The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  The Macleods were safe on the land of William Innes for a year or more, during which time Macleod was often away. He was in Edinburgh when his wife, frightened by the visits of a factor who told her that ‘he would take steps that would astonish her’, left Sandside and went to Macleod's mother in Bettyhill at the mouth of the Naver. Under no protection now, she was once more evicted. With her children she walked thirty miles to Thurso in two days, and the bitter journey, with all that had preceded it, drove her out of her mind. ‘Instead of the cheerful and active helpmate she was formerly,’ wrote Macleod sadly, ‘she is now, except at short intervals, a burden to herself, with little or no hopes of recovery.’

  They went south to Edinburgh, but Macleod returned frequently to the north for his work, and often to Sutherland. He kept in correspondence with the people there. The presence of his demented wife stiffened his resolve to publish the truth about James Loch's Improvements. Each time he visited Sutherland the changes saddened him. In Assynt, for example, where once there had been hundreds of small tenants there were eleven families only, and these belonging to shepherds on a sheepwalk of 30,000 acres. New factors had taken the place of Young and Sellar long since, but only their faces seemed different. There was George Taylor and George Gunn at Golspie, and Robert Horsburgh at Tongue. Taylor was as harsh and as demanding on his employer's behalf as ever Young had been, though he had literary pretensions that charmed the Marchioness. He had written a history of Montrose's wars, articles on deer-stalking for Knight's Cyclopaedia, and was now planning a great history of the Rebellion of 1715, illustrated by material from the archives at Dunrobin.

  With Loch's approval, the factors were now increasing rents in the fishing-villages when a son succeeded a father. The legality of this was never clear, but nobody ever successfully disputed it. The rent-roll of the Sutherland Estate was three times what it had been when it had come to Stafford as a dowry, but it still brought him no profit. More bitter for the people to endure than rent-increases was Loch's order that though a small tenant might keep his children on his croft whatever their age, should one of them marry then he or she must leave. This amounted to marriage-by-permission, for unless the factor agreed to it, and found the pair a cottage and half-acre of land, they had nowhere to go. Those who married without permission were forced to leave the county. ‘They may travel the length and breadth of Sutherlandshire,’ reported a Times commissioner some years later when the practice was still continuing, ‘but not a cottage will they find, or a place where they will be suffered to remain.’ James Loch, who had two houses in Scotland and one in England, sincerely believed that he was in this way preventing over-crowding, over-population and over-indulgence.

  On one of his last visits to Strathnaver before he left the north for Edinburgh, Donald Macleod went to a service in its ‘parish church’ (probably the mission-house at Altnaharra). A deeply religious man, though fiercely anti-clerical, he was shocked by the experience, and his description of it vividly illustrated the changes that had taken place since Donald Sage preached his first sermon to three hundred people at the foot of Rowan Tree Hill.

  ‘The parish church was now reduced to the size and appearance of a dove-cot. The whole congregation consisted of eight shepherds with their dogs to the amount of 20 or 30, the minister, three of his family, and myself. I came in after the first singing, but, at the conclusion, the 120th Psalm was given out and struck up to the famous tune Bangor, when the four-footed hearers became excited and raised a most infernal chorus of howling. Their masters attacked them with their crooks, which only made matters worse, the yelping and howling continued till the end of the service.’

  ‘There will be no weeping of children…’

  JUST before nine o'clock one evening in August 1832, the southbound coach from Tain drove into Inverness with Mr Morrison the guard ill on his box. He delivered his mailbags, stumbled to his home, and was dead within four hours. The Board of Health ordered an immediate meeting of all the doctors in the burgh. Cholera had come to the north-east.

