The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  The gentry were delighted. The Easter Ross Militia displayed their bruises in Dingwall as if they had been wounds received at Quatre Bras. Men said that Sheriff Macleod had shown the same strength of character and political courage as that needed the year before to suppress the Manchester mob. But the Inverness Courier, though its sympathies lay with the proprietors, warned them against a comparison of Culrain with Peterloo. ‘There is no feeling of a political nature among the Ross-shire people further than somewhat of that lamentable alienation of the poor from the rich, which more or less pervades every disturbed portion of the Empire, nor do we believe that there was anything like a mutual understanding or concerted action between this people and the inhabitants of other districts. A population in this state is like a maniac, whose fury requires coercion to prevent dangers to his neighbours and to save himself from injury.’ Which was another way of saying, perhaps, that the women of Strath Oykel had been beaten on the head and shot for their own good.

  But if the gentry thought that Culrain had taught the tenantry a lesson, they were mistaken. A year later the terrible shadow of Riot and Anarchy again disturbed their digestions. ‘It is with great concern that we have to advert to such violent proceedings on that part of the tenants on the Estates of Sutherland…’ reported the Courier.

  This time the trouble was at Gruids, a warm saucer of high ground three hundred feet above the River Shin, and five miles to the north of Culrain on the road to Lairg. In April 1821, Sheriff-Officers who came with Writs of Removal on behalf of Lord Stafford ‘were literally stripped of their clothes, deprived of their Papers, and switched off the bounds of the Property’. This time the Lord Advocate did not haver when Robert Nimmo asked for soldiers, and the 41st Regiment was put on the road at once from Fort George. Though they had followed the example of their southern neighbours in deforcing the officers, the people of Gruids did not stay to fight. They took to the hills, but after a day and a night of watching the redcoats below, and listening to the beating of drums, they surrendered to the Writs and walked from their homes to the mine and the fishery at Brora.

  Thereafter, all attempts at ‘Mobbing, Rioting and Deforcing Sheriff Officers’ were ruthlessly punished before the Courts. Three tenants in Farr, for example – John Matheson, John Sutherland and Anne Macdonald – were sent to Dornoch jail for six months. In the parish of Wick, Caithness, two women and three men received the same sentence for ‘Deforcing, Obstructing and Assaulting Alexander Farquhar, Messenger at Arms, who had proceeded there to eject them’. And in this way the little flames of resistance were extinguished, for a while.

  The Courier had no doubt that the simple people had acted in good faith, however stupidly. ‘Unhappily, their weak side was found out and their credulity worked upon until they were impressed by the belief that they were barbarously treated, and that they should walk in THE GOOD OLD WAY, that is – retain possession of their ancient settlements, which it was not possible for them to do without violating the laws of the country and bringing misery and destruction upon their own heads. Hence has arisen all the shameful riots and illegal acts committed in these parts during these two years past.’

  ‘They want fine fields, what care they for men?’

  THE land had once belonged to the people, and their tribal society had been patriarchal. The chief was Ceann-cinnidh, the founder of the tribe or head of the clan, and he and it were one in a mystic unity of blood. In time, and with the authority of Law, the chief made the land his, but because they were closer to the past than he the people always spoke of the earth as ‘our land’. When they walked from it to the emigrant ships it was not always the chief's rights in Law that they were obeying, but his ancient authority as Ceann-cinnidh. And when they defied him it was because they felt he had betrayed the trust of his clanna, his children. This refusal of the people to look the nineteenth century in the face was to frustrate both their friends and their enemies, but it did not worry the chiefs for long. ‘They,’ said Thomas Maclauchlan, Presbyterian divine and Gaelic scholar, ‘can ride out of a forenoon with their visitors and point out to them the splendid enclosures, the extensive sheep-walks or the well-stocked deer-forest as they pass along, without once alluding to the amount of human suffering by which the whole was purchased. They want fine fields and fine forests; what care they for men?’

