The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  The recorded facts make harsh enough reading. John Mackay's pregnant wife, when the burners tore down her house at Ravigill, climbed to the roof and fell through it in an absurd attempt to protect her home, and so was brought to terrible labour. John Mackay's cry of protest, when he saw Patrick Sellar watching, was that the law of the country must surely have been changed for such things to be done with the approval of Sheriff-Officers and Factor.

  Like the tinker Chisholm's mother-in-law, old Donald MacBeth was brought to death a month – six months, a year, it does not matter – earlier than he might have been as a result of that week. Mortally ill with cancer of the face, he lived at Rhimsdale with his son Hugh. On the Saturday Sellar came to Strathnaver, Hugh MacBeth went to the Factor. He said that he had to leave the valley for his god-mother's funeral, and he asked that his house and his father be spared until his return. ‘No,’ said Sellar, ‘De'il a ane of them shall remain!’ Hugh MacBeth's father-in-law, who was present, declared that this was cruel, and Sellar cocked an eye at him, asking his name and writing it down in his pocketbook. Before MacBeth left for the funeral on Tuesday, he took the divots from the roof of his house leaving the couples and side-trees standing, hoping that this might mollify Sellar. When he returned, four days later, he found his father lying in the open among the stones, with only a low clay wall for protection against the weather. The old man died soon after, and whether it was from cancer or exposure seems a quibble.

  The day after the burning of Skail, John Mackay, searching the hills for his cattle, found another old man of his own name lying helpless beneath some birch-trees. The only house left standing in the township was one which John Dryden, Sellar's shepherd, had marked for his future residence. Mackay knew that there would be no shelter there, so he left the old man where he was, beneath the birch-trees, speechless, lost in shock, and John Mackay could not say, when asked, whether he had found shelter across the river or whether he died where he lay.

  Grace Macdonald, a girl of nineteen living by Langdale, took shelter up the brae with her family when the township was burnt, and waited there a day and a night, watching Sellar's men sporting about the flames. When a terrified cat sprang from a burning house it was seized and thrown back, and thrown back again until it died there. ‘There was no mercy or pity shown to young or old,’ said Grace Macdonald; ‘all had to clear away, and those who could not get their effects removed in time to a safe distance had it burnt before their eyes. They were happy in Strathnaver, with plenty to take and give, but all are very poor now.’

  William Morrison, who was fourteen, wandered through the glen and watched twenty houses burning at Rossal, he said, and two more at Dalvina, Dalmalaran and Achphris. ‘But surely it was cruel!’ he cried in his old age, ‘For people to say that there was no cruelty or harshness shown people when they were burnt off Strathnaver is a glaring lie, which no amount of flowery language can hide!’

  At Ceann-na-Coille, the first township north of the loch-end, there lived a schoolteacher, or a man who had enough book-learning to act as such when his work on the land gave him the time. His name was William Sutherland, and because of his small education, perhaps, the townships entrusted him with the collection of rents on term-day. He had a son and six daughters, one of whom remembered that when the burners came all the men of Ceann-na-Coille with the exception of her father were away after their cattle in the hills. ‘When the company arrived to set fire to the house,’ she said, ‘he requested that in consideration of his service to the House of Sutherland, by going with the rents of the townships to Dunrobin, they would be good enough to spare the outhouse whither we might retire during the night; and that he himself would set fire to it the next morning. This was ruthlessly refused, and we had to remain all night on a green hillock outside, and view our dwelling smouldering into ashes.’

  For days after the burning was over the homeless people remained in the glen. They sat on the hillsides among what they had been able to salvage from the ruins. They put canvas over their heads for protection against the night rain. Across the river from the township of Rhiloisk a little girl sat and watched and remembered: ‘For some days after the people were turned out one could scarcely hear a word with the lowing of the cattle and the screaming of children marching off in all directions. Everything was burnt that they could lay their hands upon, in some cases the hens in the byres were burnt. I shall never forget that awful day.’ She was eighty-two when she said that.