  Its coming had been feared since January when it had reached the Lowlands from England. The Inverness Board of Health and similar boards in all the Highland counties had much to worry them. Poverty, destitution and over-crowding, for which the clearances were largely responsible, had made an epidemic inevitable once the disease arrived. Pigs rooted in dunghills that were placed by cottage doors. The poor slept on dirty straw in hovels where the windows, if they existed at all, were without sashes or hinges. In Inverness the poor quarter had an open slaughterhouse on every street. Public subscriptions were raised to provide manure stances, lime-washing, food and clothing (and a cholera hospital if the money would run to it). Agents of the Sutherland Estate visited every township and herring-village on the coast, ordering dunghills to be removed thirty yards from each cottage, but nothing could be done about the pigs which spent their days on the heaps and their nights in the cottages. In February, when the epidemic reached the Lothians, the rates of Inverness were increased by a penny per pound Scots to raise a fund of £300 to fight the disease. And in March, by Royal Proclamation, the Government ordered a General Fast in Scotland, which showed interest, if little effect.

  Men began to look for scapegoats, and these were found in the beggars; men, women and children who had been wandering from county to county since eviction. By tuck of drum, the Sheriff of Inverness prohibited all inhabitants from harbouring vagrants, and posted constables to see that they did not enter the town. The panic increased in the Spring, and even the successful second reading of the Reform Bill was less a talking-point than the northward tide of cholera. The disease now had a strong hold on Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth, but when it did reach Inverness it came not from the south but the north.

  In the July of that hot and sinister summer a Lowland herring-boat called at Helmsda'e from Prestonpans. It brought the cholera. The disease ravaged Sutherland and Easter Ross, burning with particular intensity in the villages about Tain. At the village of Inver only half the people survived. Whole families were found dead on the rotten straw of their beds. ‘In one instance,’ said the Inverness Courier, ‘an infant, the only survivor, lay grovelling on the body of its mother, sole mourner in the charnel-house of the pestilence…. Many survivors fled, leaving behind them the dead and the dying, and took shelter, some in the woods and some among the hollows of an extensive track of sandhills. But the pest followed them to their hiding-place, and they expired in the open air.’ Children buried their parents without shrouds, in common pits, shunned by their neighbours. So great was the poverty in most of the afflicted townships that many of the cottages were without candles, and men and women fought the first terrible attack of the disease in total darkness.

  There were three hundred cases in the poor quarter of Inverness, and eighty deaths already, when the gentlemen of the county and neighbouring shires met in the town for a ‘great procession of trades to celebrate the passing of the Reform Bill’ with flags, banners and triumphal arches. When they returned to their own towns they were refused entry unless they were first washed with chloride of lime, and ‘smoked’ in a hut full of fumes of sulphur.

  And then, in September, the epidemic began to recede. By November it had passed. Its effects were to be felt for years, particularly in the famine of 1836, and while everybody saw that poverty and squalor had contributed to its ferocity, none remarked that the creation of a landless poor by three decades of eviction may have had something to do with it too.

  In July 1833, one single death was reported in the Highlands with more column-inches of mourning than any of the cholera victims had received the year before. George Granville Leveson-Gower died a Duke, not a Marquess, though he enjoyed the title for six months only. His elevation to the rank he coveted had been publicly announced in the pleasantest fashion possible, at a dinner party held by William IV. The King had proposed the health of ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland’. The news was said to have been received with great happiness in
that county.

  He died in the castle of Dunrobin, during the Annual Wool and Sheep Fair at Inverness. The price of wool per stone of 48 lb. had risen six shillings above its unhappy fall during the epidemic. Cheviot wedders from Sutherland were selling at thirty shillings, ewes at twenty, and lambs at eleven. When the Fair ended (before his Grace's interment) business transacted had amounted to £100,000 in sheep and £80,000 in wool. These handsome figures alone would have been sufficient valediction for the Duke, but a better was being prepared by James Loch, though he had stated his own preference in his will: ‘I coincide with Tacitus in his opinion so beautifully expressed in the account of the death of Germanicus. I wish it to be without parade or absurd expense.’

