by John Prebble
From the crenellated walls of Dunrobin Castle the Countess Elizabeth saw a different picture. Her interest in the Highlands had been rekindled after so many years of child-bearing, of Paris and London Society. ‘We have been much occupied in plans for improvement,’ she wrote. ‘This country is an object of curiosity at present; from being quite a wild corner inhabited by an infinite multitude roaming at large in the old way, despising all barriers and all regulations, and firmly believing in witchcraft so much so that the porters durst not send away two old women who were plaguing us one day, believing them to be witches.’
Neither she nor her husband seem to have questioned the moral justice of what they were doing, nor can one expect them to have done so. Like all Highland lairds, they owned an uneconomic estate which in its present form (or even in the one they planned) could not support the steady and alarming increase in population. Since it was impossible for them to imagine peasant co-operatives (though Sinclair of Ulbster got close to it) and the equal sharing of the earth's wealth, the dispersal of surplus men, women and children to the colonies was both proper and necessary. Those who remained (in Stafford's opinion, the most industrious, diligent and praiseworthy) could find new employment in new ways. There was the coal-pit Stafford planned at Brora, the salt-pans, the brick and tile works, the herring-fisheries at Golspie and Helmsdale, into the creation of which he proposed to sink almost a quarter of a million pounds, which, even then, would still be less than one year of his income.
So the people of Sutherland began their great exodus from the interior, with no voice but the Gaelic of their poets to express their grief and bewilderment. The pamphleteers and journalists who were later to take up their cause were twenty years away. Ministers of the Church were silent or worse. According to Donald Macleod from Strathnaver, a literate son of the people, a stonemason who would soon prise at the rocks of Dunrobin with his pen, the churchmen of Sutherland were ‘consenting parties to the expulsion of the inhabitants, and had substantial reasons for their readiness to accept woolly and hairy animals in place of human flocks’. With a few noble exceptions, the ministers chose the side of the landlords, who built them new manses, made carriage roads to their doors, and invited them to share in the new prosperity now and then with the grant of a few acres of sheep pasturage. In return the churchmen gave God's authority to Improvement, and threatened the more truculent of the evicted with damnation.
The Sutherland clearances really began with the arrival of William Young as Lord Stafford's first Commissioner. He soon had an active and enthusiastic recruit for his factor, Patrick Sellar. The young advocate quickly lost his early detestation of sheep-farming. Once ashore from the packet, and after a tour of the estates now leased by the Northumbrian stock-farmers, Atkinson and Marshall, he was, in his own words, ‘at once a convert to the principle now almost universally acted upon in the Highlands of Scotland, viz., that the people should be employed in securing the natural riches of the sea-coast, that the mildew of the interior should be allowed to fall upon grass and not upon corn, and that the several hundred miles of alpine plants flourishing in these districts in curious succession at all seasons, should be converted into wool and mutton for the English manufacture’. He would not have accepted the term, but he was as much a colonist as those of his contemporaries who were preparing to dispossess the aboriginals of America, Africa and Australia to make room for meat, hide and wool on the hoof.
He had cogent arguments, too: ‘Children of the white or Caucasian race of mankind come into the world without any covering or natural defence against the weather…. Let a man examine his wardrobe…. Is it too much to say that for every person born a certain number of sheep must be lambed? Thus does Providence in his wisdom and in his kindness to man give certain districts to provide cover and others to yield clothing to man…. In such matters I respectfully maintain that we cannot oppose nature without placing ourselves in a false position and being presently punished by diminished profit and increased suffering to mankind. On this principle, with a good conscience, I grow wool on mountains that are covered with peatbog, believing that I thereby benefit my fellow-men.’
And among his fellow-men he no doubt included those tenants-at-will in Dornoch, Rogart, Loth, Clyne, Golspie and Assynt to whom he and William Young gave their particular attention between 1810 and 1812. ‘A large portion of the people of these parishes,’ said Donald Macleod the mason, ‘were in the course of two or three years, almost entirely rooted out, and those few who took the miserable allotments above mentioned and some of their descendants continue to exist on them in great poverty.’
