by John Prebble
The Doctor was much happier as a guest at the MacLeods’faery castle on Loch Dunvegan. He admired the dowager Lady of Dunvegan and talked with her until a late hour after supper, giving her his opinions on literature, gout as an hereditary ailment, polygamy in Formosa, and the publication of truth. His reflections on the last may have confused her – “There is something noble in publishing truth, though it condemns one’s self” – but he was more understandable when he spoke of good humour which, he said, increased as a man grew older. His own benign agreeability was largely the result of the hospitality lavished upon him. “At Dunvegan,” he wrote, “I had tasted lotus, and was in danger of forgetting that I was ever to depart, till Mr Boswell sagely reproached me with my sluggishness and softness.” He would not recognise the castle today. It is said to be the oldest inhabited castle in Britain, but it might have been more pleasing to the eye had it become an abandoned ruin. At the beginning of the last century, when Macdonald of Sleat was turning Armadale into an imitation of Breadalbane’s Gothic horror, the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth Chiefs of MacLeod equipped Dunvegan with a defensive mound, mock battlements, towers, turrets and drawbridge. Later in the century the remaining visible stones of the original building were covered with a drear coat of stucco, creating a passable likeness to the castles which once appeared in advertisements for dentifrice.
Walter Scott visited Dunvegan when the improvements begun by the twenty-fourth chief were well under way, and MacLeod was no doubt pleased with his guest’s approval. Towers and drawbridge, said Scott, “if well executed, cannot fail to have a good and characteristic effect.” He was cruising about the coast of the island in a lighthouse yacht, sending his card ashore to its gentry and accepting their hospitality. His imagination was romantically excited, his mind filled with scenes and impressions that would inspire much of The Lord of the Isles, “rocks at random thrown, black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone.” He had not yet understood the darker side to such grandeur, the tragedy and despair which had already begun before his visit, and would increase in the years following. Emigration and eviction came early to Skye, although they would not reach full spate until the middle of the 19th century. When Boswell and Johnson were the guests of John Mackinnon of Corriechatachan, the diarist took part in a dance
… which I suppose the emigration from Skye has occasioned. They call it America. Each of the couples, after the common involutions and revolutions, successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to shew how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat.
But if he thought this was a demonstration of the people’s joy, their eagerness to emigrate, he was soon disenchanted. Mrs Mackinnon told him that when a ship had sailed from Portree a year before, the relatives of the departing lay down on the earth in grief, tearing at the grass with their teeth. “This year there was not a tear shed. The people on shore seemed to think that they would soon follow. This indifference is a mortal sign for the country.”
Fifty years later the flow of emigration was irreversible. The kelp industry, by which the lairds of the Isles had enjoyed a brief prosperity, was now in decline. There were too many people, and rents were too low. When Robert Southey came to Skye with Telford, who wished to enlist labourers for work on the Caledonian Canal, they discovered that “a villainous adventurer by name Brown” was advising the proprietors. This was probably Robert Brown, once a detested factor of the Clanranald estates who was now suggesting that all rents should be doubled, trebled or quadrupled “according to the supposed capability of the tenant.” While the kelp industry flourished his advice was followed with profit, but eventually, said Southey
Cattle and kelp fell to their former price; the tenants were unable to pay; and some of the Lairds were at once unthinking and unfeeling enough to go thro’with the extortionate system, and seize their goods by distress … These grasping and griping Landlords have gone far toward ruining themselves.
Ruin came to most before the Great Cheviot saved the remainder. There are few sheep on the braes of Skye now, but at one time, it was said, the hills were covered with summer snow, and the people they dispossessed were caught by the dancing involutions and revolutions of America. Destitution, eviction and dispersal inspired the formation of the Skye Emigration Society, which would later embrace all the Highlands and Islands. Although the directing members of its board were sympathetic to the Policy of Improvement, their consciences were disturbed by its effect upon the people.
The great mass is reduced to such a state of wretchedness as could not fail, in almost any other country to produce acts of lawless violence. Yet these poor people remain quiet and peaceable, wishing and praying for, rather than expecting better times.
