The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  He had arrived in time to witness the departure of the Glencalvie people. At the end of April the Shoemakers had gone to Tain to see the Kindeace law agent, Donald Stewart, and to learn from him what compensation they might expect for their stock, and what arrangements, if any, had been made for their resettlement. They were told that each family would receive £18 ‘as their distributive of the £72 10s. agreed to be given to them to emigrate on going out peaceably.’ It was the first they had heard that the laird wished them to emigrate, and they were given little reason to hope for resettlement elsewhere on the Kindeace estates.

  When Gustavus Aird took The Times man down to the glen, all the cottages on the urlar were empty with the exception of one, and in this Hugh Ross, the pensioner, was dying. The rest of the people were seated on a green brae by the Carron, ‘the women all neatly dressed in net caps and wearing scarlet or plaid shawls; the men wearing their blue bonnets and having their shepherds' plaids wrapped about them. This was their only covering, and this was the Free Church. There was a simplicity extremely touching in this group on the bare hillside, listening to the Psalms of David in their native tongue and assembled to worship God.’ They sang Psalm 145: The eyes of all things wait on Thee, The Giver of all good…. In the Parliamentary church at Croick The Times man was shown the two families who had not followed their neighbours into the Free Church, ten men, women and children holding a service in English and the Gaelic. ‘And for what are all these people to be reduced from comfort to beggary?’ he asked.

  For what is this virtuous and contented community to be scattered and driven into destitution? I confess I can find no answer. It is said that the factors would rather have one tenant than many, as it saves them trouble. But so long as the rent is punctually paid, as this has been, it is contrary to all experience to suppose that one large tenant will pay more than many small ones, or that a sheep walk can pay more rent than cultivated land. Now, no doubt there is an object in driving off the people – namely fear of the New Scotch Poor Law compelling the heritors to pay toward the support of those who cannot support themselves.

  He was wrong in assuming that sheep-walks could produce no more profit than cultivated land in the Highlands, but there was great truth in his charge that the proprietors were reluctant to pay their proposed share under the Poor Laws. The less people on their lands, the less their financial responsibility in the growing destitution. The laird of Kindeace, said the Commissioner, ‘NEVER GAVE ONE FARTHING, the poor supported their own helpless poor, the wealthy let them do so unassisted’.

  That weekend the only refuge for the people was the one that had been feared by Mr Spence and his committee, the churchyard at Croick, a little walled enclosure sheltered by a few bent trees. Although it was May, the weather was wet and cold.

  Behind the church, a long kind of booth was erected, the roof formed of tarpaulin stretched over poles, the sides closed in with horsecloths, rugs, blankets and plaids… Their furniture, excepting their bedding, they got distributed amongst the cottages of their neighbours; and with their bedding and their children they all removed on Saturday afternoon to this place. In my last letter I informed you that they had been round to every heritor and factor in the neighbourhood, and 12 of the 18 families had been unable to find places of shelter. With the new Scotch Poor Law in prospect, cottages were everywhere refused to them.

  I am told it was a most wretched spectacle to see these poor people march out of the glen in a body, with two or three carts filled with children, many of them mere infants; and other carts containing their bedding and their requisites. The whole countryside was up on the hills watching them as they silently took possession of their tent.

  A fire was kindled in the churchyard, round which the poor children clustered. Two cradles with infants in them, were placed close to the fire, and sheltered round by the dejected-looking mothers. Others busied themselves into dividing the tent into compartments, by means of blankets for the different families. Contrasted with the gloomy dejection of the grown-up and the aged was the, perhaps, not less melancholy picture of the poor children thoughtlessly playing round the fire, pleased with the novelty of all around them.

