John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  I remember you would see a mile or half a mile between every town if you were going up the strath. There were four or five families in each of these towns, and hill pastures for miles, as far as they could wish to go. The people had plenty of flocks of goats, sheep, horses and cattle, and they were living happy, with flesh and fish and butter, and cheese and fowl and potatoes, and kail and milk too. There was no want of anything with them, and they had the Gospel preached to them at both ends of the strath.

  The last preacher of the Gospel at Achness was Donald Sage. He had been born thirty years before in his father’s manse at Kildonan on the Helmsdale river, south-eastward from Loch Naver over the high ground of Borrobol. He came to Achness in 1818 and with profound disquiet at the changes taking place on the Sutherland estate, but he was proud of his family’s resistance to the clearance of their own parish in 1813. Patrick Sellar, he said, had “laboured hard to involve my father and mother in the criminality of these proceedings, but he utterly failed.” He had not been at his ministry many months when he heard that there was to be a final clearance of Strath Naver, by which all his congregation would be evicted. “I can yet recall,” he wrote long afterwards, “the deep and thrilling sensation which I experienced as I sat at the fireside in my rude little parlour when the tidings of the meditated removal of my poor flock reached me.” Many of his congregation refused to believe this was possible, although they could see the smoke-blackened stones of the houses Sellar had emptied in the Year of the Burnings. But the remaining townships were now to be levelled, and sixteen hundred people removed. The writs of eviction, said Sage

  … were distributed with the utmost preciseness. They were handed in at every house and hovel alike, be the occupiers of them who or what they might be, minister, catechist, or elder, tenant or sub-tenant, out-servant or cotter, all were made to feel the irresponsible power of the proprietor.

  On a May morning in 1819, he stood at the door of his little house and watched the burning of two hundred buildings, along the lochside at Grummore and Grumbeg, and northward up the strath by Syre, Langdale and Skailburn. His church and home were also destroyed with the cottages of Achness, some of their stones taken to make the road from Lairg to Tongue, and their timber for the building of an inn at Altnaharra, seven miles to the west at the head of the loch. My car has often passed over the stones, and I have sometimes taken a dram at the hotel, looking up to its ceiling and thinking of the beams beyond the white plaster. On the Sunday before the evictions Sage preached his last sermon in the open. “I selected a text which had pointed reference to the peculiarity of our circumstances, but my difficulty was now to restrain my feelings … I preached and the people listened, but every sentence uttered and heard was in opposition to the tide of our natural feelings.” He could not finish the sermon, for both he and his congregations were soon weeping. A year later, a woman who had returned briefly to the strath was asked what she had seen. “Oh, sorrow!” she said, “I have seen the timbers of our church covering the inn. I have seen the kirk-yard filled with tarry sheep, and Mr Sage’s study turned into a kennel for Robert Gunn’s dogs, and I have seen a crow’s nest in James Gordon’s chimney-head. Oh, sorrow!”

  Patrick Sellar had retired from Stafford’s service before the second evictions in Strath Naver, although he must have been involved in their planning. He had taken a lease on the ground he had cleared to the east of the river, almost a hundred square miles, and the people on the west bank could see his great flocks on Rhimsdale and as far as the lower braes of Ben Griam. He was now one of the most prosperous sheep-farmers in the north, and his brutal conduct during the Year of the Burnings had been dramatically vindicated. In April, 1816, he had been brought to trial by the Sheriff-Substitute of the county, Robert MacKid, to whose children Donald Sage was once tutor. There was undoubtedly more to MacKid’s motives than compassion and a desire for justice, perhaps jealousy, perhaps social and political ambition, but the charges he laid were serious and put Sellar’s life at risk. The factor was accused of “culpable homicide, as also oppression and real injury”. And more, so much more that the Advocate-Depute spent two hours reading the charge before an Inverness court. The deaths for which Sellar was held responsible were those of Margaret Mackay and Donald MacBeth. The former had died after she was carried from her burning cottage, crying “God receive my soul! What fire is this about me?” MacBeth was an old man, suffering from cancer of the face, and he lay in the open for nearly a week after his eviction, bringing death upon him earlier than it might have called, it was said. Sellar was acquitted of all charges and returned to his employment with his good name restored. Sensing that public opinion was now against him – that is to say, the opinion of men of property and influence – MacKid sent a grovelling apology to Sellar, hoping the factor would withdraw a suit for damages against him. Sellar did so, more in disgust than pity, insisting only that MacKid pay his expenses and £200 besides.

