The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

Government and proprietors were ill-equipped to face the emergency. The former had allowed the latter the rape of the Highlands, it had abolished the fishery bounties, and it had lent its soldiers for the clearing of the hills. It had no real power to control the poor-law authorities, its public works had been ineffectual in stopping the growth of unemployment and poverty. Still following the logic of its political philosophy, it left the work of relief to the charity of the public in general, and of the new proprietors in particular.

  (And, be it noted, there was sold at this time for £59,000 the estate of one of the most successful of these proprietors – Donald Macleod Esquire of Geanies, late Sheriff of Ross, who had died in his eighty-ninth year.)

  The response of the nation was generous, though still not adequate. More than £70,000 was collected to buy oatmeal, potatoes and clothing. Three times the amount would not have been enough to stop the famine, but, even so, a Select Committee rightly declared later that but for this money thousands would have died of starvation in the Isles, Inverness, Argyll, Ross, Sutherland and Caithness. On a handful of meal, a few potatoes, men were able to survive. Middle-class women of England and the Lowlands, who had recently had their emotions aroused by the abolition of slavery in the colonies, and by Lord Ashley's campaign for humane factory legislation, now gave their support (with decency and discretion) to meetings appealing for funds. Speakers from the Highlands were welcomed to London, and one of the most popular was the handsome, white-haired Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Norman Macleod.

  He was a Highlander with a rich and musical voice that charmed more guineas from the purses and reticules of his audiences than the sense of what he said. He was one of the few ministers of his church who was beloved in the Highlands. He liked to roam Morven in a kilt of his tartan, talk in the Gaelic of old days and old ways, but at the London Mansion House in March 1837, he was dressed in the black of his cloth. He told the Lord Mayor and a great audience that when he had been a boy rent had been of secondary importance to men, but that sheep had changed all this with fearful consequences. He was inclined to exonerate the old lairds, which was more than they deserved, but in his description of the present famine he was passionate and angry.

  ‘There are many parishes without meal, and having no more potatoes than sufficient to keep the people in existence for a few weeks, while a fearful portion of them are without peat to burn, or an article of food to maintain life except the miserable subsistence obtained from shellfish and sea-weed…. The means of emigration they do not possess, and from their ignorance of the English language they cannot now compete with the myriads of Irish labourers who flock for employment to the Lowlands from whence the Highlanders now find themselves almost excluded. Heaven forbid, my lord, that 1 should dare to make one statement which I do not believe to be true!’

  Donald Macleod said that the Moderator, for all his zeal, had not visited Sutherland in his tour of the Highlands, and this because he had been assured by the Duke's factors that all was well and the people well cared for. This was a lie, said the stonemason. The relief which Sutherland received arrived two months later than that of other counties. ‘Of the whole seventeen parish ministers not one could be moved by the supplications and cries of the famishing wretches…. They answered all entreaties with a cold refusal, alleging that the proprietors would, in their own good time, send the necessary relief; but so far as I could ever learn, they took no means to hasten that relief. They said in their sermons “that the Lord had a controversy with the land for the people's wickedness, and that in his providence and even in his mercy he had sent this scourge to bring them to repentance”.’

  In April relief supplies of meal, barley, potatoes and seed-oats reached Sutherland, and the people were informed that it would be distributed at Tongue and other points. Great crowds came to Tongue from all over the northern part of the county, and were told that they could be given nothing without production of a certificate from their minister, proving that they were objects of charity. ‘Many travelled fifty to a hundred miles back and forth after certificates and relief,’ said Macleod. ‘Then they got 7 to 28lb. of meal, and seed-oats and potatoes in the same proportion. In the field and about the dyke adjoining the places where these pittances were doled out, groups of famishing creatures might be seen lying in the mornings (many of them having travelled the whole day and night previous) waiting for the leisure of the factors or their clerks, and no attention was paid to them till those gentlemen had breakfasted and dressed, etc., by which time the day was far advanced.’