  Of all Highland chiefs none dispersed their people more thoroughly than the Macdonells of Glengarry or The Chisholms of Strathglass. Nor clung to so much of their pride afterwards.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, and since the days when their Norman ancestors had come up from the Border, twenty-three chiefs of Clan Chisholm had held land in the black and green valley of Strathglass to the north and east of Loch Ness. It was their odd boast that The Chisholm shared with The Pope and The King the exclusive right to a definite article in his title (a small distinction which several others were ready to dispute). Alexander the twenty-third chief, known as An Siosal Ban, The Fair-haired Chisholm, was the last to have any genuine feeling for his people. ‘To his honour as a chief and a generous landlord,’ it was written of him,* ‘he did not suffer himself to be infected with the mania for sheep-farming which has proved so lamentable a scourge to a deserving and unobtrusive race…. The southland shepherds could not tempt him with their golden offers.’

  But the temptation was strong, and the Fair-haired One would have weakened like other chiefs had it not been for his people. Or such was the story they told. Thomas Gillespie, the Lowland grazier, made the golden offer. He was in the Highlands with three partners, prospecting the land of bankrupt chiefs, and he came to Strathglass with a hearty recommendation from Grant of Corriemony, who, having leased most of his land to Gillespie, did not see why his neighbour, The Chisholm, should not have an opportunity of doing the same.

  The sheep-farmers stayed the night at Comar House as The Chisholm's guests. They had ridden the length of Strathglass on their way from Corriemony, and they offered the old man a fortune if he would get rid of his people and let in their sheep. When the offer was made, the chief's daughter, Mary, his only child by his Lowland wife, angrily protested and was sent from the room. The Chisholm listened to the graziers for most of the night, but in the morning a thousand men of his clan gathered outside the house. They called upon him to protect them, and said that sheepmen were worse than any enemy who had once come to Strathglass with a broadsword in his hand. Gillespie and his partners did not wait for the old man's decision, but mounted their horses and rode away. At the ridge of Maol Bhuidhe, between Strathglass and Corriemony, they paused and looked back. The Chisholm was being carried on the shoulders of his clansmen, and his Piper was playing a rant of triumph.

  The Fair-haired One died in 1793, and his title and most of his land passed to his half-brother, William, a man with no burdensome feelings of responsibility to anybody but his wife and his banker. In his will Alexander had offered his widow the choice between an annuity and the rents of a few townships which, upon her death, would return to the chief. She chose the townships, and for the rest of her life she and her spirited daughter stood between The Chisholm and the eviction of the people there.

  With William, The Twenty-fourth Chisholm, there began the total dispersal of the clan. It was to be continued and finished by the sons who succeeded him. He was a sickly man, glad to leave the management of his estates to his energetic wife, Elizabeth. In her youth she had received excellent instruction in this business of eviction and clearance. Her mother, wife to a Glengarry chief, had evicted five hundred people from her husband's estate at Glenquoich and leased it to one southland sheep-farmer. As if she wished to improve upon this maternal example, Elizabeth Chisholm invited Thomas Gillespie back to Strathglass. He came with his pot of gold. The Chisholm clansmen, having no illusions about their wife-ridden chief, wasted no time in lobbying Comar House again. Some of the young men went off to join the Army, but most of the people waited with dull resignation.

  In 1801 The Chisholm's fac
tor cut a broad swathe down the glen, evicting almost half the clan. During that year, and the two years following, five thousand emigrants left Fort William for Antigonish in Nova Scotia and for Upper Canada, and almost a thousand of them, perhaps, were Chisholms from Strathglass. Fifty-three people died of fever aboard one of the ships before it made landfall. Donald Chisholm – Donald the Blacksmith from Glen Affric – was one of those driven out in this clearance, and since he was also a poet custom demanded that he record the event in verse. He was old and frail, and he had no wish to die in Canada, but he tried to encourage his companions with a hopeful picture of the life awaiting them there. More convincing was his bitter disavowal of The Chisholm. ‘Our chief is losing his kin! He prefers sheep in his glens, and his young men away in the camp of the Army!’