  Some of the Strath Naver people, the young and the robust, left the country, said Donald Sage. “But the aged, the females and children, were obliged to stay and accept the wretched allotments allowed them on the seashore and endeavour to learn fishing.” Among these was an old woman who was thrown into a fit by the approach of any stranger, rolling her eyes, hugging her body and crying “Oh! Shin Sellar! There’s Sellar!”

  I had read these accounts, and many others, before I first went to that distant strath, and the thought of them was in my mind and heart as I watched the postman climbing the lonely brae to Achness. It is not difficult to find the sites of some of the old townships, although one must learn to distinguish their scattered stones from natural outcrops, if only by the surrounding patches of green earth, enriched by half a millennium of diligent manuring. The clearances of Strath Naver are the most bitterly remembered of all in the Highlands. The people now remaining, and living for the most part on the northern coast to which their ancestors were sent, have kept the past alive. Eight years ago a museum of the Clearances was established at Bettyhill, in a white church above Torrisdale Bay, containing relics of the removals and of the life of the people before they were dispersed. It is a matter of pride to me that the manuscript of my book was accepted by its keepers, an acknowledgement far exceeding all critical approval.

  Dispute about the Sutherland Clearances also continues until this day. In 1976, when Golspie was chosen as the next location of the annual Gaelic Festival of The Mod, the Countess of Sutherland was invited to be its honorary president. There was some logic in this, albeit a want of tact, for the town and the nearby castle of Dunrobin had been the centre of her family’s history and power. Protest and argument were immediate and acrimonious, and she discreetly withdrew her acceptance of the invitation1 The impassioned wrangle continued, however, and soured much of the euphoria of the International Clan Gathering in Edinburgh, during which I made that intemperate interruption. In the spirited defence of the House of Sutherland at this time there was a curious echo of past debate, and occasional references – as if citing Holy Writ – to James Loch’s apologia of his Policy and of his noble master. An Account of the Improvements on the Estate of Sutherland. In this he declared that the object of the improvers had been

  to emancipate the lower orders from slavery … to render this mountainous district contributory as far as it was possible to the general wealth and industry of the country, and in the manner most suitable to its situation and peculiar circumstances. To convert the former population of these districts to industries and regular habits … (It was) a wise and generous policy and well calculated to increase the happiness of the individuals who were the object of this change, and to benefit those to whom these extensive domains belonged.

  Its proposals were high-minded and autocratic, and Loch’s account of their execution used the language of established power and of a class which had no doubt that it alone knew what was best for the majority. But against its impressive figures of acres cleared, roads built, rivers crossed, wool baled and fis
h barrelled, may be set the voice of William Morrison whose home was one of twenty cottages destroyed at Rossal, and who spoke of that day to the Crofters’Commission, “For people to say that there was no cruelty or harshness shown the people when they were burnt off Strathnaver is a glaring lie, which no amount of flowery language can hide.” Or the words of Angus Mackay who told the Commissioners he was eleven in the Year of the Burnings, and that he ran naked from the evictors, carrying his brother across the river.

  It would be a very hard heart but would mourn to see the circumstances of the people that day. He would be a very cruel man who would not mourn for the people … You would have pitied them, tumbling on the ground and greeting and tearing the ground with their hands. Any soft-minded person would have pitied them.