  He was buried in the ancient cathedral at Dornoch, where the Earls of Sutherland had been laid since 1248. ‘The day was uncommonly fine,’ wrote James Loch in a tasteful memorial he prepared for the Duchess-Countess, ‘lighting up the Alpine scenery of Sutherland, its rocks, glens and bays, with a grace and splendour that only rendered the presence of death more mournful and impressive.’ All shops in the county were shut (‘spontaneously’, he said), all work abandoned. Ten thousand people came to Dornoch and Dunrobin at their own request. They were brought, in some cases as far as eighty miles, by their ministers and elders, and were stationed along the road from Dunrobin to Dornoch in order of their parishes: Golspie, Loth, Kildonan, Reay, Clyne, Rogart, Lairg, Assynt seventeen in all, including three in Ross-shire. ‘Ample refreshments in bread, meat and ale were provided for the whole, all whisky and ardent spirits were excluded.’ Mr Loch was permitting nothing of the disgusting bacchanal that usually followed the committal of a Highland laird. His Grace was to be dispatched with the dignity of an English gentleman.

  Donald Macleod had another memory. ‘The day of the funeral was ordered to be kept as a fast day by all the tenantry, under penalty of the highest displeasure of those in authority, though it was just then the herring-fishing season when much depended on a day. Still this was a minor hardship….’

  A hundred superior tenants and gentry gathered in Dunrobin Castle at ten o'clock in the morning listened to some prayers from the Minister of Dornoch, and then fortified themselves with wine and cake until his Grace was brought into the courtvard in a coffin made by his carpenters, and in a shroud sewn by the women of his family and the daughters of his principal tenants. The coffin was attended by his son the new Duke, by his son-in-law the Earl of Surrey. his grandson Lord Edward Howard, his nephew the Honourable Mr Howard, his physician Doctor Dunbar, two of his law-agents from Edinburgh (one of whom was William Mackenzie, the lawyer of Strathglass), and ‘Mr Loch his confidential friend’.

  Also present to claim an ancient privilege of leading the funeral processions of the Earls of Sutherland was the Chief Factor of the Estate, George Gunn, who was also head of whatever the evictions had left of his clan in Kildonan.

  The procession left for Dornoch shortly after ten-thirty: five mourning-coaches, forty carriages and gigs full of sheen-farming tenants, and a hundred mounted gentlemen riding two by two. George Gunn, Mac-Shevmais-Chetaich the Chief for this day, was in the van, followed by the factors of Tongue and Scourie, followed by William Lewis the agent of the English estates. followed by John Mackenzie, Clerk to the County, followed by eight gentlemen riding in pairs, overseers, wood-rangers and surveyors of the Sutherland lands. Then the hearse drawn by six black horses. Then ‘his Grace's chariot, empty, and drawn by six horses with servants on the dicky’.

  Finally, but before all the other carriages, gigs and horsemen, the new Duke rode in his carriage alone. ‘The road from the avenue to the further extremity of Rhives plantation,’ he wrote to his young wife Harriet that evening, ‘was lined on the right hand by a row of men of the common people, all from Kildonan and Loth, their heads uncovered, and with their hats before their faces while the cortege passed, as if they were each of them praying.’ As indeed they were, led by their ministers. At Kirkton, where Robert MacKid had once lived, another line began, people from Rogart and Assynt, Tongue and the Reay country. A mile from Dornoch the line stretched on both sides of the road. ‘One felt sorry not to be able to give something to each as one passed, and one would have wished to have been a Pope to have given them a blessing.’

  At the boundary of Dornoch, the procession, which was in one sense an assembly of all the prophets and profiteers of Improvement in Sutherland, was met by the magistrates of that burgh and, said Loch, by ‘three hundred and sixty of the most respectable persons of the burgh of Tain’. These gentlemen had been spending some weeks on the preparation of An Address of Thanks to the Duke for extending his interests to the County of Ross by the purchase of their town. Now that he was dead they did the next best thing and came to his funeral.

