by John Prebble
If the portrait said to be his is a true one, the face fits the man he was, a broad forehead and shaggy brows, the uncompromising challenge of his eyes above the high cheek-bones, and a mouth of great compassion and understanding. Whatever he was like as a stonemason, he was a born journalist with an abundant share of the faults and virtues of the craft. He was courageous and incorruptible, his writing was wild, but never dull. In his old age he frequently repaired his memory with his imagination, as if he were afraid that the truth was not enough to arouse the nation's conscience. He was called, and is still called, a fanatic, by which men mean that there is something indecent in passion and something dangerous in anger. For such anger and passion he had good cause, and although they were rarely subjective his own suffering was great. He was hounded by the Stafford agents and brought before the justices. The persecution of his wife reduced her to incurable madness, and in the end he became an exile, like his kin and friends.
Until he and his family were driven like rats from Sutherland in 1831, he wrote nothing for publication, or at least nothing that any newspaper was willing to publish, but in his memory and his notes, his correspondence with Highlanders whom he dared not name, he stored a great arsenal of ammunition. His chance to use it came in 1840. Public opinion was changing; people were now uneasy about the value and justice of the great clearances. If newspaper editors were not ready to agree with what Macleod had to say, they were now willing to offer him a forum in which to say it. Between 1840 and 1841 the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle published twenty-one of his letters which he later expanded into his History of the Destitution in Sutherland-shire.
From then on he wrote and wrote, not only the story of his own county, but of the removals and persecutions in other parts of the Highlands. But always he returned to the events of his youth, to Bliadhna an Losgaidh, the Year of the Burnings, when Patrick Sellar came to Strathnaver.
‘He would be a very cruel man who would not mourn’
ON Wednesday, 15 December 1813, twenty-seven tenants-at-will from Strathnaver, some of them with their families, gathered before the Inn at Golspie under the direction of their minister, Mr David Mackenzie. He was the missionary at Achness in their glen, and for such work as this day's the Staffords would shortly reward him with the great parish of Farr, a splendid manse for his home, a glebe consisting of the best land in the area, and a fine church from the pulpit of which he would translate and support each successive eviction order issued by his patrons.* He was here this day to translate Mr Young's Lowland English into the Gaelic of his parishioners, and to urge upon them that it was God's will that they should obey those whom He had placed above them.
In that bitter weather, the journey to Golspie from Strathnaverin the far north of the county must have been hard and cruel, but the people had come willingly and with anxiety, and perhaps in the hope that their presence alone would dissuade Lord Stafford's agents from proceeding with their eviction. Though they may not have known it, it was also their legal right to be there and to make their own bids when their land was put up for auction. This was the only occasion when Young invited those whom he proposed to remove to be present at a set, but since the affair with Clan Gunn some months before he may have been less concerned with the Law than with facing trouble before it grew too serious.
At last Mr Young came out of the Inn, well-wrapped against the cold, cleared his throat and read the formal notice:
Notice is hereby given to the tenants of Strathnaver and others on the old estate of Sutherland whose farms are to be set at Golspie this day – That Lord and Lady Stafford have directed that all the grounds from Curnachy on the north and Dunvieddan on the south side of the river down to its mouth, including Swordly and Kirktomy, with a sufficient quantity of pasture, is to be lotted out among them, and in which every person of good character will be accommodated….
He waited until Mr Mackenzie had translated the notice and until it was clear that there was going to be no rioting or mobbing as a result. The tenants heard that by Whitsunday next they were to leave their homes and move to new plots on the harsh coast near Strathy Point which Lord and Lady Stafford, in their concern for their people's welfare, would graciously grant them. Mr Mackenzie then went inside the Inn to sign a declaration that he had translated the notice and that it had been understood.
There was no auction that day, or any day. One man only made a bid for the lease of the property, and he was Patrick Sellar. It was his second purchase of land on the Sutherland estates. In 1810, and shortly after becoming Factor, he had followed William Young's example and obtained the lease of the farm of Morvich on the east coast of Sutherland. Both men were to become great sheep-farmers, and it was in Strathnaver that Patrick Sellar made his fortune from wool.