  The men had returned with the cattle, which now wandered unhindered over the crops of young barley, the green potato patches by the roofless houses. Murdo Mackay's corn-kiln at Ravigill, which all the township used, had been pulled stone from stone, although it was a custom of the country that an out-going tenant was entitled to the use of his kiln until he had manufactured his waygoing crop. William Gordon's three barns at Skail, the finest in the valley, were also destroyed, and here too custom should have given the tenants the use of all barns until the harvest's end. But this year there would be no harvest; before barley or oats ripened Mr Sellar's Great Cheviots would be among the crops.

  At last the people left for the coast. ‘When they came down from the strath to the sea-shore,’ remembered George Macdonald, ‘they suffered very much from the want of houses. They hurriedly threw up earthen walls, stretching blankets over the top to shelter them, and cooped up in a small place like this, four or five families spent the following winter. No compensation was given for the houses burnt, neither any help to build new ones. Having brought with them large flocks of cattle and there being no food for them, they almost died the first winter…. Some people were removed three or four times, always forced farther down until at last the sea-shore prevented them from being sent any farther unless they took ship for the Colonies, which many of them did.’

  Among the evicted were many old soldiers whose natural dignity of race was stiffened still further by a pride that took them beyond the edge of starvation before they would beg. One of these was Iain Ban Mackay from the township of Rhifail He had served with the Reay Fencibles in the Irish Rebellion, marching up Tara Hill under heavy musket-fire, and for his courage and conduct that day he carried with him a letter of commendation from his colonel. After being driven from Rhifail in 1814 he and his family were removed five times more before they at last reached the coast, building themselves a hut of stones on the cliffs above Tongue. During the winter of 1816 the county suffered badly from a potato famine. Iain Mackay had given his last spoonful of meal to his sick daughter before he stomached his pride and asked Lord Stafford's factor for food. The factor closely examined him, demanding proof of his character, questioning his ability to pay for the charity he asked. When Mackay had agreed to give his one milk-cow in exchange, he was allowed a boll of meal. On this the family contrived to live until spring.

  But perhaps, as Lady Stafford wrote to a friend that same winter, ‘Scotch people are of happier constitutions, and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.’

  Nearly seventy years later Mackay's granddaughter, Annie, spoke of the effect which those times had on her family. ‘I remember my grandmother, a sadly-depressed woman with a world of sorrow in her faded blue eyes, as if the shadow of the past were always upon her spirit. I never saw her smile, and when I asked my mother for the cause she told me that that look of pain came upon my grandmother's face with the fires of Strathnaver. Even when my mother was in her last illness, in May 1882, when the present was fading from her memory, she appeared again as a girl of twelve in Strathnaver, continually asking “Whose house is burning now?” and crying out now and again, “Save the people!”’

  Improvements? asked Donald Macleod bitterly:

  ‘Mr Dempster of Skibo has improved, and his factor from being a kitchen-boy has become a very thriving gentleman. These are the kind of Improvements that have taken place, and all would go merrily if they could get entirely rid of the small tenants. Mr Loch says that the Sutherlanders were in a “state of nature”. Well, he a
nd his coadjutors have done what they could to put them into an unnatural state!’

  ‘The laws of the country imperiously call upon me!’

  THE Procurator-Fiscal had been quite right. Robert MacKid, Sheriff-Substitute of Sutherland, had indeed been lying in wait for Patrick Sellar, and the Strathnaver evictions of June 1814 gave him his opportunity to spring. MacKid was a Highlandman, but his sympathies were less with sub-tenants and cotters than with that dying class of middlemen to which he belonged,* and whose creature he seemed to be. The middlemen were a great trial to Stafford, for much of his vast estate was still encumbered with them, and the proposal to be rid of them along with the sub-tenants, said Sellar, ‘made my duty no sinecure’. But there were a number of them who would not lie down or go away when bribed or threatened, and Mr MacKid was soon to be put into the lists as their champion against Sellar, and against Lord Stafford through the Factor.