The better times did not come, and with sorrowing hearts the people surrendered to the Society’s appeal, “We will do what we can to assist you, and we will endeavour to procure assistance for you from others …” The proprietors also responded, some with donations but all grateful for a Society ready to send ships and guarantee passage for the tenants they were evicting. By the middle of the last century all the Hebrides were in movement, their sea-lochs and their bays filled with emigrant ships, their white beaches loud with the barking of dogs, the cries of women, the angry shouting of sheriff-officers as the people were driven to the boats, often bound or manacled. “Oh the turns of the hard world,” recalled one of them many years later, “oh the suffering of the poor folk and the terrible time that was!”
The first great wave of evictions was on the valley floor of Strathaird in 1851, where the green braes look westward across Loch Scavaig to the Cuillins. It is a lonely drive to Strathaird now, beautiful and lonely, the sun yellow on the hills, and the loch-water bright with sequins. Five hundred people were driven from the land by their new laird, Alexander MacAlister, who styled himself of Tornsdale Castle in Argyll. He was generally thought to be an amiable fellow, which meant, said Thomas Mulock, that he was “a man who does all his harsh deed by deputy.” The people owed him £450 in unpaid rents, but he told them he was ready to waive this, and advance them £12,000, if they went to Canada or New South Wales, and he was surprised when they refused. “Ah, Mr MacAlister of some Argyll ilk,” said Mulock, “how would you like to be transported against your Scottish will from Torrisdale to Toronto?” Before he could persuade the people to go, MacAlister was obliged to enlist the help of the Sheriff, sheriff-officers, members of the Destitution Board, and the threat of deploying two companies of the 13th Regiment, Prince Albert’s Own.
While the eight townships of the Strathaird estate were being cleared, the Trustees of Lord Macdonald’s land were evicting the people of Suishnish and Boreraig on the eastern shore of Loch Slapin. It was two years before all were gone. Two men who resisted the evictions were arrested and tried at Inverness, but the jury refused to find them guilty after their counsel had asked it to consider “how far the pound of flesh allowed by the Law is to be extracted from the bodies of Highlanders.” Their acquittal changed nothing. Five days after Christmas in 1853, the factors and the officers came again to Suishnish and Boreraig and drove out the remaining people. Among the last to go was a child of seven who cried out to the men who were dismantling the cottage in which he was born, “If my father were here today, who would do this to us?” Lord Macdonald’s Trustees defended him against a public outcry by saying that he had been over-indulgent to the people and had allowed them to waste good land, therefore their removal was in their own good interest. Developing this exculpatory argument his Commissioner, Patrick Cooper, who had recently cleared Macdonald’s estate on North Uist, explained that his lordship had been prompted to remove the people “by motives of benevolence, piety and humanity, because they were too far from the church.” It was some months before a buyer could be found for the estates. The market for wool and mutton was unsteady, due to the war in the Crimea, but the Wool Market Circular reported that prices for ewes and wedders were still high, and the
re could be confidence in an early return to stability.
His pious and benevolent lordship is long gone, his descendant owns no wide lands on the Isle of Skye, and the gothic castle at Armadale, built and maintained by some of the profit got from the dispersal of Clan Donald, is now a museum to their memory. To the north in Minginish, at the mouth of a narrow glen from Loch Harport to Talisker Bay, there is a distillery producing Skye’s only malt. Stevenson called it “a king of whiskies”, and Neil Gunn, who wrote the finest book on the subject said “Talisker at its best can be superb, but I have known it adopt the uncertain manners of Skye weather.” It is a talking-whisky, almost as fine as Lagavulin when there is frost in the evening air and a night of good conversation ahead. The little glen from which it comes is narrow and dark, a cleft of waterfalls and steep rocks between the sea-loch and the sea. Johnson stayed here as the guest of its MacLeod laird and thought it a depressing place “from which the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded, and where the hermit might expect to grow old in meditation, without possibility of disturbance or interruption.” But before the building of the distillery, sixteen families were removed from this glen, and when I drink Talisker I remember them.