  I was granted no access to the Sutherland archives at Dunrobin when I was writing my book. I wrote twice to the 5th Duke asking for this, and having twice received no answer I did not try again. When I heard that an academic historian of St Andrews was studying these papers I wrote to him, explaining my purpose and hoping he would tell me how I might also have an opportunity to see them. He replied courteously, but briefly. Since he was himself writing a book upon this same period, he said, I would of course understand that he could give me no help with mine. I understood that less, I think, than I did the Duke’s indifference to my application. Some years before this, the newspaper for which I was then working had sent me to interview him at his London home, upon what subject I cannot now remember. I recall the noble aloofness of his face, sculpted in marble from a descriptive passage by Ouida, but most of all I remember his butler. When called to show me out at the end of the interview, he sensed the Duke’s unspoken thoughts and took me through the kitchen to the servants’ door. In his autobiography, Sutherland included an account of his family’s rise to great wealth and influence at the end of the 18th century, the improving zeal of the first Duke, and the criticism it provoked. He softened the word evictions with inverted commas, combining distaste for its vulgar meaning with contempt for those who used it, and in his final sentence he put the bitter suffering of the Clearances into what he thought was its proper perspective. “As in most disputes, there were probably faults on both sides, and a great deal of misunderstanding2

  Sutherland is still the wildest and most lonely part of the Highlands. It is traversed by one principal road only, moving northward by Lairg to Tongue like the flight of an arrow from the sprung bow of the kyle. The cost of this highway, with the coastal road from Bonar Bridge to Wick, was £16,500, and when they were finished in 1819 it was proudly said that a mail-coach leaving Inverness at six in the morning could reach Thurso by noon on the following day, provided there were no delays caused by “snowstorms and sudden thaws … the inexperience and want of accurate habits in the persons engaged in such an undertaking.” The four hundred and fifty miles of these roads, with the thirty-four bridges they crossed, are the lasting achievement of James Loch and his master. Before they were completed, the great clearances on the Sutherland estate were over, in the parishes of Farr and Lairg, Dornoch, Rogart, Loth, Clyne and Golspie, Kildonan and Strath Naver. The flocks of True Mountain Sheep already upon the braes would shortly increase to 200,000 with the promise of 415,000 pounds of wool annually. Loch’s Account said that 600 families were removed between 1810 and 1820, and in addition there were 408 more who, in his opinion, had no right or title to be in the county and were justly driven from it. Assuming an average of five to a family, this makes a conservative estimate of five thousand men, women and children, a third of the total population of the Sutherland estates. Loch’s figures do not include the removals carried out by Sellar before 1810, and they do not include the cotters and out-servants whom I have not counted as members of a family.

  The majority of the evicted were removed to the coasts of the county, there to become part of Loch’s great plan to develop a fishing industry. Factories and cottages were built, and the people from the glens were drilled into a new economy and a new discipline under which their sons and daughters had first to ask the permission of Mr Loch, or his agents, before they married. The town of Helmsdale at the mouth of the strath was the Commissioner’s greatest experiment, and for a time it prospered as a fishing-port. Little is left of its ambitious beginning. When I first visited it the grey shells of the fishery sheds remained, and on the high ground beyond the bay were roofless buildings which might have been mute evidence of clearance and eviction, but were once barrack cottages, now empty monuments to Mr Loch’s great dream. Along the strath, northward to the deer forests of Borrobol, Baddanloch and Achentoul, there are sporting estates where the Kildonan parishioners of Alexander Sage once lived, and from which they marched to Dunrobin in 1813, believing the Countess Elizabeth would save them from eviction. She was in London, but she recorded their protest in a letter. “I am uneasy about a sort of mutiny that has broken out in one part of Sutherland, in consequence of our new plans having made it necessary to transplant some of the inhabitants to the sea-coast.” She attributed their discontent to their preference for distilling whisky, and their unwillingness “to quit that occupation for a life of industry of a different sort which was proposed to them.” That reluctance was answered by the arrival of a detachment of Royal Scots Fusiliers, some artillery and wagons loaded with powder and ball, and those people of Kildonan who did not leave for Lord Selkirk’s colony on the Red River went instead to the fisheries on the coast. The parish now is not what the young men and women remembered in their Canadian exile, and it is not what the Duke of Sutherland and James Loch confidently expected it to become. A man from Kildonan, who was himself evicted from the strath in 1959, and who treasures the red-stocked flintlock with which his ancestor defied the incoming sheepmen, replied sadly to a letter from me.

  What is the position in Kildonan today? Six alien proprietors owning land and water where once hundreds of good, happy people lived, a red Post Office van, a score of gamekeepers and shepherds. In addition to deer, grouse and salmon, the proprietors do quite a side-line in sheep and cattle. They sometimes open baby shows and strut at Highland games, and the people think it fine.

