The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  William Ross, Ground Officer at Bonar Bridge, will show the Farms in the Parish of Kincardine. Further particulars will be communicated by James F. Gillanders, Esq., Highfield by Beauly, to whom offers are to be addressed.

  It was decided to proceed first against the sub-tenants at Glencalvie. If and when they went without trouble, then evictions at Greenyards would follow. Eighteen families, eighty-eight people, lived on the urlar in turf cabins indistinguishable from the brown hills, growing barley and oats, herding cattle and sheep on a total holding of no more than twenty acres. According to The Times, which sent a man there later: ‘The most incredible rent of £55 10s. has been paid for the same land no farmer in England would give £15 for at the utmost.’ Rents had been paid for generations without arrears, except for some weeks during the famine of 1836. The little community had no paupers on the poor roll, and the last relief given, said The Times, had been ‘5s. a year to a widow now dead, and 4s. 6d. a year to a sickly girl who was unable to do anything’.

  I am told that not an inhabitant of this valley has been charged with any offence for years back. During the war it furnished many soldiers; and an old pensioner, 82 years of age, who has served in India, is now dying in one of the cottages where he was born.

  Four tenants only were responsible for the rents of the property. The first was a Donald Macleod, an absentee who lived at Kingsburgh on the Isle of Skye. The others were of one family, David Ross and his son David, and Alexander Ross who may have been a brother or another son. Each was known (when the Law came to put their names to paper) as ‘Ross alias Greusaich’, meaning Shoemaker, and they had lived on the urlar for generations. The rest of the eighty-eight were relatives of these Rosses, cotters or squatters. The old pensioner, dying in his cottage, was Hugh Ross who claimed descent from Earl Farquhar, but most of the people, said John Robertson, ‘do not know when their forefathers came there’.

  Their cottages and holdings vary from huts in which the paupers of the community live without paying any rent, upward to the only stone cottage whose occupant pays a rental of about eight pounds a year. Of those who pay rent the highest pay eight pounds, the lowest two pound a year. Sixteen cottages pay rent, three cottages are occupied by old lone women who pay no rent, and who have a grace from the others for the grazing of a few goats or sheep by which they live. This self-working poor-law system is supported by the people themselves; the laird, I am informed, never gives anything to it. They are exceedingly attached to the glen. Their associations are all within it. Their affections – all the flower and beauty of their lives – are rooted, and grow like red buds of the coarse grass in the clefts of the rocks, out of their bare, bleak, wild mountain home. Their hearts are rooted to their hearths.

  Since the Shoemakers were responsible to the laird for the rent, collecting it from the others, they were also regarded as spokesmen and leaders of the community, and it was they who went to Gustavus Aird in February 1842, asking the minister what they should now do. Aird was a young man of twenty-eight, and new to the parish, but his influence over his congregation had been deep and strong since the first day of his arrival. He had come in a snowstorm thirteen months before, and before he entered his little manse by the Black Water he had led the people in the singing of a psalm of joy. Though he understood the bitterness of his parish, and shared it, he did not believe that Kindeace intended to turn the people out. Like Donald Sage, he had a weak admiration for the gentry, and would later prepare and publish a genealogy of the Robertson family.

  On 14 March he wrote to James Gillanders, telling him that shortly after his induction he had been assured by Major Charles Robertson, the laird's heir, that ‘so long as they paid the rent they were then paying, he would not think of turning out so many poor people, and I really think that if he were in the country that he would still be of the same feeling’. He reminded Gillanders that the tenants were ready to pay more rent, equal to any offer made by an outsider, if only they might remain.

  If the offer of another is preferred, and theirs refused, these eighty-eight souls will then be set adrift, without knowing where to go or look for shelter. At home there is almost no prospect of their procuring any place; and to emigrate would prove to most of them but total misery, as, after reaching any of the colonies, they would not have the wherewithal to support themselves….I sincerely hope that they will not be set adrift, but that the example of the Good Samaritan will be followed toward them.