Young and Sellar proceeded circumspectly, first securing the support of tacksmen and ministers who advised their people to go without protest, sternly warning them that it was the wish of their Ban mhorair Chataibh that they should obey her agents in all things. In this the tacksmen acted with more foolishness than sense, for after their tenants-at-will had gone, they too were evicted by Sellar and Young. There was no room in Improvement for obsolescent middlemen.
The first white wave of Cheviot sheep broke over the Assynt hills before the people there had time to obey the writs of eviction. To the sound of phrenetic bleating, they pulled down their house timbers and walked with them to the coast where the villages in which they were to live had not been built, the boats from which they were expected to fish had not been launched, the nets unspun. In the bitterness they felt, one of their poets cried out, apostrophizing Sellar and Young: ‘Nam faighinn's air an raon thu…’
If I had you on the field
and men binding you,
With my fists I would tear
out three inches of your lungs!
From Assynt on the Atlantic coast, Commissioner and factor turned their attention to the parish of Kildonan, where this ran in a green and meandering strath from the inland plateau to the northern ocean, and it was here that resistance was first met. Sellar surveyed the land. Summons of removal were prepared against tenant and sub-tenant, and Sheriff's Officers were warned to make ready their delivery. The country was divided into lots and advertised, so that gentlemen from the south might inspect the property and make ready their bids. Never had the parish seen such a coming and going of foreigners, Lowland men and English, who rode along the banks of the Kildonan making notes in their record-books. This narrow valley, bordering on Caithness, was the country of Clan Gunn, a dour and hard people, more Norse than Gael, who had been made increasingly uneasy by the stories they had heard from Assynt, Farr and Rogart. Their reaction to the strangers in their glen was abrupt and angry, and news of it travelled far south to London, interrupting the Marchioness's season.
‘I hope to be in Scotland this summer,’ she wrote, ‘but at present I am uneasy about a sort of mutiny that has broken out in one part of Sutherland, in consequences of our new plans having made it necessary to transplant some of the inhabitants to the sea-coast from other parts of the estate. The people who are refractory on this occasion are part of Clan Gun, so often mentioned by Sir Robert Gordon, who live by distilling whisky and are unwilling to quit that occupation for a life of industry of a different sort which was proposed to them. London is more full and gay, if possible, than usual. A great many foreigners from Russia, etc., parlant bon anglais-russe.’
The trouble occurred in March 1813, when a Mr Reid, the Northumbrian manager of a southern sheep combine, visited Strath Kildonan with his notebook and inquiring tongue. He returned to Golspie, further down the coast, far earlier than was expected, declaring that he had been attacked by a mob of men and women, and put in great fear for his life. ‘The factors,’ said Donald Macleod the mason, remembering the affair thirty years later, ‘eagerly jumped at this trumped-up story; they immediately swore in from sixty to one hundred retainers and new inhabitants as special constables, trimmed and charged the cannon at Dunrobin Castle which had reposed in silence since the last defeat of the unfortunate Stuarts.’
But the alarm was real enough. The people
of Golspie, many of them newcomers from the south, had the townsman's old dread of the Highlander in arms, and the Year of the Sheep was close enough in memory for them to fear that Riot, Rebellion and Sedition was ever restless beneath Highland docility. At Dunrobin Castle, where his lordship's Commissioner and Factor had their headquarters, rumour quickly leap-frogged over rumour, beginning with Mr Reid's modest bound of truth. It was said that the men of Clan Gunn were marching down the coast toward Golspie, threatening to hang Sellar and Young, expel all sheepfarmers, and burn Dunrobin Castle. It is unlikely that the two Morayshire men believed these stories, but they knew that if the Gunns gathered to protest against the evictions there might well be serious trouble when the Sheriff Officers arrived in Kildonan with writs of removal. So Young sent messengers to the strath, inviting the people to Dunrobin, where their grievances would be heard and their happy future explained to them. According to Macleod, it was a trick. Young really intended to flush the malcontents into the open and frighten them with the power of Law and Good Order. In view of what followed, one may well believe this. The people of Kildonan, men, women and children, were six miles from Dunrobin when a sympathizer in Golspie sent them a warning that constables were waiting for them below the walls of the Castle, that soldiers had been sent for, and that some of them were to be arrested and charged with threats against Mr Reid's life.
