by John Prebble
The Sheriff’s report contained no criticism of Josephine MacDonell, and only a passing reference to her as one of the four proprietors. It was sympathetic but impatient with Catherine MacKinnon, whom Ross had called Aunt Katy, and whose cabin was made from canvas sacks, branches and ropes. She was “an obstinate, perverse person,” said the Sheriff, “declining to remove from a wretched hovel at Inverie.” He ordered her to be carried to a farmhouse at Scottas, “but the tenant objected to her, and the poor woman lay that night and the succeeding one at the roadside, and for aught I know is still without house or shelter.” Surprisingly there was one death only, the widow Mary MacDonald who died at Nigart in the first week of spring and in her ninety-fourth year. A month later, the Inverness Courier reported that “proceedings have been taken to remove those crofters and families who were allowed to remain at the time of the evictions last year.” And when they were gone, James Baird the ironmaster took possession of Inverie House and put his sheep on the hills.
To a greater or lesser degree, the harsh treatment of the Knoydart people was common to most evictions, as was the self-interest of many chiefs, each by tradition the ceann-cinnidh, the head of the clan and father of the children he was now deserting. It has been impossible to write of such events without feeling, and my emotions admittedly influenced the style and language of The Highland Clearances. As a result, the book has sometimes been dismissed as politically inspired, but the implication that it was written to the direction of an agit-prop committee has never distressed me. And when I am called a barrack-room lawyer by my most amiable Scots critic – a distinguished product of Stowe, Oxford, Edinburgh and the Third Guards – I can perhaps accept it as a compliment. The term is rarely heard in a barrack-room, but is often used by some warrant and commissioned officers who believe they know best what a private soldier should think, and are uneasy when he makes up his own mind.
I can understand those academics who maintain that the science – not the art – of historical writing requires dispassionate detachment, and I think such coolness of intellect must explain their silence when the inhumanities of the past continue into the present. I cannot agree, however, that it is unrealistic to make moral judgements in the context of the Clearances, or incorrect to suggest that there could have been a humane alternative to the Diaspora of the Gaelic people. It is true that no such alternative was considered by the few who profited from the misery of the many, but this was not because their age did not or could not supply one, or that the spiritual teaching of the time did not oblige them to seek it. Apart from Christian precepts, to which lip-service was paid by 19th-century proprietors and their placemen in the Church of Scotland, there were men of intelligence and compassion among their contemporaries – like the agriculturalist Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, the Swiss social scientist Sismondi, and Delane’s reporter at Ardgay – who not only shared Walter Scott’s anger at the removal of a native population in favour of sheep but also suggested means by which both might be profitably sustained upon the land.
The chiefs were the first instrumental party to the great changes which began in the decades following Culloden, and because academic study of these events is not concerned with moral responsibility it has too often ignored their obligations within an obsolescent clan society which still thought of them as protectors and providers. Their property rights, based upon tenure-at-will, made eviction easy, and the lack of violent resistance to it – the manner in which Highland men, if not always Highland women, walked into exile with the docility of the sheep which replaced them – can be explained in part by the fact that the people acknowledged the power of the ceann-cinnidh to act as he thought best for them and the land.
In 1794, the seventy-two men of his clan whom Alasdair Ranaldson summoned into a company of the Strathspey Fencibles did not challenge his right to demand this military service as a condition of their tenancy. Their minds and hearts were still close to a recent past when another MacDonell chief had boasted that his rent-roll consisted of five hundred swordsmen. These young men, however, were uneasy in a changing world and while agreeing to follow Glengarry where he wished, they asked for an assurance that their families would not be evicted during their absence. In a petition to him they said they expected “to enjoy those possessions which our ancestors so long enjoyed under your ancestors.” Furthermore, “as we do not wish that you should lose by us we shall give as high rents as any of your Lowland shepherds ever give, and we shall all become bound for any one whose circumstances may afford you room to mistrust.” Their faith in his continuing protection was nobly naive. They could never have competed with the rents Border graziers were willing to pay, and soon after their discharge in 1802 many of them were gone to the Canadian woodlands between the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence rivers. When it was too late, in Lochaber and elsewhere, the bards who had once praised the chiefs in resonant and clanging verse now denounced them for their betrayal of the Gaelic people.