  Major Robertson was in Australia with his regiment. Old Kindeace was far south in London, and father and son were content to leave their affairs in Gillanders' hands. The factor sent Aird a brief reply on 21 March. He had, he said, given the people his ‘tender consideration’, and was prepared to leave them where they were, ‘but only on the event of their giving a full rent for the farm, which I do not consider they pay at present.’

  He invited them to compete in the bidding and, if they were successful, to give him security that the increased rents would be paid without arrears.

  Aird read the letter to the Shoemakers, who told him that they were ready to pay the increase and asked him to arrange a meeting with Gillanders for the following Monday. But on the Friday before this, 25 March, before any answer had been received from the factor, Sheriff-Officers rode down the strath with writs of removal addressed to David Ross alias Greusaich Senior, David Ross alias Greusaich Junior, and Alexander Ross alias Greusaich, all tenants on the urlar of Glencalvie. By order of John Jardine, advocate and Sheriff of the shires of Ross and Cromarty, and by a statute of 1555 entitled An Act Anent the Warning of Tenants, the Shoemakers were ordered

  To flit and Remove themselves, Bairns, Family, servants, subtenants, Cottars and dependants, Cattle, Goods, and gear forth and from possession of the said Subjects above described with the pertinents respectively occupied by them as aforesaid, and to leave the same void, redd and patent, at the respective terms of Removal above specified, that the Pursuer or others in his name may then enter thereto and peaceably possess, occupy and enjoy the same in time coming.

  The Shoemakers were also warned that any attempt to oppose the officers in their duty would be punishable by a fine of £10, payable to Mr Robertson of Kindeace.

  The Sheriff-Officers crossed the Black Water at the mouth of Strath Cuileannach and rode southward for a mile to where the land narrowed and the Carron and the Calvie came out of their glens to meet, and to hold between them the green and low ground that was the urlar of Glencalvie. To the south-west the hills rose abruptly to a brown peak known as the Cairn of the Sparrow-hawk. The only way to the urlar was by bridge across the Carron, and before this was gathered a crowd of women. Smoke, milk-white and sharply-scented, tumbled from a peat fire that had been lit by the bridge. The women smiled and called out to the officers, asking for the writs of removal, and when the papers were handed to them they threw them on the fire. The officers grinned, shrugged their shoulders and rode back to Tain.

  Only Gustavus Aird realized that this was not the end of the affair, that the officers would come again, and with constables to enforce the writs. They would come as soon as fresh papers were prepared at Tain. He pleaded with the people. ‘Receive the officers civilly,’ he said, ‘Say to them, Gentlemen by what hour must we be gone? Collect your cattle, your furniture, carry your sick, your children, and come in a body to the nearest town South. If you break the law you make it impossible for any like your minister to say a word for you. God bless you!’

  On Monday there came Mr Cameron, Sheriff-Substitute, the Fiscal, Sheriff-Officers and a band of constables. They were met at the elbow of Strathcarron by Aird, who showed the Sheriff the letter he had received from Gillanders. Cameron was angry that the factor, after writing such a letter, ‘should request me and these constables to serve the summonses’. But he had no power to reverse his instructions (nor, perhaps, did he think Gillanders' letter sincere), and he moved on, with Aird trudging unhappily by his side. Before they reached the Craigs, and crossed the Black Wate
r on to the Amat property, they heard the shrill piping of whistles calling the people to the bridge over the Carron. It was cold, and it began to rain. Half a mile from the bridge a small group of men and women, armed with cudgels, watched the officers approach. ‘We will use our sticks,’ they said, but when they saw Gustavus Aird's familiar cloak they fell back. Both the Carron and the Calvie were in spate with the Spring thaw, meeting in a white and tumultuous embrace below the bridge. Before it stood a crowd of tenants from Glencalvie and Wester Greenyards, and the smoke of another fire was held to the ground by the heavy rain. The Sheriff-Substitute (exaggerating no doubt, in the manner of defeated generals) said that there were two hundred people gathered there to deforce his officers. He said that most of them were women, and in this he was probably right.