Most of them wisely decided to remain where they were, but some who were more courageous (more desperate or more credulous) marched on, skirting the Castle and halting at last outside the Inn at Golspie. There they waited for someone to hear their grievances, and there at last came Commissioner, Factor and Sheriff at the gallop from Dunrobin, followed by a band of armed constables and several ministers of the county. Prompted by his lordship's agents, the Sheriff told the people that those who were guilty of mobbing Mr Reid would soon be discovered and punished, and that all of them would do well to disperse immediately. They were then scolded by the ministers, who used all the sonorous imagery of which the Gaelic is capable. Macleod said that the churchmen threatened ‘the vengeance of heaven and eternal damnation on those who should presume to make the least resistance, no wonder the poor Highlander quailed under such influence’. Then, as if he believed that divine assistance might not be enough, the Sheriff began to read the Riot Act. Since this was in English, it was gibberish to most of the Gunns. They drifted away, more confused than afraid.
They went back to Kildonan, followed now by a powerful detachment of the 21st Foot, some artillery, and wagons loaded with cartridge and ball. The soldiers had come by forced march from Fort George, in response to the Sheriff's urgent plea for help, arriving too late to make a display of force outside the Inn at Golspie, but soon enough to pursue the people to their homes. The presence of the 21st in the Highlands at this time of uneasiness was probably no accident of posting. There is a cumulative security to be got from using one racial minority for the suppression of another, and although the 21st was nominally a Scots regiment* the men in its ranks were mostly Irish, pressed into service by force of famine. They had bitter memories of the Rebellion of '98 which a fencible regiment from Sutherland had helped to defeat. They marched northward after the retreating Highlanders telling all who would listen, or could understand, that they would have their revenge for Irish blood which Scots had spilt on Vinegar Hill.
But the sound of their drums alone was enough to end the little affair. The people of the strath went back to their homes to wait in listless resignation for the writs of removal. ‘Dismayed and spirit-broken at the army of power brought against them,’ said Donald Macleod, ‘and seeing nothing but enemies on every side, even in those from whom they should have had comfort and succour, they quietly submitted to their fate.’ The 21st took a few prisoners, men whom the Sheriff-Officers had smelt out, others who had looked too insolently, perhaps, at the King's Colours or the King's men, but since no reasonable charge could be brought against them, they were soon released.
At Whitsun large areas of Strath Kildonan were cleared and left to grass which, even after a century and a half, still grows greenest where the people had their tiny potato-patches. They were offered meagre lots of land on the cliffs at Helmsdale, the choice of becoming herring-fishers or leaving the country altogether. Ninety-six young men and women proudly chose exile – Gunns, Macbeths, Mathesons, Sutherlands and Bannermans from townships between Garlag and Borrobol. In early June they sailed from Stromness where they boarded the emigrant ship, Prince of Wales. Two months later they disembarked at Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay, and travelled southward by the waters of Lake Winnipeg to the prairie settlement which Lord Selkirk was building along the Red River. They endured a Canadian winter for which even Highland snows had not prepared them, and they wrote bitterly to their parents advising the old people to give up all thought of a second emigration.
Lord Stafford had no reason to doubt the efficiency with which his Commissioner and Factor were clearing human beings from those parts of his estate which, in Sellar's opinion, had been ‘formed by nature to produce wool’, but in 1813 he was beginning to see that his plans for Improvement (involving more than the collection of rents and the serving of writs) needed a creative mind greater than that possessed by either man. He found such a mind in James Loch, gentleman.