Their land and they themselves
will die together,
since they have become hard monsters,
stiff-necked, cruel,
with no mercy of remorse …
It is absurd and indecent, I think, to pretend that the familial interdependence between clansmen and chiefs, which many of the latter so easily abandoned, can be maintained or resurrected today. My use of that word indecent, and the subsequent addition of obscene under questioning, inflated a small bubble of outrage some years ago during an International Clan Gathering in Edinburgh. Whatever the sincere intentions of many involved in its organisation, this was fundamentally a theatrical exercise on behalf of the tourist industry, and most people in Scotland seemed content to accept or ignore it as such. That same week I was invited to give an extramural lecture in the University. I had prepared some notes but I was given no lectern, only a low table eighteen inches from the floor, and I was thus unable to read them, despite the flourishing use of three pairs of glasses. Having failed to hold the papers successfully in my hand, I eventually discarded them and spoke of what I felt about the Gathering and the men and women of Scots descent who had come to it from overseas. I regretted that many of them knew little, and were being told nothing during their visit, of the manner in which their ancestors had been driven from the Highlands by chiefs whose descendants were now splendidly arrayed in George Street to greet them. I said there was something indecent in a tartan charade which pretended there had been no sadness and betrayal, and that at best it was “as if the undertakers who long ago buried the corpse of the clan society were now holding its wake.”
The natural indignation this aroused charged the emotions of some Highland gentlemen at a press conference the next day, called to refute a growing belief that the Gathering was a failure. Having denied this, and dealt with an American reporter who wished to know if Highlanders still ate their porridge while standing, the convenors and their supporters reluctantly answered questions about the Clearances. The Countess of Sutherland admitted she disapproved of much of her family’s responsibility for them, but added that she did not care to live with them for the rest of her life. When she was asked what she thought of my intemperate criticism, an island chief intervened on her behalf. “You get experts on everything. John Prebble is one of these experts, an English expert.” Agreeing with this, another said, “It grieves me that my clansmen from abroad should see these attacks. John Prebble does not know the least thing about what it feels like to have Scottish blood.” Taken literally this was meaningless, but metaphorically it was not without irony. Because of his ancestors’marriages he is almost as English as myself, and only marginally less well-favoured in that respect than others of his obsolete rank. The search for wives in England was common among Highland chiefs in the 18th and 19th centuries, and after seven generations of this amiable preference one of the greatest today, in name if not in property, has no more than one per cent of “Scottish blood.”
The incident was of course trivial, and might have been less acri
monious had I been provided with a lectern or better eyesight. Beneath its lightsome ripples, however, there were darker undertows. More had been challenged than the masquerade of that urban Gathering, which profited the tourist trade of Edinburgh but did little for the Highlands where it could have been more properly placed. The fabric of the private ownership of land in the mountains today was woven during the years of Improvement. The threads run taut from Josephine MacDonell to the late Lord Brocket and his living ilk, and censure of the past arouses unwelcome criticism of the present. The strongest apologists for the evictors are to be found among a tenacious property class, and in maintaining that the Clearances can now be forgotten they argue that a man should not be called to account for the behaviour of his ancestors, or of those who once possessed the land he now owns. In general this is obviously true, but where he has inherited the residual comfort, station, profit and influence secured by the Clearances he may not dismiss the enduring memory of the suffering they imposed upon a helpless people. Of that, too, he is a legatee.