  As the riders approached the bridge the tenants shouted to Aird, telling him to leave the officers. They were angry and disappointed. ‘You have no business in such company!’ they said. When officers and tenants joined there was a confused, sliding mêlée on the muddy road. A woman grasped Cameron's plaid to pull him from his horse, but released it when Aird shouted ‘He's not a constable, he's the Sheriff. Don't lay hands on him!’ The Sheriff-Substitute had the Gaelic too, and he pushed forward, shouting for silence. When he could be heard, he said, ‘I greatly regret that so many people should be turned adrift, but by resisting the law you are only injuring yourselves. If you'll receive the summonses, after writing such a letter to Mr Aird, Mr Gillanders could not show his face if he turned you out.’ The crowd laughed, and Cameron raised his voice. ‘I don't believe you'll be turned out, and I'll do all I can to prevent it, if you'll take the summonses and not break the law!’

  Despite their intention to hold the bridge by force if necessary, the tenants were in good humour, and the Sheriff-Substitute dismounted and walked among them. One took his arm and pointed to the river. ‘What shall I do if I'm turned out,’ he asked. ‘Shall I lay my sick wife and children in that?’ With the Fiscal, the Sheriff moved closer to the bridge, shouting ‘Let me cross!’ But the people held his arms and laughed again, pointing once more to the Carron. ‘Shall we throw him in that? Let's see how well he can swim.’

  But they let Gustavus Aird cross to the urlar, telling him to take shelter from the rain in a cottage. Angrily, the Sheriff-Substitute ordered up the constables with the summonses. John Robertson was told that the women mocked the officers, pretending they were lovers come to a tryst.

  Some say the women took affectionately the hand of a constable, held the summonses in the hand clasped in rough dalliance, and applied the lighted peat to the end of the summons, and as the flames advanced up the paper the fingers of the constables themselves pushed forward the summonses to a state of tinder. According to other accounts the women simply burned the papers. But as there would be a struggle for the summonses it seems most probable they were destroyed whenever an edge of them appeared in the grasp of the constables. On coming forward, the Sheriff ordered the constables forward, the people blocked up the way, and the functionaries of the law retired, having, it is said, sustained no further injury than a wound on a hat.

  Fiscal, Sheriff, constables and officers, retreated to a gamekeeper's cottage on the Amat property near the mouth of Strath Cuileannach. The whole business had been more ludicrous than dangerous. His pride hurt by the refusal of his offer of help, Cameron decided to secure evidence against the ringleaders, if he could determine who the ringleaders were. He asked the gamekeeper for the name of a man in a white hat whom he had seen with the tenants. The gamekeeper, having no wish to offend his neighbours or the law, said that he had seen no one in a white hat ‘but Mr Andrew Ross the Justice of Peace Clerk’. And had he seen a woman with a stick in her hand? He had. For what purpose, did he think? ‘I cannot say. It might have been a support for her corset.’

  So the Law went back to Tain, and contented itself for the time being with a peremptory demand that the young people of Glencalvie should come down to the town to be examined before magistrates. They sent a cheerful reply. They would indeed come, if Mr Jardine would give them an assurance that they would not be put in ‘the sharp-pointed house’, the old Tolbooth with its spired cap.

  And there, surprisingly, the matter rested. No more officers came to Glencalvie that year, or in the year following. Perhaps James Gillanders, acknowledging the tactical error of his letter to Aird (which was now public knowledge), decided that it would be foolish to insist upon evictions at this moment. Perhaps old Kindeace, on his death-bed in Hackney, wanted nothing immediate on his conscience when he was so close to Judgment. The Major, his heir, was too far away in Australia to make his wishes quickly known to the factor.

  In 1843 the Disruption of the Church of Scotland emptied parish churches throughout the Highlands as men turned their backs on what was unashamedly the religion of Improvement, Clearances, Sheep and the Lairds. In many districts there was riot and the marching of soldiers to enforce the appointment of unwanted ministers. Landowners refused to grant sites for the building of Free Churches, and in Sutherland they were forbidden altogether. In Strathcarron Gustavus Aird took all but two families of his parish with him when he left the Establishment for the Free Church. Thomas Telford's greystone church at Croick was left empty, and without a minister. Aird preached to his people on the hillside, and later in a wool-shed offered him by a farmer of Rosemount.