  In 1809 there was another great clearance in Strathglass. Five lots ‘calculated to keep from a 1,000 to 5,000 or 6,000 Sheep each’ were advertised for sale by The Chisholm's law-agents, Mackenzie and Moneypenny, W.S., of Edinburgh:

  These Grazings have been lotted out in separate Sheep Walks by the most skilful, intelligent and eminent Store-master that could be found in the Highlands of Scotland, and after his favourable report it would be quite unnecessary to enlarge upon the quality of these Lots. The name of Mr Thomas Gillespie, who has brought the Sheep Stock of Glenquoich to unrivalled excellence, supersedes any comment that could be added in the way of advertisement.

  It might also have been said that Mr Gillespie was once more bringing the human stock of Nova Scotia to unrivalled excellence, for that is where more of the people went the next year. The Chisholm was wasting no thoughts on resettlement, like Lord Stafford. He had not the land for it, in any case. This year he made strong efforts to persuade his sister-in-law to release to him the property his brother had left her. These townships were now crowded with hungry refugees from his estates. She made them welcome, but supporting them was not easy, and her kinsman, Bishop Aeneas Chisholm, told her that soon the people under her care would be double the number left on The Chisholm's estates. ‘Allan Chisholm and his brother Duncan are driven from their place by a vile fellow, and sixteen good fellows driven out of their places…. Oh! madam, you would really feel if you only heard the pangs and saw the oozing tears by which I am surrounded in this once happy but now devastated valley of Strathglass, looking out all anxiously for a home without forsaking their dear valley; but it will not do, they must emigrate!”

  Old and growing simple in the mind, the Dowager Mrs Chisholm was no match for Mr William Mackenzie, the law-agent. He called again and again, urging her to sell the townships to the chief. Her daughter, Mary, refused him entry to the house, but once she went into her mother's room and found the lawyer forcing a pen into the old woman's hand. She scolded him from the estate like a fish-wife, shouting, ‘If ever you come here again, I'll make Edinburgh too hot to hold you!’ The memory of Mary Chisholm in Strathglass was to live longer than that of her uncle or his lawyers.

  The Twenty-fourth Chisholm died in 1817, leaving the title to his son, Alexander, a minor, and the immediate future of what remained of his clansmen to his wife. She evicted some of them, leased their land to a sheepman from Peebles, and with the money received sent her boy to Cambridge for three years. When he came of age in 1831 he returned to the Highlands full of plans (so his friends said) ‘for ameliorating the condition of the people on his property’. Old Alexander Chisholm's widow had been dead for five years, and her holdings were now the new chief's. Mary Chisholm was the wife of a London merchant called Gooden, with nothing to offer her father's people but her sympathy.

  The Twenty-fifth Chisholm's plans for his people turned out to be nothing that might have shamed his mother. In the spring of the year his factor told all the men in Strathglass to gather at the Inn of Cannich, where their chief would meet them and explain what was to happen to them now that all the leases in the valley were about to expire. The men came, and waited. ‘After some hours,’ remembered Colin Chisholm, who was there, ‘a gig was seen at a distance, driving toward the tenants. This was the signal for a momentary ray of hope. But on the arrival of the vehicle it was discovered that it contained only the “sense-carrier” of the proprietor, viz., the factor, who told the men that The Chisholm was not coming to the meeting, and that, as factor, he had no instructions to enter into any arrangement with them. Imagine the bitter grief and disappointment of the men… who had to tell their families and dependants in the evening that there was no alternative before them but the emigrant ship. In a short time after this meeting it transpired that the best farms and the best grazing lands in Strathglass were let quite silently, without the knowledge of the men in possession, to shepherds from other countries, leaving half the number of the native population without house or home.’

  Some of the people went over their northern wall of hills to Glenstrathfarrar on Lord Lovat's land, and there the Chief of the Frasers gave them work and shelter on a sheep-farm. In time, said Colin Chisholm, he too ‘informed the evicted men of Strathglass that he required their new holdings for the purpose of enlarging his deer forest and they were again removed’. A number went to other parts of Lovat's estates, but many, trusting no Highland laird now perhaps, went away to Antigonish and the timberlands of Upper Canada.