The valley of Strathnaver is a green fold in the earth, the richest in that part of the country, a narrow, twisting glen down which the black water of the River Naver runs from south to north, from the loch of its name to the Atlantic Ocean. The people who lived there in 1814 were Mackays, by name or allegiance, though the Countess Elizabeth was their Lord. They lived in long stone houses roofed with sod. One end of the house was a byre, the other was living accommodation. There was no window-glass, the floors were uneven earth, and the smoke of the open hearths found its uncertain way through holes in the roof. The stone walls were sometimes plastered on the inside and plugged with clay to make them draughtproof. Scattered about such primitive buildings were dry-stone barns, outhouses and drying kilns. In such surroundings had Donald Macleod been born and bred.
The houses were grouped in a dozen small townships, northward down the strath to the sea and westward along the shore of Loch Naver. Because of the mission there, Achness was perhaps the most important to the people. It took its Gaelic name, Achadh an Eas, the cornfield by the cascade, from the brown stream that still falls in noisy delight from hills where once the Norsemen buried their dead. There was Rhifail, the enclosure in a hollow, the smooth dale of Dalvina, Skail the sheiling, and Syre where the young men had been asembled in the spring of 1800 for service with the Sutherland Highlanders. Along the loch, toward Altnaharra at its finger-tip, were Grummore and Grumbeg. On these fell the evening shadow of Ben Klibreck across the water, and if one stands among the few remaining stones of Grummore today the mountain takes the naked shape of a sleeping woman, the milky smoke of burning heather for her hair, and her head turned away from Strathnaver.
The tacksman of the property was Robert Gordon, whose ancestors had come from Banffshire in the sixteenth century when a Countess of Sutherland married the son of a Gordon Earl. He was an old, simple man, who styled himself ‘of Langdale’ from the cottage and land he held on the west bank of the river. Most of the people in the strath were his sub-tenants, and while they did not speak ill of him, they expressed no surprise when he opened his door and offered the hospitality of his home to Patrick Sellar in the Year of the Burnings.
If Strathnaver were not the paradise some exiles believed it to have been when they remembered it in their old age, the words they used spoke their love and their longing for it. ‘I remember,’ said Angus Mackay, who was eleven when he was driven from the glen, ‘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 bonnie haughs between the 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 property which Mr Sellar had acquired lay on the east bank of the river, a great loop of land twelve miles in length and seven at its widest. It was shaped like a tear. Its rich braesides mounted toward the waters of Loch nan Clar and the peaks of Ben Griam. Sellar anticipated no trouble from the people, believing, perhaps, that the stern han
dling of Clan Gunn in March, 1813, had shown them that bayonets and artillery would be brought against them if necessary. But he had been warned that the petty tacksmen of Sutherland might proceed against him, and that in particular he should beware of Mr Robert MacKid, the Sheriff-Substitute of Sutherland. Mr MacKid was a Gaelic-speaking Highlander who made great play of his attachment to the people, but who, since he was a middleman himself in a small way, was more probably a weapon which the tacksmen used in their doomed struggle against Improvement. One day toward the end of 1813, Hugh Ross, Procurator-Fiscal, took Sellar's arm in private and told him (as Sellar later claimed) that ‘the Sheriff-Substitute was lying in wait to do me an injury, that he had learned this from the Sheriff himself so far back as the month of July, and he advised me to be extremely cautious in all my proceedings’. Sellar appears to have acknowledged the warning without acting upon it, but he was quick to remember it two years later, and to repeat it where it would do him most good.
On 15 January, the first rent-day of 1814, and in bitter snow-driven weather, Sellar arrived at Achness. With Mr MacKenzie the minister as his host, ally and interpreter, he gave notice to those tenants whom he wished to quit his property at Whitsuntide. Others were told that their time for removal would come later, and still more of the people were warned that within four years Mr Young proposed to clear the whole of Strathnaver from Altnaharra to Dunvedin and place it under sheep. Meanwhile, a surveyor would come north as soon as the spring thaw permitted and would lay out those new lots on the coast where Lord Stafford had decided the people should now live. The surveyor did indeed come with the melting snow, but left immediately because of illness in his family, and although he returned in May his work was still unfinished when Whitsunday came.