  And in 1844 William Robertson, fifth laird of Kindeace, died and was buried in Homerton Cemetery. Now Gillanders, acting with the authority and approval of the Australian absentee, ordered the three Shoemakers to meet him at Tain. They went in the belief that their offer to pay a new rent had been accepted, but once in Tain they were each handed a writ of removal, and this time there were no women present to burn them. Pleased with the little stratagem, Gillanders magnanimously told the Rosses that they might have until the following spring to flit and remove peacefully. Their stock would be taken at his valuation (he thought that £100 would be adequate) and they were free to take away the timber of their houses, ‘which is really worthless,’ said John Robertson, ‘except for firewood’. The Rosses sadly accepted the writs, and their acceptance was noted and attested by the Witnesses appointed by Sheriff Jardine. They promised to lay down no crops that year, and the two tacksmen of Strathcarron, Munro and Mackay, became bound for their good behaviour until they were gone.

  All over the county of Ross the people were again in wretched movement. It would have surprised James Gillanders to learn that the eviction of eighty-eight people from the urlar of Glencalvie would shortly be given wider publicity and cause greater concern than the four hundred sub-tenants he was at that moment driving from Strathconon to the Black Isle.

  ‘James has shown his nature, a brutal chamberlain’

  IN THE SPRING of 1845 John Delane, Editor of The Times, received a letter from Charles Spence, Solicitor before the Supreme Court of Scotland. On behalf of a committee of northern gentlemen who had appointed him their spokesman, Mr Spence wished the newspaper to publish the following advertisement:

  CLEARING THE HIGHLANDS OF MEN

  GLENCALVIE – NINETY ROSS-SHIRE COTTAGERS REMOVED WITHOUT HOUSES WHERE TO TAKE SHELTER. The following sums have already been received for the Relief of these Poor People. It is hoped that they may yet be saved from the necessity of encamping in the CHURCHYARD, as the aged could not be expected to survive the effects of exposure to damp and cold in such a situation, especially labouring as they are under heavy depression of spirits produced by expulsion from the land of their fathers, where for centuries they have been located. It is earnestly entrusted the Subscriptions will be liberal, and that the sympathy of the public will yet help to cheer the sufferers amidst their cloudy prospects.

  The ‘following sums’ amounted to £37 2s., contributed by nineteen people including the Earl of Buchan, an East India Company general, Two Ladies, A Young Man, a Friend, and, of course, A Widow. Mr Spence was treasurer of the fund, and his committee of eight was
headed by Gustavus Aird who may, perhaps, have been responsible for its formation.

  Delane had no intention of publishing the notice without first satisfying himself that the facts were true and the cause genuine. He knew, also, that if ninety people were about to be abandoned in a churchyard this was too good a story to be buried among the advertisements on the front page of his paper. Highland destitution was at this time a running story, but The Times had not as yet given it its Olympian attention. Delane had perhaps been waiting for a dramatic opportunity to make a thorough examination of it through the dispatches of one of his ‘Special Commissioners’, those anonymous and often amateur feature-writers who were one of his greatest contributions to journalism. He wrote to Spence immediately, saying that he would ‘send down a gentleman of experience and talent’, and this Spence joyfully reported to his committee. The Commissioner whom Delane sent was a lawyer whose name has survived on no record.* He left for Scotland in the second week of May, and took his lodgings in the Inn of Ardgay at the mouth of Strathcarron. His reports, brave, compassionate and angry, brought the reality of eviction and improvement to the breakfast tables of the nation. The opening words of his first dispatch (written at the Inn and filling two columns of The Times) were pitched on a note of indignation that was sustained throughout.

  Those who remember the misery and destitution into which large masses of the population were thrown by the systematic ‘clearances’ (as they are here called) carried on in Sutherlandshire some 25 years ago under the direction and on the estate of the late Marchioness of Stafford – those who have not forgotten to what an extent the ancient ties which bound clansmen to their chiefs were then torn asunder – will regret to learn that the heartless course, with all its sequences of misery, of destitution, and of crime, is again being resorted to in Ross-shire.