by John Prebble
The timber of three hundred buildings burned in the thin May sunshine. The valley was filled again with terrible noise, the crying of women and children, the hysterical barking of the dogs which the Northumbrian shepherds had brought with them. ‘Nothing but the sword was wanting,’ said Macleod, ‘to make the scene one of as great barbarity as the earth ever witnessed.’ At Ceann-na-Coille, George Munro the miller also had most of his family sick with fever. He carried them to a damp kiln not far from the Achness meeting-house, and there they watched their house burn. In the same township lived an old woman who had been evicted from Rhimsdale across the river five years before, and who was known as Bean Raomasdail, the Woman of Rhimsdale. ‘In her house,’ said Sage, ‘I have held diets of catechising and meetings for prayer, and been signally refreshed by her Christian converse.’ She was a paralytic, unable to walk or lie. Night and day she sat in a chair, and any movement caused her great pain. Lord Stafford's agents, said Sage, told her neighbours that ‘she must immediately be removed by her friends, or the constables would be ordered to do it’. Her family lifted her from the chair, and four of the strongest boys in the township wept as they carried her out in a blanket. She was taken northward to the coast, ‘and her cries never ceased till within a few miles of her destination, when she fell asleep.’
At Grumbeg the first house met with belonged to Widow Henney Munro, an old woman who had marched beside her husband in the Peninsular campaigns until he was killed or died of sickness. When she returned to Strathnaver the people had built her a cottage, given her a cow and pasture. She now pleaded for her home and was told that ‘if she did not take her trumpery off within half an hour it would be burned’. And so it was burned, for she could drag her bed, presses and stool no further than the gable, and ‘the wind blew in the direction of the furniture and the flame, lighting upon it, speedily reduced it to ashes’.
At eleven o'clock that night Donald Macleod climbed to high ground above the strath, probably to the top of the little hill at Rossall behind the ruins of his home, and from there he counted two hundred and fifty buildings burning, ‘many of the owners of which were my relations, and all of whom I personally knew’. The townships burned in a long line for more than ten miles, from Grummore on the loch northwards to Skail. He said the fires were still alight six days later, and that at one time the wind sucked great clouds of smoke down the funnel of the glen and out to sea, blinding a boat that was tacking up to an entrance of Torrisdale Bay.
One man refused to go north to Bettyhill and the unprepared allotments on the coast. He was John Mackay, the catechist at Achness, an old man of eighty who earned a living by making leather gaiters for the men of the townships. When he was burned out he walked to the south-east, inland over the hills toward Kildonan and away from the sea he feared. The rest of the people made their way down to Bettyhill and huddled on the quayside there. A small sloop was berthed against the stones, discharging a cargo of quicklime, and her master agreed to take some of the evicted to Caithness if they had a mind to go. Twenty families went aboard, said Macleod, ‘filling deck, hold and every part of the vessel. Many of these persons had not been on sea before, and when they began to sicken a scene indescribable ensued. To add to their miseries, a storm and contrary winds prevailed, so that instead of a day or two, the usual time of passage, it was nine days before they reached Caithness. All this time the poor creatures, almost without necessaries, most of them dying with sickness, were either wallowing among the lime and various excrements in the hold, or lying on deck exposed to the raging elements.’
Donald Sage's Memorabilia confirm Macleod's claim that Strathnaver still burned six days after the torches were set to it. He came by the glen the following week, on his way to Tongue from his father's manse in Kildonan. ‘Of all the houses the thatched roofs were gone, but the walls, built of alternate layers of turf and stone remained. The flames of the preceding week still slumbered in their ruins and sent up into the air spiral columns of smoke; whilst here a gable and there a long side-wall might be seen tumbling to the ground from which a cloud of smoke, and then a dusky flame, slowly sprang up.’ The remains of his little manse at Achness became the home of a foxhunter employed by Atkinson and Marshall. Some of the timbers of his meeting-house were used in the improvement of the long road from Lairg to Tongue. Others were built into a new inn at Altnaharra. A year after Strathnaver was cleared, a woman who had once lived in it paid it a visit, and on her return she was asked what she had seen. ‘O chan eil ach sgiala bronach!’ she cried, ‘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. Sgiala bronach!’
Donald Macleod did not complain of Mr Sage's unexplained absence when his parish would appear to have needed him most, but the stonemason bitterly attacked other ministers of Farr and Tongue who gave the people no comfort at this time. ‘The clergy, indeed, maintained in their sermons that the whole was a merciful interposition of Providence to bring them to repentance….’ Macleod said that shortly after the evictions the Staffords, or James Loch on their behalf, sent a message to the Reverend David Mackenzie at the manse of Farr, asking him if the people were comfortable and provided for. ‘The answer returned was that the people were quite comfortable in their new allotments and that the change was greatly for their benefit.’