  The Duchess-Countess came to Dunrobin from London in September. She was now seventy-two, almost toothless and chronically infirm. She was childishly pleased to be in her Ruritanian castle again, and to be close to her husband in the Cathedral that was fast becoming a neo-Gothic nightmare. But she was also genuinely concerned about the condition of the people. Her ministers reassured her. The Presbytery of Tongue, for example, headed by its Moderator, Hugh Mackenzie, sent her an address of joyous welcome. Mr Mackenzie had some personal reasons for joy unconnected with her visit. During the worst days of the famine he had exchanged part of his glebe for more extensive property. ‘But in consenting to the change,’ said Macleod, ‘he made an express condition that the present occupiers, amounting to eight families, should be removed, and accordingly they were driven out in a body.’

  The Presbytery of Tongue told the Duchess-Countess that the people of their parish had survived the hard times as a result of her bounty. ‘When other districts were left to the precarious supplies of a distant benevolence, your Grace took on yourself the charge of supporting your people. By a constant supply of meal you not only saved them from famine but enabled them to live in comfort.’ They hoped that the Almighty would bless her and long spare her for her people.

  But within eighteen months she had gone to ‘that inheritance which is incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away’ (which is how the Presbytery described her inevitable death). She died at her house in Hamilton Place, London. Mr Loch made all the necessary arrangements, of course. Her coffin was taken to the steamer City of Aberdeen at Blackwall in a great hearse, which was draped with black Genoa velvet and emblazoned with the arms of Sutherland and Strathnaver. A mounted man, attended by two pages, carried her coronet on a crimson cushion. He was followed by a long carriage procession of dukes, marquesses, earls and barons. When the steamer arrived at Aberdeen, the coffin was carried by road to Dunrobin Castle where the Duchess-Countess lay in state for three days.

  She was buried beside her husband on a bitterly cold day, and once more the people of the parishes were gathered by their ministers. There was undoubtedly genuine sorrow among them, a sense of loss at the passing of the Ban mhorair Chataibh rather than the anglicized wife of an English lord. Her son, the Duke, in one of those spontaneous acts of generosity that contrasted oddly with his more frequent indifference to what his agents were doing, remitted all arrears of rent among the small tenantry. Donald Macleod said that the factors added their own qualification to this – all future defaulters would be instantly removed. Macleod also gave the old woman his own valediction: ‘That she had many great and good qualities, none will attempt to deny…. Her severity was felt, perhaps, far beyond her own intentions, while her benevolence was intercepted by the instruments she employed.’

  The death of this last link with the last true Earl of Sutherland may have released some of the people from any strong sense of loyalty to the authority of Dunrobin Castle. Or it may be that in most of them, those below the age of forty, this feeling had no meaning now, for throughout the whole of their lives they had known nothing of that authority but writs of eviction, burnings, famine and emigration. As early as 1816, only the Military Register found it significant that soldiers finishing their term of service with the Sutherland Highlanders were refusing to reenlist in that regiment, saying that they had been betrayed by the removals in Strathnaver, and asking to be re-mustered in the regiments of Ross or Argyll. And
the people were no longer afraid of their ministers, seeing them now as creatures of the landlords. The Church was moving toward its great Disruption, and the threat of hell-fire from a churchman had little effect when men saw that while their land was taken from them his glebe was increased. Certainly, in the few years following the death of the Duchess-Countess, there were bitter acts of violence and resistance such as Sutherland had never before known. The greatest of these occurred at Durness in September 1841.

  A Low Country man called James Anderson was the principal leaseholder of Keneabin and other farms in the area, which he sublet to a number of small tenants who had tiny crofts of land but whose principal source of living was herring and deep-sea fishing. According to Donald Macleod, Anderson had originally come to the district as a fish-curer, renting the sea to his sub-tenants as if it were land, ‘furnishing boats and implements at an exorbitant price while he took their fish at his own price, and thus got them drowned in debt and consequent bondage’. In 1841 he decided to turn his attention to sheep for the more profitable exploitation of his leases. ‘With which view,’ said the Inverness Courier ‘it became necessary for him to remove several of the Keneabin people who, besides, had fallen into arrears of their rents.’ The reaction of the people was violent.