  There were twenty-three children in the churchyard, all under the age of ten, and seven of them were ill. There were also some young and unmarried men and women, but most of the refugees were over forty. Aird called them to him, and told them that his companion was an Englishman who had come from a great newspaper in the south. They crowded about The Times man, shaking his hand. ‘Their Gaelic I could not understand,’ he told Delane, ‘but their eyes beamed with gratitude. This unbought, spontaneous and grateful expression of feeling to you for being their friend is what their natural protector – their chieftain – never saw, and what his factor need never hope for.’ He admired their dignity and their pride, but believing, like most of his Scott-fed generation, in the fierce spirit of the Highlander, he was puzzled by their docility. Yet this too was admirable. ‘Were any such clearances attempted in England, I leave you to conceive the excitement which it would be certain to create, the mob procession, the effigy burning, the window-smashing…’

  Within a week the churchyard was empty. Where the people went, to what southern town or what emigrant colony is not known. The six families, for whom Gillanders claimed he had found resettlement, were followed by The Times man. David Ross and his son, Greusaich Senior and Junior, ‘got a piece of black moor near Tain, 25 miles off, without any house or shed on it, out of which they hope to obtain subsistence’. Another old man was given a small lot at Edderton, and these three alone received anything from which they might confidently expect to get the barest of livings. The other three families were given turf huts near Bonar Bridge. ‘The rest are hopeless, helpless.’

  The Commissioner moved on from Glencalvie to see and to report more of Highland destitution which, he said, was the result of ‘a cold, calculating heartlessness which is almost as incredible as it is disgusting’.

  One man, a respectable miller whose father, and grandfather before him, had rented a mill of one of the heritors in this neighbourhood (Fodderty parish in Ross), having taken the part of a poor woman who was ejected from her holding to make room for some improvements, and who on applying to her landlord to do something for her was beaten and driven from the door by him with a stick, walked 10 miles yesterday to tell me his own case. In the midst of a winter's night, with deep snow on the ground, he and his aged mother were suddenly turned out of his house under a decreet of removal, and his mother is now bed-ridden from the consequences.

  In one of his dispatches he quoted a letter he had received from a Free Church minister of Ross:

  Nothing short of a visit to this quarter and conversation with the poor creatures themselves could give an idea of the misery and wretchedness to which the people of this parish are reduced by the heartless and cruel tyranny of their oppressors. Here there is a kind of slavery ten times worse than that which for so long disgraced Britain. The poor are starving, and yet so much afraid are the people (who are tenants-at-will) of being removed, that lately I could get none to sign as witnesses to the petition of a pauper who required relief from the heritors and the Kirk Sessions. They said if their names were seen as witnesses, how clamant ever the case, they were sure of being thrown upon the wide world at next term. I have a list in my possession of from 50 to 60 who since the Disruption were turned away from houses and lands, and service and employment, by an heritor of this parish because they would not become residuaries and denounce the Free Church.

  The immediate result of these Times dispatches was that Mr Spence's committee for the relief of Glencalvie people was encouraged to grow into ‘The Society for the Protection of the Poor’. Its life was brief, and no more than The Times could it prevent the successive waves of evictions which continued for another ten years, and which threatened to make all the Highlands one great sheep-walk. The Society was formed at a public meeting held in the Waterloo Rooms, Edinburgh, at th
e beginning of June, under the chairmanship of Sir David Brewster, philosopher, physicist, a one-time licensed preacher and the inventor of the kaleidoscope. After the singing of Psalm 41 (Blessed is he that wisely doth the poor man's case consider!), Mr Spence told the meeting that there were now 200,000 paupers or destitute persons in Scotland, and that he thought (as in the case of Glencalvie) ‘a collection might be raised throughout the country on their behalf, for the purpose of providing them with coals and candles and other necessaries in which they might stand need.’ He was followed by other speakers, most of them ministers of the Free Church, and the Reverend Mr Begg was answered by prolonged applause when he asked if it were not true that the landlords ‘proposed to extirpate the people because they would not be as quiet as sheep’.