Knoydart today is an empty echo-chamber for such angry thoughts. Still unapproachable by road, it is isolated in its sorrow. The yellow hawkweed and violet campion which grow in the northern pass above Inverie are no longer crushed by the hooves of the black cattle its people once drove to Loch Hourn, joining the herds that came from Glenelg and the Outer Hebrides. There are still footpaths over the ascending mountains to the east, wild tracks that twist by dark escarpments and drumming streams to a braeside above the drowned township of Kinlochquoich. It was on this wind-tortured massif of Barrisdale that Edward Ellice’s guests, having reached the western march of his estate, abandoned their pursuit of his deer and were then rowed down the loch by singing boatmen, coming at night to the spartan comfort of iron bedsteads and cane chairs at Glen Quoich Lodge. Not having the spirit or strength now to enter Knoydart from the east, I have persuaded myself that its cloud-touched splendour is best observed from Skye, at Isleornsay where the Sillery was anchored, or on the coastal road from Kilmore to Armadale Bay. In the morning its peaked shadows darken the Sound of Sleat, and the indigo mask that hides its face may not be lifted until an hour before noon, or later still if there are black storms above Caillich and Ladhar Bheinn. But sometimes at the end of a kindly day, when it is seen on the port beam of the Mallaig ferry, the glory of a departing sun can ennoble the slopes of its corrugated hills and fill their watered ravines with falling gold.
The five peninsulas of Glenelg, Knoydart, Morar, Ardnamurchan and Morvern are the extended hand of the Rough Bounds, forever grasping at the Isles of Mull and Skye. Above the Sound of Sleat the blue mountains are arthritic knuckles on the thumb and forefinger of Glenelg and Knoydart, but southward there are more gentle hills, rolling inland to the higher ground of Lochaber. The narrow trenches of the sea-lochs, where a sudden fall of sunlight can change the water from dark jade to beaten silver, were once an anchorage for merchantmen from France and Holland, a safe landing for Jacobite letter-carriers and the agents who came to collect the rents which maintained an absent chief in exile. Until the beginning of this century side-wheel and screw-driven steamers from Oban and the Clyde regularly visited their wooden piers, and within my own memory Aberdeen trawlers sheltered in the lee of Loch Hourn before leaving for the North Minch and the Icelandic seas. Ironically, now that their native people are largely gone and there are no townships in their small glens, the Rough Bounds are penetrated by three principal roads, the ribs of a leaf branching from the spine of the Great Glen and touching the coastline of all but the remote loneliness of Knoydart. The northern way goes over the timbered pass of Mam Ratagan to Glenelg Bay and the waiting majesty of Skye across the water. In the centre, another follows the shore of Loch Eil to Glenfinnan and thence to Morar and the raucous herring-gulls at Mallaig. The third comes down the western shore of Loch Linnhe from Corran, where Alasdair Ranaldson was fatally injured as he leapt ashore from the wreck of the Stirling Castle. This road forks at the entrance to Glen Tarbet. One tine thrusts through Morvern to the pier of Lochaline on the Sound of Mull, and the other bends by Sunart to Salen where it divides again, northward to Acharacle, Moidart, Arisaig and Mallaig, and westward through Ardnamurchan to the lone lighthouse on its Point.
There are few Highland roads so beguiling as these. In Moidart and Arisaig the track wanders leisurely above the green fiords that gave both districts their Norse names, past gaunt survivors of a great forest of oak and through a corridor of pine where I once saw a pair of red cross-bills, far north of their customary ground and spinning like sparks in the evening shade. Hawk and raven quarrel above purple outcrops on the upper slopes of Ardnamurchan, and at the shoreline hem of its shawl of hills black-capped tern make a spring landfall, coming down on scythe-blade wings to scrape their nests in the seaward grass. As were all Highland roads not long since, these byways of the Rough Bounds are rarely wider than a single car and follow the trails cut by foot, horse and cattle. Cautionary posts mark the passing-places that inspire competitive courtesies and remind us that driving was once the civilised pleasure of motoring. Forty-seven years ago, when I rode with the carter from Acharacle to Strontian, the only vehicle we passed was a doctor’s bull-nosed Morris, and even today, in late fall, I sometimes meet no one as I drive over the welcoming hills and beneath the rustling bronze of the valley trees.