  When a Sheriff-Officer called Campbell came with the writs in August he was mobbed and his papers were burned. The Superintendent of Police at Dornoch, Philip Mackay, got the same welcome when he rode across to tell the people to behave. He was driven off with sticks and stones, and when he returned with constables they too were routed.

  On Friday, 17 September, the Law came back to Keneabin in force, and far south in Edinburgh Castle the 53rd Regiment was put under marching orders in case it should be needed in the north. When Campbell and Mackay had come to Keneabin most of the men of the crofts had been away at sea, and the officers had been driven back by the women, but now men and women were waiting to resist the Sheriff-Substitute, the Procurator-Fiscal and their army of Sheriff-Officers and constables. According to reports there were three hundred people on the cliff road, the men with sticks, the women with aprons full of stones. ‘They were all in a highly-excited state,’ said the Courier, ‘using the most threatening language and swearing vengeance against all who dared to lay hands on the rioters.’

  With Superintendent Mackay at their head, constables and officers fought their way through the crowd which, at one moment, almost succeeded in tossing Mackay into the sea. Finally the Law reached the Inn of Durine where it decided to spend the night under siege. Doors and windows were barred. At ten o'clock, in the pale light of the northern night, the people launched an assault on the house. They tore up railings and used them to prise open the windows. They broke down the door with blocks of stone. After a furious, clubbing fight, they dragged out the constables and dispersed them over the hills. The Sheriff-Officers escaped through the back of the house, hid in a field of standing corn and in rocks by the shore until dawn, when they escaped toward Loch Erribol.

  Having got rid of constables and officers, the people came back to the Inn for the Sheriff and Procurator-Fiscal who, with commendable courage, had stood their ground in their room. They were pulled out, and maintained what they could of their dignity while the people argued what should be done with them. ‘Some proposed to destroy their horses and gigs,’ said the Courier, ‘while others suggested that they should be stripped naked and turned out to the rocks. At length they were compelled to retrace their steps to the nearest inn, about twenty miles distant, which they reached at five in the morning.’ And the people of Keneabin went back to their crofts, jubilant.

  But a few days later Hugh Lumsden, the Sheriff-Depute of Sutherland, came to Durness with his Clerk, the Procurator-Fiscal, and the threat of ordering the 53rd against Keneabin if it did not obey the Law. The people changed from angry lions to timorous sheep. Under direction from their minister, they wrote a letter to James Anderson and the Sheriff, ‘stating their contrition and soliciting forgiveness, and promising to remove voluntarily the May next if permitted in the meantime to occupy their houses’. Anderson grudgingly allowed them to stay until spring, and by the following autumn he had their land under sheep.

  In Assynt, two years later, John Macleod, a small tenant at Balchladdich, also stood up against the Duke of Sutherland's factor and refused to be evicted. ‘He set his Grace and the managers at utter defiance,’ reported the Courier, ‘in violent and threatening letters which he addressed to them.’ He was also a natural leader, a rarity in his race, for he gathered a small band of men and women willing to defend his holding with him. Together they drove the first party of Sheriff-Officers from Balchladdich with sticks and stones. But once again Hugh Lumsden came ‘with a sufficient force to teach the deluded people that they would not be allowed again, as in Durness riot, to set the law at defiance’.

  Thirty constables, armed with ash-sticks, came down on Balchladdich, led by Lumsden, the Vice-Lieutenant of the County, the Procurator-Fiscal and several Justices of the Peace. John Macleod was for making a heroic fight of it, but his little army drifted away in despair until he was left alone with his son and two other young men. They were arrested and carried in manacles to Dornoch Gaol, eighty miles away.

  The Highland people believed that there must be a punishment for the inhumanity with which they were treated. They could not see it coming from the Law now, nor perhaps from God even, and in their own knowledge of the worst that could happen to a man they decided that surely there would be none to mourn the landlord at his death. Only a Highlander, who was capable of such deep and terrible grief at a graveside, could understand what a punishment that would be. ‘'S 'n air théid spaid de 'n ùir ort….’ cried the bard John Maclachlan to all evictors.

  And when a spade of turf is thrown upon you

  the country will be clean again!