  From the town boundary the magistrates led the cortège to the cathedral. Following a funeral service conducted in the manner of the Church of England by the Reverend Edward Ramsay of St John's Chapel, Edinburgh, the Duke's coffin was lowered into a tomb at the south end of the south transept. The last member of the family of the Earls of Sutherland to be buried there, in 1766, had been the elder sister of the Duchess-Countess, aged two years. The new Duke stayed in the cathedral until two large flagstones, fixed with brick and stucco, had been placed over the tomb, and then he rode back to Dunrobin by way of Embo and Skelbo to avoid the crowds. From the window of his carriage he could see ‘the good people returning quietly home in bodies across the moor’.

  There was time that late afternoon in his room at Dunrobin, with the sun still hot on the sunken gardens and on the sea beyond, for the new lord of Sutherland and Stafford to reflect upon his father's work and upon the obligations now laid on him. ‘One must do all the good one can,’ he told his wife. ‘We come to our wealth, etc., certainly at a time that disposes us to such thoughts, and it is better for ourselves that we do so than if we had been younger, and perhaps too much occupied with the thoughts of enjoying all this.’ Then he seems to have remembered that though he was forty-seven, his pleasure-loving and ambitious wife was twenty years younger. So he finished the letter with a reassurance. ‘There is no reason, I think, why we should not enjoy it all very much too. In short, dearest love, I hope and trust that you will have much enjoyment, and of the purest sort.’

  In the months that followed, while the Duke's widow planned to restore Dornoch Cathedral in his honour ‘under the direction of Mr Burn of Edinburgh and to adorn it with a statue from the talents of Chantrey’, Mr Loch was preparing to resurrect him in stone and place him above the heads of all men at Trentham in Staffordshire. Lilleshall in Shropshire, and on Ben Bhraggie in Sutherland. The cost was to be borne by the Duke's grieving tenantry on all three estates. Sir Francis Chantrey designed the model for the Ben Bhraggie statue, entrusting its final execution to Joseph Theakston, a journeyman who usually carved the drapery and accessories of his work. ‘Although the model is only four feet in height,’ said the Inverness Courier, ‘and the final statue will be thirty, every line and feature can be preserved by the most exact measurements, and by mechanical processes which impose a check on each and secure certainty to the whole.’

  James Loch made personal contributions to each monument: ten pounds for Lilleshall, ten guineas for Trentham, and forty pounds for Ben Bhraggie. Collections were taken from two thousand people in Sutherland, and Donald Macleod, remembering how they had been asked to pay for Lady Stafford's set of ornaments, said: ‘Exactly similar measures were resorted to to make the small tenantry subscribe, in the midst of all their distress and with similar results. All who could raise a shilling gave it, and those who could not awaited in terror for the consequences of their default. No doubt the Duke deserved the highest post-humous honours from a portion of his tenantry – those who had benefited by the large sums he and the Duchess had lavished for their accommodation – but the poor, small tenantry, what had been done for them?’

  Of the £1,430 16s. 8d. raised for the statue on Ben Bhraggie (£
1,858 was collected for the monuments in England), little came from the parishes of Assynt and Farr where evictions had been so bitter. There, five hundred people gave no more than £111, and in lonely Kildonan Mr Loch's agents could get £18 only. From the Ross-shire parish where the Sutherland Estate was a new landlord came £3, one from the minister and two from the innkeeper at Ardgay.

  The restoration of the cathedral was still unfinished, and the statues uncompleted when the harvest failure of 1836 brought a terrible famine to the Highlands. There was hunger all over the British Isles, from the Channel to the Orkneys, but in the mountains of Scotland it was worse than even they had ever known (or were to know until ten years later). Half the population of Skye, for example, was destitute and starving. Bad weather had destroyed peat stocks, and people burnt the divots of their roofs to keep warm. Each week the men of some villages met and drew lots to decide whose house should next be taken down for fuel. Destitution had followed eviction, and now famine made the trinity.