The gentleman is used with relevance. Social rank and the abilities of those holding it were seriously debated by Stafford and Loch before they entered their contract, and probably neither of them, the one a descendant of wool-staplers and the other of Baltic traders, saw anything ironic in the discussion. Loch was at this time only thirty-three, a broad-shouldered, fair-haired young man with the type of resolute head that strikes well in profile on a coin. His home at Drylaw, a house and acreage near Edinburgh, had been bought by a seventeenth-century ancestor Who had traded well with the Hanseatic ports, and the family had subsequently emblazoned it with modest arms and traced a real or imagined descent from a Norman de Loch or de Lacus. James Loch was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn when he was twenty-six. He housed himself comfortably in Boswell Court, and built himself a profitable conveyancing practice of which he soon tired. He turned to estate management, showing immediate imagination and genius. He met Stafford at a dinner-party and it was there that they argued the question of whether or not it was possible for a gentleman to administer estates with success. Loch's advocacy of the positive answer, as much as of his own merits, was so persuasive that the Marquess made him Commissioner of all the Stafford estates, but most particularly of those in Sutherland. During the next forty years, for the rest of his life, he worked to complete the clearance of the interior, to carve the emptied lands into great sheep-farms, to build harbours, bridge rivers, turn cattle-tracks into macadam roads, and to so mould and control the lives of ‘the ignorant and credulous people’ that at one time the young among them had to go to his agents for permission to marry. ‘In a few years,’ he wrote, before a quarter of his long service was run, ‘the character of the whole of this population will be completely changed…. The children of those who are removed from the hills will lose all recollection of the habits and customs of their fathers.’
This was ‘the Loch Policy’. Behind it and the figure of its creator the Staffords became shadows, and Highlanders who had been reluctant to blame the Ban mhorair Chataibh for their suffering and exile could now hate the Lowlander Loch with all the passion their grief demanded. Men would debate the Loch Policy for a century, with admiration because it seemed to combine the best qualities of direction and laissez-faire, or with disapproval because it broke the spirit of a proud people and failed to bring the lasting prosperity it confidently proposed.
After an exploratory tour of Sutherland when he accepted the post, Loch confined his visits to a brief stay at Dunrobin with his family every autumn. He was content to work from Edinburgh or London, delegating the execution of his plans to Young and Sellar, and to the agents who followed them. He was a desk-worker, at war with indolence, superst
ition, inefficiency, the obstinacy of a primitive people and the intransigence of the earth itself. Or so it seemed to him. A man must be inspired in a war, though he sits at a desk, and Loch's inspiration was his noble employer. He gave Stafford that adulation which was the fee paid by the lesser gentry of his time for the right to stand in the same drawing-room with their betters, but he also admired the Marquess and believed him to be an enlightened benefactor. The admiration, however, was laced with pedagogic instruction, betraying his inner belief that he was intellectually the better man. At this death a memorialist paid him a tribute that he would have appreciated: ‘What a happiness it was for the Highlands that there was a man who had the courage to carry out his just conceptions of the duty of a great landowner!’
Loch's most relentless and implacable enemy was Donald Macleod the stonemason, a son of that ‘ignorant and credulous people’ for whom the Commissioner felt such impatient contempt and anger. He was born in Strathnaver, in the township of Rossal, some time toward the end of the eighteenth century, the son of a mason under whom he served his apprenticeship, and he came to manhood during the most terrible years of the Loch Policy. ‘Every imaginable means short of the sword or the musket,’ he wrote of those days, ‘was put in requisition to drive the natives away, to force them to exchange their farms and comfortable habitations, erected by themselves or their fore-fathers, for inhospitable rocks on the sea-shore, and to depend for subsistence on the watery element in its wildest mood…. The country was darkened by the smoke of burnings, and the descendants were ruined, trampled upon, dispersed and compelled to seek asylum across the sea.’