  Or nothing will be placed over you

  but the dung of cattle!

  There will be no weeping of children,

  nor the crying of women.

  There will be no widow or poor creature

  striking their palms.

  4

  THE WHITE-SAILED SHIPS

  ‘Oh, send us something immediately… many are dying!’

  LITTLE that the people had endured in 1836 prepared them for the great famine that came ten years later. In 1845 the potato blight, which also destroyed crops in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Canada, visited Ireland with such appalling effect that its history and its economy were scarred for a century. Yet in the Highlands the harvest of that year was one of the finest ever known, and men wrote of the summer months with pride, as if credit were theirs for its ripening sun and gentle rains. Blight had of course afflicted potato-fields in the Lowlands, with a loss of £50,000 along the Border, but this was far from the Isles and the Highland Line. Even so, there were portents into which old men and old women read a coming judgement. At the beginning of September a fine white dust fell upon the Orkneys like a shroud. Terrible storms broke upon the Caithness coast long before winter, destroying boats and nets and leaving five hundred men without employment. Summer lingered into October, a sickening warmth and stillness in the air, and snow was very late in coming to high ground. In November the Inverness Courier, less confident now of Highland immunity as it reported the news from Ireland, expressed the general uneasiness: ‘We are sorry to find that the potato murrain is gaining ground. The disease is yet abroad, extending over three kingdoms, and no human agency can yet forsee to what extent the pestilence may spread.’ It had not reached the seven northern counties except for one trifling case recorded in Sutherland, but it was remembered that to this same county and in this same stealthy fashion cholera had come in 1832.

  One half of the total population of Scotland lived on the potato for nine months of the year, and in the mountains the proportion was probably more than two-thirds. A chief of the Clanranald Macdonalds had brought it to the Highlands and Isles a century before, forcing its cul
tivation on his clan with some difficulty (the people of South Uist, for example, long resisted it). It was easy to grow and to store in a land that could produce no great harvests of grain, and when sheep destroyed the black cattle economy, and the lairds restricted the shooting of game to paying tenants from England, the potato became the staple diet of the Highlander. In the coastal townships of Sutherland it was almost all that would grow on the thin allotments. Nonetheless the south still believed that the mountain people were bred on oats and beef.

  At the beginning of February 1846, the weather was mild and spring-like, bringing pear-trees to leaf in the gardens of Inverness. No one doubted now that the blight would come with the summer, if it had not already attacked the pits in which some of last year's harvest had been stored. As each pit was opened there was fear, and then relief at finding the potatoes pure and whole. They were sent south in shiploads from Inverness and The Aird, to collect high prices in the Lowlands and England, the farmers arguing in their own defence that the Corn Laws made profit on their grain impossible. At first the people of Inverness watched these shipments impotently, and then protested with a week of angry violence. A crowd of five thousand halted a convoy of wagons on its way to the quay. They unloaded the potatoes and rolled the wagons into the River Ness. Urged on by a screaming woman who led them from a cart, they fought for several days against two hundred special constables, conscripted navvies from the Caledonian Canal, and soldiers of the 87th Regiment from Fort George.

  Twenty men and women were sent for trial. In the same week the contents of potato-pits opened in Lochcarron were found to be rotten and uneatable. It was soon the same in Kintail, Sutherland, Ross and the Isles. In the spring men planted what seed they had and waited with no hope.

  The summer of 1846 was as quixotic as the preceding winter had been. Fierce droughts sucked dry the streams and lochans, and men swore that they had seen salmon swimming in red dust only. The rainless weeks were followed by great storms that flooded all low ground and rotted the feet from the sheep. In July there was hope again. The potato-fields were rich and green and promising. And then, at the beginning of August, the airborne spores of fungus (about which nothing was known, or would be known until the next century) floated silently from Morayshire to the Isles, from Perth to Caithness. They were carried by the rain and mist, by the hands of men, the hair of animals, and the wheels of carts. Overnight the potato-plants withered and blackened, the leaves turning to slime as if struck by frost. When the earth was opened, the tubers wept and smelt of death.