left with four children to care for alone, suffering a short imprisonment for theft. While in prison she turned to writing poetry in her native language to voice her innocence and to express her anger.
During her time in Inverness, Mary supported Charles Fraser Mackintosh (Teàrlach Friseal Mac An Toisich), who stood for Inverness Burgh in the Westminster general election of 1874, on a programme in support of land rights for the crofters. Mary campaigned for him using song to win support among Gaelic-speakers at a time when newspapers were published only in English. Her fellow poet Sorley MacLean writes: ‘Her personal sense of injustice and empathy with the sufferings of her people gave a unique force to her poetry.’21
After her release she worked in Glasgow as a nurse before returning to Skye in 1882, a year when the island was at the centre of the land agitation. Her Gaelic songs were used in the election campaign of the Highland League (also entitled the Highland Land Law Reform Association). Five of its members were elected to Westminste
r in the 1885 UK election, including an old associate of Karl Marx, Gavin Clark, in Caithness. Another of the MPs was D. H. MacFarlane, a Scottish Roman Catholic who had previously sat for an Irish constituency.22
They helped secure the Crofter’s Holding Act of the following year, which gave the crofters security of tenure and appointed a commission that reduced rents. The Land League’s best known slogan was ‘Is treasa tuath na tighearna’. This Gaelic saying or proverb is usually translated as ‘The people are mightier than a lord’. As well as parliamentary politics, they encouraged direct action.23
Mary Macdonald’s last poem is ‘Prophecy and Blessing to the Gaels’:
And when I am in the boards
my words will be a prophecy.
They will return, the stock of the crofters
Who were driven over the sea.
And the aristocratic ‘beggars’
will be routed as they [the crofters] were.
Deer and sheep will be carted away
and the glens will be tilled;
A time of sowing and a time of reaping,
and a time to reward the robbers.
And the cold ruined houses
will be built up by our kin.
Today across much of the Highlands and Islands you can still see the remains of the clachans where Gaelic-speaking communities lived. Their destruction was one of the final chapters in the emergence of capitalism in Britain. That began with the enclosure of the common lands in England, which would spread north to Lowland Scotland, and included the wealth accrued by the slave trade and the creation of Empire, accompanied as it was by war and famine. The dry-stone walls of those crofts still visible today are one more memorial to the victims of that bloody chapter, whose end we still have not reached.
A People's History of Scotland Page 13