  The meeting concluded with a resolution that although they might not ‘be able to secure for the people of Glencalvie the restoration of their farms, they might be able to prevent another Glencalvie affair from rising’. They were, of course, hopelessly optimistic. James Gillanders and other factors, the lairds they represented, were no more worried by The Society for the Protection of the Poor than they were disturbed by Parliament when it considered the Ross-shire evictions at the end of May. Answering a question, the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, said that his attention had been directed to reports (in The Times) ‘that four hundred tenants in the shires of Ross and Cromarty, including with their families probably four thousand persons, had been served with summonses of removal’. While he condemned such proceedings, he hoped that the reports were exaggerated. If anything, said the Inverness Courier, they were an understatement. In July, Graham was asked again for his comments, and this time he bored the House with a long communication from the Lord Advocate of Scotland in which his lordship, leaning heavily on the side of the proprietors, said that while he did not approve of wholesale removals either, the reports were indeed greatly exaggerated.

  And by now the famine in Ireland was holding everybody's fascinated attention.

  One silent voice during the evictions in Glencalvie had been that of the Chief of Clan Ross, Mr Ross of Pitcalnie, whose father or grandfather had acquired the title when Admiral Lockhart inherited the lands of Balnagowan. Pitcalnie held a house and land at Amat, between Strath Cuileannach and Strath Allan-dale. The tenants on the urlar were his most immediate neighbours, and while The Times Commissioner said that his wife ‘is spoken of as doing much good to the poor’, Mr Ross was an absentee laird and rarely came to the land of his forefathers, except when the shooting was good. He, however, has an enduring monument in Strathcarron today, an eroded obelisk against the railings of which sheep are inclined to scratch their backs. The bards of the Rosses made no complaint against this Pitcalnie, but of Gillanders they said

  James has shown his nature,

  that he is a brutal chamberlain

  like his grandfather before,

  wasting and stripping the poor.

  He is a poor creature, without responsibility,

  without honour, understanding or shame.

  An unpleasant boor, he will be

  doubly judged for driving

  away the Rosses of Glencalvie.

  When they took shelter in the graveyard at Croick, some of the people scratched their names and brief messages on the diamond-paned windows of the church. They wrote in English, as if acknowledging that their own tongue would pass with them and would not be understood in time. The words they wrote are still there:

  ‘Glencalvie people was in the church here May 24, 1845… Glencalvie people the wicked generation…. John Ross shepherd… Glencalvie people was here… Amy Ross… Glencalvie is a wilderness blow ship them to the colony…. The Glencalvie Rosses…

  ‘A singular, perverted feeling of insubordination’

  WHEN James Gillanders decided that he could now complete the clearance of Strathcarron by evicting the remainder of its sub-tenants from his father-in-law's property at Greenyards, no Times Commissioner came north to report the bloody result, and nothing was heard from The Society for the Protection of the Poor, if it still existed. The indignation of Press and Public, in their concern for oppressed minorities, was directed against Tsar Nicholas I, upon whom war was declared three days before thirty-five constables from Dingwall and Fort William broke the skulls and kicked the breasts of the women of Strathcarron. But for one man, little would have been heard of this obscene affray before it was quickly disposed of by Lord Justice-Clerk Hope and the Northern Circuit Court of Justiciary in September (when, in any case, Scotland was more anxious to hear how many Russians the Black Watch was killing in the Crimea, than to know how many Highland women had been maimed by constables' truncheons in Ross-shire).

  This man was Donald Ross, a Glasgow lawyer who left little record of himself but his writings on the evictions and a list of his addresses in the Glasgow Directory (the earliest being Brunswick Place in 1849). He was a Highlander by his name, and although it is a common enough one he may have been the Donald Ross of Dornoch who collected money for Mr Spence's Glencalvie fund in 1845. He had friends in Ross-shire, and it was in answer to their letters that he left Glasgow at the beginning of April and arrived in Strathcarron within ten days of its invasion by the Law. What he was told by the people there, what he saw, he put into long letters to the Northern Ensign, and when the editor baulked at printing all of them he published them himself, a pamphlet form with a trumpet-challenge for a title.