Also cleared at the same time as the townships along the Naver was the upper strath of Kildonan nearby, most of it lying within the limits of Achness mission. This long glen, from its narrow opening on the North Sea coast at Helmsdale, curved in a green bow north-westward to Loch nan Clar, Badenloch and the borders of Patrick Sellar's fine new sheep-walk. From the highest point of the valley the black ribbon of the Helmsdale River fell eight hundred feet to the sea. It was an enclave of Highland history. St Donan had a cell in its rock walls. Norsemen had stormed up it to the inland heart of the country. Gunns and Keiths had fought bloody brawls on the lowland meadows, and had left their memory in the names they gave to their land – Bealach nan creach, the Pass of the Forays, Loch nan cuidhean, the Lake of the Snow Wreaths. Viking tumuli were thick in the strath, from its mouth to its rise, and Clan Gunn's black cattle scratched their backs on stone slabs that marked a warrior's death. Within the glebe of the manse in which Donald Sage had been born an Abbot had once built his home. It was gone beneath a scrub of stunted whin even in Donald Sage's time, but his father's house and church still stand below the heather rise of Ben Dubhain, on a green grass field embraced by the river. The old minister's grave, and the graves of his two wives, are in a walled kirk-yard by the flat field in which the chiefs of Clan Gunn were once buried. But the valley is empty.*
Many of the people of the lower strath, close by the sea, had been burnt out in 1813 when the Irish of the 21st came up from Dornoch, demanding vengeance for Vinegar Hill. More had gone in 1815 and in the slow years following. Now it was the time for Loch to clear away the rest, to drive them down to Helmsdale, where his workmen were building herring-stores, curing-sheds and harbour offices, all bearing the Stafford arms and the date of the year in grey Highland stone. And if the people were too lazy (in Loch's opinion) to leave the plough for the trawl, then they might walk to the emigrants' ships at Wick and Thurso, and the country would be well rid of them.
‘The whole inhabitants of Kildonan parish, with the exception of three families,’ said Donald Sage, ‘nearly 2,000 souls, were utterly rooted and burned out. Many, especially the young and robust, left the country, 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.’
‘The idle and lazy alone think of emigration’
WHILE his ground officers were clearing Strathnaver and Upper Kildonan, and as the Great Cheviot moved in thousands to the braesides of Badenloch and Borrobol, Mr Loch was finishing a book seven hundred
miles to the south in Bloomsbury. It was published the following year: An Account of the Improvements on the Estate of Sutherland belonging to the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford, by James Loch, General Agent of the Sutherland Estates. It was a long and confident justification of the Loch Policy over the preceding seven years, and of its proposals for the future. It became the great apologia of the Improvers, with an armoury of statistics for their use. It was to hold its own against a minority of doubt, scepticism and disproval for the rest of the century, and still has its supporters. Nowhere in its pages did Loch refer to himself as the creative and responsible mind, he wrote as if all had sprung god-like from the noble brow of his master. Yet his proud satisfaction can be read behind the figures of herrings barrelled and fleece sheared, of roads, bridges and harbours built, even of people removed. Improvement was the century's Crusade, and in this book James Loch defined its cause: ‘To emancipate the lower orders from slavery has been the unceasing object of the Highland Proprietors for the last twenty years.’
All crusades have their troublesome Saracens, however, and before the book came off the press in Covent Garden ‘Old Mother Stafford’ (as Henry Brougham was now calling her) was sending her friends long and exculpatory letters. ‘We have lately been much attacked in the newspapers by a few malicious writers who have long assailed us on every occasion. What is stated is most perfectly unjust and unfounded, as I am convinced from the facts I am acquainted with, and I venture to trouble you with the enclosed…. If you meet with discussions on the subject in Society, I shall be glad if you will show this statement to anyone who may interest him or herself on the subject.’ The enclosed statement was something Loch must have prepared at the request of the Staffords (who were being uncommonly sensitive to public opinion), a paraphrase of the important arguments and facts in his book.
In an age when every educated and landed gentleman was his own economist, sociologist, agriculturalist, scientist and Improver, Loch's arguments came like a soothing syrup. By the simple arithmetic with which men comfort their consciences it was obvious that against the removal of a few thousand people (to much better conditions) must be set the production of hundreds of thousands of pounds of wool and mutton. Loch allowed that there was opposition from tenants and sub-tenants, but saw it as ‘formidable obstacles to the improvement of a people arising out of the prejudices and feelings of the people themselves’. Stafford's critics were claiming that 15,000 men, women and children had been torn from their homes, but this figure was almost the total population of his Sutherland estates. Loch said that the number of families removed between 1810 and 1820 did not exceed 600, by which he probably meant that this was the number of writs of eviction issued. In addition there were 408 families who, in his opinion, should not have been on his lordship's property at all, for they were squatters, refugees from other clearances with no right or title, and they were justly driven from the county. Assuming an average of five to a family this makes a conservative estimate of five thousand persons evicted. Loch's calculations do not include the removals carried out by Sellar and Young before 1810, and they do not include the cotters and out-servants who could not be counted among the squatters.
No one can ever know the correct figure. It was less than fifteen thousand, but probably considerably more than Loch claimed.
Justifying the remorseless removals, Loch set down the demands of Progress and Improvement: ‘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 and to enable them to bring to market a very considerable surplus quantity of provisions for the supply of the large towns in the southern parts of the land, or for the purpose of exportation.’ This, he thought, as if the idea were not his, 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’.