  It was the evicted, exiled people of Clan Chisholm who gave the best example of the complex and intimate relationships that had existed between clan and chief. In 1832 the exiles in Canada sent the graduate of Trinity (who had just ejected half of his remaining clansmen) an address of loyalty on his majority, acknowledging him as their chief and affirming their allegiance to him though they no longer lived in their homeland. This admirable if naïve gesture has been offered as proof that Clan Chisholm went willingly, even gratefully, to the emigrant ships and bore the chief no grudge, but the truth of it was probably more moving. Though the men who held the rank had betrayed its trust, the people still held to the noble ideal of the Ceann-cinnidh and the unity of his children. And perhaps some of those who signed the loyal address hoped that it would awaken a proper sense of shame in The Twenty-fifth Chisholm.

  If so, they were mistaken. He and his brother Duncan, who succeeded him, continued to empty Strathglass from the beautiful vale of Affric to the Beauly River. As their factor they now had Donald Robertson from Atholl, a hard and canny fellow who followed the profitable example of Patrick Sellar, taking for himself some of the land from which he evicted his employer's people. It was he who leased much of Strathglass to James Laidlaw, the Sasunnach Mor, one of the greatest sheep-farmers in the Highlands. Laidlaw was a tall, impressive man with a good share of that solemn rectitude that made Improvement sometimes appear to be the executive branch of the Almighty. He was a Lowlander of the peasant stock that produced native poets and natural businessmen with prodigal profusion at the beginning of the last century. He had learnt his letters from his father's shepherd, James Hogg the Ettrick verse-maker who was the friend of Byron, Wordsworth, Southey and Scott. Laidlaw, too, was Sir Walter's ‘dear friend’, and he was known to be a liberal man and kind, but the Chisholms were driven from the land so that he might pasture his sheep.*

  Laidlaw's shepherds and Donald Robertson were attacked in one of the most bitter poems ever written in the Gaelic. It was the work of a Chisholm bard Donnachadh Buidhe, Yellow-haired Duncan, and the part of it which follows is an inadequate prose translation only:

  Destruction to the sheep from all corners of Europe! Scab, wasting, pining, tumours on the stomach and on the hide! Foxes and eagles for the lambs! Nothing more to be seen of them but fleshless hides and the grey shepherds leaving the country without laces in their shoes. I have overlooked someone, the Factor! May he be bound by tight thongs, wearing nothing but his trousers, and be beaten with rods from head to foot. May he be placed on a bed of brambles and covered with thistles. Thus may this stray cur be driven back to Atholl!

  For the Twenty-fifth Chief this same bard had nothing but pitying contempt: ‘He is a
man without power, under the control of gentlemen who misdirect him. He desires nothing so much in the world as sheep on his meadows, in place of his people, his family from the beginning of time!’

  But so far as the gentry, the county authorities and the Government were concerned, the emptying of Strathglass was long overdue. It was, in their opinion, a most unsavoury spot, with more illicit stills to the square mile than could be found anywhere else in the Highlands, including Sutherland (and that was bad enough). Not only did the Chisholms make so much of their raw whisky, they also offered shelter and protection to the smugglers of it. Now and then the King's officers were forced to make armed forays into Strathglass, with considerable risk. In April 1827, for example, a Revenue party under a Mr Macniven marched into the glen, destroyed some stills, and then retired to the Inn at Comar. There the officers remained under siege until Mr Macniven pricked their courage to a sortie.

  ‘About two miles beyond the public-house,’ said the Inverness Courier, ‘a smart fire commenced from the upper grounds, and on arriving in a narrow pass of the road, Mr Macniven's further progress was opposed by about twenty men, armed with muskets and arrayed within gunshot. The Revenue Party, consisting of ten men, and being armed only with pistols and short cutlasses, had no alternative but to retreat from the determined purpose of slaughter shown by the smugglers, and retired accordingly from the unequal contest; nor is it of any avail for the Revenue Officers to attempt a seizure in that quarter until powerfully reinforced and efficiently armed.’

  As late as 1835, when most of the Chisholms had gone, the survivors were still making whisky and entertaining smugglers. A detachment from the revenue cutter Atlanta was attacked in Strathglass by fourteen armed men ‘and driven back with great violence’. Beyond any other consideration of their value, sheep were infinitely preferable to such unruly people.