Skye’s agony did not end with the clearances in Strathaird, Boreraig and Suishnish. In 1882 the people began to fight back. At Glendale in Duirinish, below the lava plateaux of MacLeod’s Tables, they had suffered bitterly from increasing eviction, and from a harsh factor who forbade them to keep dogs or gather driftwood from the shore. At the beginning of February the most resolute of them met in the church and decided to take a stand against further evictions, to demand the reinstatement of those who had already been removed. Authority’s response was to send the gunboat Jackal. When it anchored in Loch Pooltiel and landed an officer he was met by the sound of horns and by a crowd of six hundred orderly but determined people. Three men of the townships voluntarily surrendered to arrest, willing to plead their case before the Court of Sessions, but because they would not have it said “that Glendale men had to be taken away from their homes in a man-of-war” another ship was sent. They went aboard the Dunara Castle after a weeping farewell and the reassurance that “We go to uphold a good cause, to defend the widow and fatherless, and the comfort and needs of our hearths and homes.” They were taken to Calton Prison in Edinburgh but the governor refused to admit them, sending them under a Messenger-at-arms to the Ship Hotel where they became the astonished centre of public sympathy and admiration.
In April that same year, Lord Macdonald’s factor was faced with the angry defiance of his tenants on The Braes, a coastal strip between Loch Sligachan and Tianavaig Bay. The immediate cause was their refusal to pay their rents until it was acknowledged that they had an ancient right to graze their stock on the lower slopes of Ben Lee, but there were other grievances and older fears. When writs of eviction were brought, the papers were burnt and pails of water were thrown over the sheriff-officer. Fifty Glasgow policemen were then sent to enforce the writs, and as their approach from Portree was signalled by braying horns “men, women and children rushed forward in all stages of attire, most of the females with their hair down and streaming lovely in the breeze. Every soul carried a weapon of some kind.” They fought with sticks and stones and clawing hands. When the police retreated, with five prisoners they had taken, they were ambushed by another party, hurling large stones from above the road. The discontent, the brooding threat of further violence lasted for another year, until warships arrived from Rosyth and an armed party of Marines was landed at Uig.
The Crofters’War, which spread to other islands and the mainland, is still remembered with pride and sadness. Its most positive achievement was to persuade Gladstone to establish a Commission of Enquiry. The august members of this Board came to the Highlands by sea, patiently interviewing hundreds of witnesses: factors, tenants, sub-tenants and cottars, men and women, old and young. They heard the story of clearance and emigration over the past seventy years, during which, on Skye alone, more than thirty-five thousand people had been evicted. Many of the witnesses spoke in Gaelic, the only tongue they knew. Their evidence was translated literally by interpreters, recorded and subsequently printed. It retained the rhythm and poetry of the original language, and those who have the time and patience to read the Report and Evidence of the Commission will hear moving voices from the past, the sound of weeping and the laughter it replaced.
Much was won by the Crofters’War, by the Commission’s diligent Enquiry and the reforming Act which followed. The violence of protest in Lewis and Assynt, in Skye and the Outer Isles aroused the sympathy and generosity of Scottish exiles throughout the world, and it inspired a political initiative in the Lowlands which eventually led to the development of the Scottish Labour movement, without whose energy English Socialists might have remained a minority party. But in the Highlands the changes in Law and political consciousness came too late, perhaps, nor did they stop depopulation or alter the basic nature of land ownership. Much of Skye still belongs to anonymous consortiums, to foreign speculators who play cynical games of chance with the land. The old Highland belief that the fish in the burn, the bird on the wing, and the stag on the brae were put there for all men to take was never much of a truth, I think, and the Law still protects all three on behalf of the proprietor. The bitter years of the Crofters’War have left a lingering anger in the Western Highlands and the Isles, but also pride, and both are occasionally voiced in the pages of the West Highland Free Press, published from an old school-house at Breakish. When this bold newspaper first appeared ten years ago its young writers alarmed an establishment accustomed to a subservient press. It insistently questioned the rights of property, entrenched privilege and autocratic central government, and it honoured the example set by polemical Highland journalists a century ago. Time has mellowed it, but it still has the ability to make authority pause and sometimes withdraw, and I hope it will not think it presumptuous of me to suggest that it should exercise that power as often as it once did.