It is said that Ardnamurchan’s name means the land of the sea-hound, the otter, and one day I will see its brown inquisitive head breaking a circle of ripples in Glenmore Bay, or hear its shrill whistle at dusk in Borrodale. The road where this may happen goes sweetly along the timbered shore of Loch Sunart to Ardslignish, turning inland there by Ben Hiant’s volcanic cone to the ard of the peninsula’s name, the high ground of brown moors, blue lochans, and grey-ribbed hills. From the lochside there is a misted view of Mull’s dark peaks to the south, and tiny islands of jewelled rock in the mouth of Sunart where Victorian sportsmen shipped oars and whistled to bring the grey seal within killing range. Ardnamurchan once belonged to the MacIains, a small branch of Clan Donald, until they were driven from it in the 17th century and their stronghold of Mingary was taken by the Campbells. Nearby this castle, where the western flank of Ben Hiant rises from the sea, there is said to be a cave in which some of the MacIains were smoked to death by a greenwood fire the invaders lit at its entrance. If the story is not a transplanted legend they were foolishly indifferent to precedent in their choice of a refuge, for on the island of Eigg the MacLeods had previously suffocated its population of MacDonalds in the same decisive way. Remembrance of the Ardnamurchan people was enduring, as if it were the least their misfortune deserved. When Johnson and Boswell were guests of Maclean of Lochbuie that roaring man, having been told that the Doctor was deaf, raise his stentorian voice a decibel and asked, “Are you of the Johnstons of Glencro, or of Ardnamurchan?” Johnson huffily refused to answer, leaving Boswell to explain “that he was not Johnston but Johnson, and that he was an Englishman4
Few travellers visit the flaked stone walls of Mingary now, except those who like driving to the end of a road for the pleasure of seeing it again on their return. On an open point of wind-bent grass, the decaying fabric of the 13th-century castle is locked in its past, pale sea-flowers like watered blood on the rock from which it appears to grow. Five hundred years ago that handsome, humane, Renaissance king, James IV, came here to accept the surrender of the Lordship of the Isles from the chiefs of Clan Donald, sitting before them in a cloak of rich scarlet, beneath banners of gold. In the late 17th century Mingary was a miserable prison for Covenanters, far from their homes in Galloway and with no comfort but an enduring faith in their harsh and unbending God. Eighty years later it was still no better than a penal settlement for the soldiers who built their wooden barracks against its curtain-walls, suffered the neglect of the Government, and watched the island seas for the ships that might – and ultimately did – bring that calamitous young Prince from France
Westward from Mingary, Ar
dnamurchan ends at Garbhlach Mhor, a soaring cliff against which the white Atlantic breakers can leap fifty feet and more, below coronets of circling sea-fowl. The navigation of this intractable headland is always perilous, and long-remembered when successfully made. Its changing winds almost sank the little boat that carried Johnson and Boswell from Mull to Coll, on a night dark with terror. Aware that his life depended on the skill of a one-eyed seaman at the helm, Boswell tried to compose his mind with pious thoughts, but unhappily remembered that popular theology now argued that it was “vain to hope that the petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any influence with the Deity.” Aboard the sloop Johnson, and in the same enraged waters thirty years later, James Hogg stayed below on his berth, writing a letter to Scott, he said, although I have a writer’s doubt about that. He was content to trust in the skill of the master and crew until he heard the frightened helmsman shout “Oh, my God… my God!” Before Hogg could reach the deck the sloop rolled over on her beam-ends, with her mainsail touching the sea, and only “A singular interposition of Providence” brought her back on a level keel. The helmsman “thanked his Maker aloud for this signal deliverance, and indeed every heart seemed sensibly affected.”
William Daniell’s view of Ardnamurchan Point makes such miracles appear credible – grey-green waves heaving against the rocks, small ships fighting an inshore wind, and a Providential sword-blade of sunlight parting the clouds. Although he probably made his detailed sketches in peaceful reflection at a Tobermory inn, it is easy to think they were drawn on a wet and heeling deck, close in to that olivine altar of basalt and its black-winged acolyte gulls. My script for Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland at first began with Daniell’s aquatint, dissolving to film of the Point today and as I believed the composer would have seen it on the starboard beam of the Highlander, but this fanciful device was abandoned when it was realised that time and need had altered the profile of the headland. Twenty years after Mendelssohn passed through the Sound, perhaps too wretched to be interested in awesome seascapes, a lighthouse was placed upon the Point, a stone candle designed by Stevenson’s uncle and still blinking across the night-dark water to the hidden island of Coll.