  The Russians of Ross-shire

  or

  THE MASSACRE OF THE ROSSES

  in

  Strathcarron, Ross-shire

  by

  policemen when serving the

  tenants in Strathcarron with

  summons of Removal in March

  Also a warning against

  THE CLEARING OF THE GLENS

  ‘Talk of secret diplomacy,’ he said, ‘and Russian intrigue and aggression forsooth! Are not whole straths and districts bargained for, and quietly let to some rich sheep-farmer and sportsman months before the unhappy occupants know about it!’

  Some such secret agreement, he claimed, had been reached by Gillanders, Major Robertson of Kindeace, and Alexander Munro the tacksman of Greenyards soon after the Glencalvie removals. To prevent disquiet, or outside interest such as the troublesome curiosity of John Delane, they proposed to clear the property piecemeal, one tenant and his dependants at a time. Since there were four tenants only on the rent-book (though close to four hundred people in all) it was hoped that the evictions would be executed quietly and efficiently within four years. But, said Donald Ross, ‘Munro who had up to this period remained a frigid bachelor, now married a young girl next door to him, and this interesting business occupied his attention so much that for the last three or four years he forgot to give the necessary instructions to his law agent.’ Though he had the facts correct, Ross had got the wrong principal. The frigid bridegroom was James Gillanders who, in 1852 and at the age of forty-one, married Kindeace's daughter, Margaret.

  The area to be cleared was a long, green stretch on both banks of the Carron, eastward from its second bend to the low ground at Gledfield by the mouth of the strath. Here the river flows more slowly than at the mountain angle of Glencalvie, turning in black coils about flat meadows. The hills above it are gentle and brown. The people, who lived in turf and stone townships at calling distance, had uneasy memories of Glencalvie. Some could re member Culrain thirty-four years before, and there were a few whose memories stretched as far back as The Year of the Sheep. In the early weeks of 1854, when rumours that they were to be evicted at the next term grew stronger, they talked of resistance, and in their determination to burn the papers and deforce the officers the women, as always, were stronger than the men. As the snow-line receded up Bodach Mor look-outs were placed on Ardgayhill, young boys and girls to watch the firthside run of the Tain road, and others to guard the drove-path that came down the Great Pass from Alness. Among these children were two or three men, armed with gu
ns which they were to fire as soon as the officers were seen approaching.

  Early in March Alexander Munro left his house at Braelangwell, on the north bank of the Carron opposite Wester Green-yards, for a secret (he thought) meeting in Tain with Gillanders and Kindeace's law-agent Stewart. Between them they decided on the day of delivery for the summonses. When Munro returned, the sub-tenants called on him and asked him for an assurance that he was not planning their removal. ‘Calling his Maker to witness,’ said Donald Ross, ‘he declared that he had not authorized anyone to apply for warrants in his name.’ And when they later pressed him to disprove the rumours they heard, he again invited Heaven to judge him if he lied.

  Satisfied with this solemn oath, and believing that the tacks-man would support them, the women ran from their houses on Tuesday, 7 March, answering the warning of hilltop whistles. Two hundred yards from Braelangwell, they halted Sheriff-Officer William Macpherson and his Witness, Peter Mackenzie, a constable. According to the evidence both men gave in September before the Court of Justiciary, they were attacked by ‘a mob or a number of disorderly persons’, who threw them on the ground, burnt their papers, stripped them of their clothes and drove them four miles down the strath to Bonar Bridge. Donald Ross, closer to the event, was told a different story:

  The females laid hold of Macpherson, searched his pockets and took the summons from him, and burnt them. They made no attack whatever but treated him very gently; and one or two of the men who came up after the summonses were burnt went with him and with his assistant ‘Peter’ to the Inn at Ardgay and treated them to refreshments and some spirits.