Confused, uneasy, and stubbornly reluctant to leave the known for the unknown, the people remained where they were. In April beef prices had fallen with the end of the long European war, and the year ahead promised to be a hard one for all Highlanders who still lived on a black-cattle economy. In spring, too, fodder was always scarce, and now there was even less of it. As soon as the snows melted, Sellar's principal shepherd, John Dryden, had come to burn tens of square miles of dead heath so that cotton grass and deer hair might grow more richly for the coming sheep. Burning to prepare pastures was no new thing in the hills, but never had it been done here on so vast a scale. Much of the townships' muir-pasturage was burnt, and the Strathnaver cattle roamed raw-ribbed in search of food. There was more to make the people despair. In previous removals the evicted had been allowed to take their house-timbers with them for use in the building of new homes. Now it was learnt that the moss-fir was henceforth to be burned when it was torn from the cottages. The people were to be paid the value of the wood, or the value which Sellar set upon it, but this was no compensation at all in a land so sparsely timbered as Sutherland.
At the beginning of June, when most of the Strathnaver men were away in the hills looking for cattle that had strayed as far as Ben Griam for pasture, Patrick Sellar decided that it was time he acted. ‘I waited patiently until the thirteenth of June, when it was then found necessary to cause the Sheriff-Officers to eject the tenants.’
He had arrived in Strathnaver a day or so previous to this date, accompanied by four officers and twenty men. He lodged in the ‘rustic cottage on a knowe’ belonging to Robert Gordon of Langdale. On Sunday, 12 June, he went to divine service in the mission-house at Achness with his host, and sat with him among the other petty gentry – Captain John Mackay of Syre, the Peninsular veteran who was Stafford's warm-hearted but ineffectual factor in Strathnaver, and William Gordon of Breacachadh, an ill-tempered, black-eyed man whose ancestors had also come up from Banffshire three centuries before.
While the Reverend David Mackenzie threatened the people with hell-fire for the slightest disobedience, Sellar seems to have been studying them with interest. After the service was over, he asked the two Gordons for information about them and was told that one man, a William Chisholm, at whom the Gordons pointed, was a very unsavoury character. He was no tenant, not cotter even, but, Sellar was later to write, ‘a tinker who had taken possession of an extremely wild piece of ground in a morass among the mountains, and was accused by the tenantry of bigamy, theft and riotous conduct, and was put down in my instructions as a person to be expelled from the estate’.
The next morning the evictions began, and for a while Sellar stayed to watch. The burning of the house-timbers began as soon as a cottage was emptied, and even before if the occupants were laggardly. The smoke rolled oily and thick in the moist air. The bowl of the valley held the resonant noise of barking dogs, shouted orders, the crying of women and children. ‘It would be a very hard heart but would mourn to see the circumstances of the people that day,’ said Angus Mackay. ‘He would be a very cruel man who did not mourn for the people. You would have pitied them, tumbling on the ground and greeting, tearing the ground with their hands. Any soft-minded person would have pitied them.’
He and his younger brothers were alone and asleep when the alarm came. Their parents had left the cottage early, driving their stock – sheep, cattle, a horse, two mares and a foal – northward to the coast, having been told that if any of their property was still on the ground at noon they would be fined. They told their young sons they would return for them soon, but before they came back the boys were aroused by a woman crying, ‘Won't you wake up? Sellar is burning at Rhistog!’ Angus took his youngest brother, aged three, and ran naked toward the river. ‘I took my brother on my back and through the river I went, and the water was that deep that when it came upon his back he commenced crying and shaking himself on my back, and I fell, and he gripped round about my neck, and I could not rise no more. We were both greeting, and took a fright that we would be drowned. There was a poor woman coming with her family up the strath, and she saw us and jumped into the river and swept us out of it.’