  Not all of them perhaps. There are some who detest the red sandstone figure of the first Duke of Sutherland, in a red sandstone toga, thirty feet from his bare head to his square-toed shoes, standing on a column seventy feet high at the top of Ben Bhraggie, which is itself thirteen hundred feet above the green water of the Dornoch Firth. It cost almost £15,000, which was approximately the rental of the Sutherland estate when that became his by marriage. Much of the money was raised by contributions from the tenantry, and allowing for his understandable hatred of the Duke I am inclined to believe Donald MacLeod, the stone-mason from Strath Naver who said, “All who could raise a shilling gave it, and those who could not awaited in terror for the consequence of their default.” The statue has its back to the glens the Duke emptied, and it faces the sea to which he committed their people. It is a grotesque example of the 19th century’s taste for monstrous monuments, and the most cruelly ironic in Scotland.

  I saw much and revisited much of Sutherland with James during the years of our friendship. Westward from Telford’s road the land is dominated by lonely mountains, rising from the desolate moors like dark tents of stone, or great hangars for the airship clouds above them. By the Kyle of Tongue and to the north of Altnaharra, the long ridge of Ben Loyal is a frozen wave, triple-peaked and white-capped until early summer. It can change colour at each turn of the road, sometimes mist-blue and sometimes indigo, and one evening when it was lit by an angry sunset I saw it glow like an embered fire. Its sentinel friends to the west are Ben Hope and Ben Spionnaidh, watchers of the sea-lochs and gatemen to Lord Reay’s Country, the land of the Mackays from which came those 17th-century soldiers whose names I found carved on the timbers of a Dutch mill in the winter of 1944. This northern coast, from Torrisdale Bay by sea-skirted peaks to Cape Wrath, was truly Sudrland, a southerly land to the Vikings who ca
me down from the great shield-rim of Norway, settling on the shores of its sea-lochs, moving inland by its narrow straths, leaving their imprint in the names of its waters and stones, and their blood in the veins of its Pictish inhabitants. Seven hundred years ago, King Haakon of Norway anchored his great fleet in the shelter of Loch Eribol, on his way to chastise the young King of Scotland and re-affirm his lordship of the Hebrides. That day he watched an eclipse of the sun above the high wall of Foinaven, and his heart was darkened by strange premonitions. But he sailed on by the coast of Wester Ross and between Skye and the mainland, where the strait of Kyleakin remembers his name. On the Ayrshire coast at Largs his army was defeated in “a dangerous and cruel battle.” It was said that sixteen thousand Norsemen and five thousand Scots were slain, and all but four of Haakon’s ships destroyed. The figures are fantasy, of course, and the brief charge and counter-charge of the confused battle were not the epic conflict remembered by chronicle and legend. But it was decisive, and the Norse threat to the Crown of Scotland was at last ended.

  The sea beyond the northern coast of Sutherland was once a safe highway for Scottish shipping, a north-about route from the Firth of Forth to Europe and the New World, free from English molestation. At the end of July in 1698, and ten days out from Leith, the first fleet of five ships which the Company of Scotland sent to Darien was scattered by gales in the Pentland Firth, and those vessels which at last sighted each other were then separated by mist and fog to the west of Cape Wrath. They kept together by firing signal guns, and by answering each muffled hail of “Success!” with the cry “God grant!” They were neither successful nor favoured by Providence, for none of the ships returned from the wretched, fever-rotted Colony of Caledonia. The waters of Tongue Bay, Loch Eribol and Loch Durness were safe harbouring for French and Baltic merchantmen, for the transports which came to embark Lord Reay’s volunteers for the Dutch Wars. In March, 1746, the French ship Prime Charles put two hundred soldiers ashore at Tongue with a chest of silver coins for the Young Pretender, then retreating to Inverness. The soldiers were routed and the money captured by a small detachment of Loudon’s Highlanders under a young lieutenant, John Reid of Straloch. It was a small skirmish and almost forgotten, but the loss of the money is said to have forced the Jacobites to fight at Culloden.