It is perhaps irrelevant to return to the Old Sergeant, but I have not finished his story and it requires a final comment. When I first thought of using his Memoirs as the inspirational basis of a novel, I looked for some confirmation of them in the records of outpensioners at the Royal Hospital. These are brief but informative, and against each man’s name is an account of his age, his wounds and disabilities. The man I found and believe to be Sergeant Donald MacLeod was certainly very old, but some years younger than he or Thomson claimed. There is no reference to those terrible wounds received at Sheriffmuir, Fontenoy and the Plains of Abraham, only this laconic entry: Suffering from fits.
A Private Soldier’s pay at this time was approximately tenpence a day, including deductions.
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Alexander MacLeod of Ullinish, sheriff-substitute of Skye also lived to a great age. He was already a centenarian in 1791 when the Sergeant’s Memoirs were published. Thomson refers to him as Donald MacLeod’s uncle, but earlier writes of a brother Alexander born in 1690. Why the Sergeant, as the first son, was not recognised as the laird when his father was killed at Belle Isle in 1761, I do not know. He may have been born before his parents’marriage. His illegitimacy would perhaps explain his grandfather’s cruel indifference in sending him away to Inverness.
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Chapter 10
There was a post-van ahead of me when I reached the eastern end of Loch Naver, where the river curls in hesitant bends before flowing northward to the sea. The van was stationary, pulled to one side and leaning into the soft earth, and although there was room to pass I stopped to watch the postman. With his bag tied about his body like a guerrilla’s blanket, he moved over the emerald green of the rough pasture to a swinging foot-bridge, crossed the water and went up the brae to the white-walled farm at Achness, three-quarters of a mile from the road. He did not return within the time I stayed there, and I saw no one else in this part of Strath Naver that morning. The spring sun was lo
w in the sky, and the dark silhouette of Ben Klibreck across the loch was a sleeping woman, a shawl of white smoke across her hips. The silence and the stillness were unnatural, as if they were a pause only, and before long the people would return, apologetic for their absence and filling the glen with noise.
Achadh an Eas, the cornfield by the waterfall, was once a township. A dozen families lived in its dry-stone and sod-roofed cottages beneath the three cones of Rhimsdale, and amongst the heather and deer-grass of the braesides there are a hundred cairns and hut-circles of earlier inhabitants. The strath was also the most fertile in northern Sutherland, a green fold in the brown mountains, a gentle glen down which the black water of its river moves to the white sand of Torrisdale Bay, to the cold sea and the Arctic Circle. Until Loch’s Policy of Improvement, Telford’s energy and a rich lord’s money built a carriage-road from Bonar Bridge, this northern land was almost inaccessible except by ship. It had few visitors, and those who did come usually recoiled from it in horror, deciding that it was either a gateway to Hell or the edge of the world. It is still a wild country, the waste-heap of a glacial age, open to the wind and at war with the sea. Yet its wildness is beautiful, and it was loved by its people. Knowing both it and the bleak, short-grass country of the Canadian prairies, I think I understand the anguish of the men and women who were forced to exchange one for the other.
The people who lived in Strath Naver at the beginning of the last century were mostly Mackays by name or clan allegiance, although the Countess Elizabeth of Sutherland was their Great Lady, and the Marquess of Stafford her husband was their landlord. They lived in what she and the Marquess considered to be poverty, squalor and slothful indolence, and thus their eviction and their enforced employment in fruitful industry elsewhere should be the Christian duty of their superiors. The first great clearance of Strath Naver by Patrick Sellar was in 1814, Bliadhna an Losgaidh, the Year of the Burnings. If the land from which they were driven was not the paradise some of the people remembered, the thought of it gave them pain until the end of their lives. More than sixty-five years after the first clearance, there was perhaps exaggeration in what Angus Mackay told the Crofters’Commission, but his love and longing for the past are unmistakable.