Loch's figures spilled tumultuously across the pages of his book in support of all this. Half a million pounds of wool were being exported annually, and more than two hundred thousand sheep grazed from Farr to Ross. Ninety miles of road were made or under contract. Bridges were being built at Dornoch and Helms-dale, and another planned for Bonar. Coal was now coming to the county from Newcastle, timber from Speyside, slates from Abderdeen, bricks from Peterhead and lime from Sunderland. A seam of coal had been struck at Brora. The estate was to have a brewery, a pier at Dunrobin where the Burghead packet might berth on its weekly call. Three excellent inns were now open on the coast. Lime was being quarried locally, and a tileworks and brickworks would also make imports from the south unnecessary. Carpenters, masons, smiths, mechanics and merchants were being attracted to the county from the Lowlands.
The herring-fishery at Helmsdale would be a model for all. Here one hundred and forty boats were already catching twenty thousand barrels of fish a year. Here were seventy coopers and five hundred and twenty women to stave and fill the barrels. Cargoes from Helmsdale were travelling to the Baltic, and even to the West Indies. In the beginning the people had at first hired themselves out to fishermen from the south, but when the curing and store-houses were built at Helmsdale in 1814 the mountain people began to captain and man their own vessels, and ‘their success was much greater than could have been expected from the efforts of men unacquainted with the management of a boat’.
What man could not prefer such improvement to the state of affairs before, when the wretched people of Kildonan, for example, had to kill their cows to keep themselves alive in winter, slaughtering as many as two hundred in one season, and also as many horses because there was no fodder for them. Now seven hundred new tenants had been placed at Helmsdale. ‘Their turf hovels after having, in the first instance, given place to cottages built of rough stones without mortar, are by degrees changed into neat houses constructed of stone and lime. A greater attention to cleanliness commences to be an object; and the cow and the pigs begin no longer to inhabit the same dwelling with the family.’
Another advantage of the Loch Policy had also been welcome. The removal of the people from the interior had struck a hard blow at an old Highland custom – the illicit distilling of whisky. To all respectable people this was uplifting news, for the practice had a terrible effect on the moral fibre of the mountaineers, ‘nursing them in every species of deceit, vice, idleness and dissipation’. To regularize the consumption of whisky among his tenants, to secure for the farmers a regular market for the grain they had been selling to the illegal stills, Lord Stafford was proposing to build a distillery at Brora.
Loch closed his book with a justification of the Policy of Improvement in Sutherland and with a summary of its objects:
First: Nothing could be more at variance with the general interests of society and the individual happiness of the people themselves than the original state of Highland manners and customs.
Second: The adoption of the new system, by which the mountainous districts are converted into sheep pastures, even if it should unfortunately occasion the emigration of some individuals, is, upon the whole, advantageous to the nation at large.
Third: The introduction of sheep farms is perfectly compatible with retaining the ancient population in the country.
Fourth: The effect of this change is most advantageous to the people themselves; relieving them from personal services, improving their industrious habits, and tending directly to their rapid increase and improvement.
Lastly: The improvements… have had constantly for their object the employment, the comfort, the happiness of every individual who has been the object of removal; and that there is no single instance of any man having left this country on account of his not having had a lot provided for him; and that those who have gone have been induced to do so by the persuasion of others, and not from themselves, and that in po
int of numbers they are most insignificant.
Such a bland assumption of rectitude was an invitation to Loch's critics to rush into print themselves, and the first away was a grumbling, sceptical English journalist named Thomas Bakewell of Spring Vale near Stone in Staffordshire. Loch's book had scarcely begun to circulate when Bakewell had his own in the bookshops: Remarks on a Publication by James Loch, Esq., entitled, etc…. It contained some plodding but telling sarcasm on the subject of Loch's modesty. ‘How adroitly does he avoid that egotism which is so hateful to an enlightened mind. In almost every page we hear of the Marquess or the Marchioness – Lord and Lady Stafford, the proprietor or the landlord having done this or that to promote the comfort and happiness of their people, when it is well known to be Mr Loch himself that has done all these great things.’
He reminded Loch, ‘you told me that the present Marquess of Stafford was fully aware of the value of popularity as a means of avoiding much evil, and of doing much good in society, and that, as his Lordship's Agent, you considered it your duty to observe that line of conduct which should effectually secure his popularity.’ Observing Stafford's great English estates from the gate of his own tiny plot, Bakewell could not see that Loch had done anything there to win his master friends. ‘I have seen periods of alarm and danger since you became agent; I have heard an old servant much attached to Lord Stafford lament that if a mob were to arise in these parts the first object of it would be to destroy Lord Stafford's property. I have, too, heard it declared that Lord Stafford could not be seen and known in one part of Shropshire without danger to his life.’ The Marquess, however, rarely ran such risk of mobbing. In twenty years his English tenantry saw his face but once, at a ploughing match, when one of his farmers came to him and said that though he had lost the contest he had at least seen his landlord face to face, ‘and that's what neither me nor any of my family ever did before’.