  MacKid was a lawyer by profession, practising first at Fortrose and later at Tain. In 1809, when the Sheriff-Substitute of the county was drowned with seventy other people aboard the Meikle Ferry, Mr MacKid became his successor. He liked to make speeches boasting that trial-by-jury was rare in Sutherland because crime was unknown except by name, but when the shire got the most famous trial-by-jury in its history Mr MacKid was responsible for it.

  He was a fussy, money-ridden man with a large family of three sons and three daughters to whom he was sentimentally attached. In his nature there was a boyish and adventurous longing for the old days when any deer that started from the heather, any hare leaping, any bird rising was the rightful target for a Highlandman's gun. He was, in fact, grievously addicted to poaching on Lord Stafford's estates. ‘I mean,’ complained Sellar fretfully, ‘to killing hares on the corn at breeding time, to shooting partridges by the covey when sitting close together in time of snow; and to otherwise destroying the game without either certificate or liberty from the proprietor. He had met with several checks from the keepers, from myself, and in one instance from the Marquess of Stafford; none of which checks were, I believe, calculated to compliment this man of authority, or to flatter his vanity.’

  When MacKid was caught for a third time at his poaching, and was unable to talk his way out of the act, he wrote to the Staffords, begging them not to prosecute. ‘Lord Stafford's answer passed through my hands,’ wrote Sellar later. ‘I cannot do it justice, but it was somewhat to this effect – that, including the Sheriff, there were seven poachers detected in different parts of the county and contained in the same report; that whatever differences might exist between the condition of the culprits, the quality of the offence was the same; and therefore, in granting the Sheriff's request his Lordship had directed me to discharge the whole.’ But Robert MacKid did not forget that Patrick Sellar would rather have seen him in the Tolbooth.

  All this took place before the burnings in Strathnaver. The evictions there were reported briefly by the Press, and without comment, except by the Military Register. The interest which this newspaper and its readers took in the affair was something more than a feeling that injustice had been done. It was edited and published from Pall Mall in London by a Scotsman, Robert Bisset Scott, an officer in the Tower Hamlet Militia, a military writer, and later a free-lance warrior in Portugal's wars. He had begun the paper in 1814, acquiring a healthy circulation for it among retired and half-pay officers, particularly in the Highlands. Therefore Scott had a strong and partisan concern for their affairs. In the past, when Highland regiments had been raised for the Crown, they had been clan levies, officered by junior kinsmen and tacksmen of the chiefs. Those who served well were rewarded, as was the custom, with grants of land. But now the raising of recruits and the commissioning of officers followed the normal procedure governing all regiments of the line. Officers returning impoverished and land-hungry from the Napoleonic Wars found no grants of land awaiting them, and in many cases no grateful chiefs to welcome them. The land they had hoped to receive (and often the land they believed they already possessed) was being sold for sheep-walks, and they were of no more importance than any English half-pay officer condemned to penury in Bath or Cheltenham.

  The Military Register became their spokesman against Improvement and eviction long before Waterloo: ‘The present war is a war of liberty! O then let us not suffer petty local tyranny to destroy such hopes either in the army, or those sources from which are to be drawn our future armies.’ It published full accounts of the events in Strathnaver, written by a correspondent who signed himself ‘Miles – a Highlander of Sutherland’, and who, from the detailed nature of his information later, would appear to have been a close confidant of MacKid if not the Sheriff-Substitute himself. The Military Register was read aloud at cottage doors in the parish of Farr, fomenting a demand for the prosecution of Patrick Sellar. Encouraged, perhaps, by this sympathy from the south, the people drew up a petition to Lady Stafford, complaining of the injury, cruelty and oppression they had suffered. Having been assured by Sellar that there were no grounds for complaint, she replied to them: ‘That if any person on the estate shall receive any illegal treatment, she will never consider it as hostile to her if they have recourse to legal redress as the most secure way to receive the justice which she always desires they should have on every occasion.’