Betsy MacKay was sixteen and she lived at the river's edge by Skail. ‘Our family was very reluctant to leave,’ she remembered, ‘and stayed for some time, but the burning party came round and set fire to our house at both ends, reducing to ashes whatever remained within the walls. The people had to escape for their lives, some of them losing all their clothes except what they had on their backs. The people were told they could go where they liked, provided they did not encumber the land that was by rights their own. The people were driven away like dogs who deserved no better, and that, too, without any reason in the world.’
Donald Macleod, by his account, was present in Strathnaver that day, though he wrote nothing of what happened to his home and family at Rossal. ‘I was present,’ he said, ‘at the pulling down and burning of the house of William Chisholm, in which was lying his wife's mother, an old bed-ridden woman of nearly one hundred years of age, none of the family being present.’ When Sellar came to Chisholm's little hut at Badinloskin to see the expulsion of this vagrant whom he had marked down after prayers the day before, Macleod told him that the old woman was too ill to be removed. ‘He replied, “Damn her, the old witch; she has lived too long. Let her burn!” Fire was immediately set to the house and the blankets in which she was carried were in flames before she could be got out. She was placed in a little shed, and it was with great difficulty they were prevented from firing it also. The old woman's daughter arrived while the house was on fire, and assisted the neighbours in removing her mother out of the flames and smoke, presenting a picture of horror which I shall never forget, but cannot attempt to describe. She died within five days.’
That was Macleod's account, written thirty years after the event (later still, when he was in Canada, he was to add to it, saying that he had burnt his own hands while helping the old woman, Margaret Mackay, to safety). Chisholm and his wife, Henrietta, giving evidence in 1816, told a story no different in substance. The tinker said that one of Sellar's men had refused to carry the sick woman from the cottage, saying, ‘He would not attempt it, even though they should take of
f his coat, as he would not be accessory to murder.’ Sellar then ordered the cottage to be burned, laying faggots against it himself. Janet Mackay, Chisholm's sister-in-law, arrived then, and dragged her mother out in a blanket. The old woman cried, ‘God receive my soul! What fire is this about me?’ She never spoke a word more, said Chisholm.
All of Chisholm's little property was destroyed. His house, his furniture, and some growing corn amounting to twelve sheaves in harvest. He and his wife declared that three bank notes had also been burned with the cottage, for which he received no recompense. Sellar gave him 3s., which the gypsy tinker took to be the value which the Factor placed upon his house-timber, but, he said, ‘Twenty pounds would not have been enough.’
Thus William Chisholm's house burned. ‘There was wind and it burned,’ he said. ‘The wood was thrown down before it was set fire to, and Seller said “There's a bonfire for you!’”
Among the crowd which watched this burning was a boy of fifteen, George Macdonald,* who was then called away to drive his father's cattle northward. He lived at Rossal, where, he said, every house was burned after he had gone. He saw the black ruins some days later. ‘I cannot remember the number, but I would say there were about twenty. There were four other townships near this, each with about the same number of houses, all of which were burnt on the same day. My father, when his own house was set on fire, tried to save a few pieces of wood out of the burning house, which he carried to the river about half a mile away, and there formed a raft of it. His intention was to float the wood down the stream and build a kind of hut somewhere to shelter his weak family, but the burning party came that way and, seeing the timber, set fire to it, and soon reduced the whole to ashes.’
Sellar left Strathnaver before the eviction of the twenty-seven sub-tenants, their families, dependants and cotters, was completed. He was satisfied, he said, that the people were suffering no hardship or injury. As late as Thursday that week the burning continued, the smoke moving with the wind and withering the spring-green growth of barley and oats. ‘Many deaths ensued from alarm, fatigue and cold,’ said Donald Macleod. ‘Some old men took to the woods and precipices, wandering about in a state approaching to, or of, absolute insanity; and several of them, in this situation, lived on a few days. Pregnant women were taken with premature labour, and several children died. To these events I was an eye-witness….’ There is no recorded evidence to support his passionate and grieving accusations (two deaths only can be charged against the evictors), but there was no conscious dishonesty in what he said. ‘I was a neighbour of Donald Macleod,’ declared George Macdonald, ‘and can conscientiously say that he was a truthful and honest man. His book, I am sure, contains the truth, having read some of it myself, most of which I could substantiate.’