  It is surprising that the petition even reached her. ‘In the rare case of any of the noble family coming to the Highlands during the period of the removals,’ said Donald Macleod, ‘they came only to the castle and stopped there, where the old tenants were strictly denied access while the new occupiers had free personal communication with the proprietors. When any memorial or petition from the former could be got introduced there was no attention paid to them if not signed by a minister, and this was next to impossible as the clergy, with one honourable exception, had to take the other side.’

  When the people heard no more from the Marchioness (she believing Patrick Sellar) they wrote to her son, Earl Gower. He passed the petition to his parents, and this time Stafford replied that he was ‘desirous that the tenants should know that it is always their [the Staffords] wish that justice should be impartially administered.’ He told the people that he had ordered William Young to place both their petitions before Mr Cranstoun, the Sheriff of Sutherland, to take what steps he thought fit. Thus encouraged to believe that justice might be theirs, the men of Strathnaver began to collect funds for the prosecution under the guidance of the Military Register, which regularly published the anonymous donations received (in March, 1816, a total of £27 2s. sterling was reached).

  In the spring of 1815, when Mr Cranstoun appeared to be laggard, the people wrote to him too, ‘requesting that he would bring Mr Sellar to justice’. The Sheriff's reply showed that he had no intention of burning his fingers. He said ‘that if the tenants mean to take a precognition immediately it will proceed before the Sheriff-Substitute, as my engagements will not permit me to be in Sutherland until the month of July’. He thus handed the matter to Mr MacKid, who had surely been active in the affair long before this.

  The Sheriff-Substitute went to work with enthusiasm, setting out for Strathnaver at once and ‘at considerable personal inconvenience and expense, and with much patient perseverance’, he later told Lord Stafford. He said that he examined forty witnesses in Strathnaver, ‘and it is with the deepest regret that I have to inform your Lordship that a more numerous catalogue of crimes, perpetrated by an individual, has seldom disgraced any country, or sullied the pages of a precognition in Scotland!!!’

  It was not, however, his responsibility to collect such evidence. This should have been done by the Procurator-Fiscal, but Hugh Ross was away from the country for lengthy periods at this time, and MacKid was in no mood to await his return or the Sheriff's. So he travelled to Strathnaver on his own, without even the Sheriff-Clerk to be his penman. The people spoke freely and bitterly of the dark days of the burnings, and from their evidence came the picture of Margaret Mackay crying ‘O teine! Oh, fire!’ as she w
as carried out in her blanket; of old Donald MacBeth lying for four days in the wind and rain by a clay wall, of their deaths, of the burning cottages, destroyed barns and broken kilns.

  Back from the north toward the end of May 1815, MacKid wrote to Lord Stafford, informing him that his Factor Patrick Sellar was now a prisoner in the Tolbooth at Dornoch and that a statement would shortly be taken from him too. He was there, said MacKid, because ‘the laws of the country imperiously call upon me’. Meanwhile he could tell his lordship something of the nature of the crimes with which the Factor was almost certain to be charged: ‘Wilful fire-raising; by having set on fire and reduced to ashes a poor man's whole premises, including dwelling-house, barn, kiln, and sheep cot, attended with most aggravated circumstances of cruelty, if not murder!!!’

  So far as MacKid was concerned, the Factor could stay in the Tolbooth until his trial. He refused bail, and Sellar's friends had to apply to the Court of Judiciary in Edinburgh for an order that it should be accepted before they could get the Factor out of MacKid's hands. The Military Register expressed ‘the utmost astonishment of the country’ that bail should have been granted, and accused Sellar and his friends of threatening to commit MacKid himself on charges of false imprisonment. This although Margaret Mackay's scorched blanket had been displayed in public!