The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  Mulock returned to Inverness thoroughly pleased with himself, and with every right to be; his letters had been masterpieces of polemic, but they had also been a hammer-blow at the Victorian gloss that was spreading over Highland landlordism. For their wider circulation and the payment of his debts, he published them in book form, and warned his readers that the gathering of the material had not been the work of a day. ‘The discovery of truth is a painful and difficult process where oppression frowns on a crushed community…. At length, however, the real state of things becomes apparent to a patient investigator.’ The only fault in this noble declaration was that it did not pay due credit to Donald Macleod of Strathnaver, whom Mulock had plagiarized with vigour and abandon.

  When it was announced that the Queen was considering a visit to Sutherland, Mulock was delighted. Sardonically, he considered the Inverness Courier's glowing account of the pleasures awaiting her: ‘The splendid palace… well-sheltered gardens… sweet-wooded and sequestered dells… wide heaths well-peopled with antlered monarchs… a loyal and peaceable, high-spirited race of peasantry of whom almost every woman is comely, and every man handsome.’ Was some Scots Potemkin, Mulock asked, going to prepare all this? ‘As the Queen has a decided taste for the picturesque, and sketches as well as she etches we recommend Her Majesty to try her hand at transferring to her album Kildonan and Strathnaver landscapes, interspersed with the blackened ruins of burnt-down cottages, where dwelt in former days the “loyal and peaceable and high-spirited race of peasantry”.’

  And, naturally, he could not ignore the Consort. ‘If, instead of devoting his royal zeal to the feeding of porkers, Prince Albert were to dedicate his whole mind to the management of sheep, we admit that Sutherland's noble straths would afford His Royal Highness ample scope for contemplating the grandeur of a lonely shepherd's life on the large scale organized by the late Marquess of Stafford.’

  In the same month that the Queen's visit to Sutherland was proposed, a great celebration was held at Dunrobin Castle upon the majority of Sutherland's heir, Lord Stafford, who had been recently married to Anna Hay-Mackenzie. Mulock was able to get no closer to this brilliant affair than the Inn at Golspie (‘which, by the way, is an excellent hostelry’). He was cordoned there with other journalists, factors, ground-officers, and unimportant ministers of the Established Church. One of these last was a Reverend Mr Rose of Tain, who made the journey worth while for Mulock.

  Mr Rose was on his road to Golspie for the purpose of mastication, deglutition and declamatory achievement when he was lucky as to see (without second-sight) two rainbows, one lovingly enclosing another and brighter one! The rev. gentleman treasured up these optical wonders in his mind's eye until a tenth toast enabled him to turn his rainbows to admirable account, by insisting that the larger and (he somewhat ungallantly added) the faded one meant Mrs Hay-Mackenzie, while the lesser and brighter rainbow radiantly imagined the youthful Marchioness of Stafford.

  This bodes well for the congratulatory addresses to the Queen when received right royally at Dunrobin. If Mr Gunn fires off another loyal harangue, and the Rev. Mr Rose has the good fortune to pop upon another pair of rainbows (to suit the Queen and Prince Albert), the next Sutherland rejoicings will constitute a memorable affair.

  He could not be allowed to keep this up for ever, of course. To duel in public with a hack journalist was not within the dignity of the Duke of Sutherland, beyond that one letter in the Inverness Courier. But something stopped Mulock's mouth, and we have only Macleod's word for the fact that it was gold. One suspects that it was exhaustion and old age. In 1853 he was gone from the Highlands, leaving behind that letter of ‘apology’. It was a qualified one; he was too Irish not to go down fighting: ‘My mind has undergone no change respecting the impolicy of Highland Clearances. But I feel conscientiously convinced that even unquestionable truths may be advocated with an angry pertinacity which impedes usefulness instead of promoting it.’

  Macleod said that Mulock then went to Paris, where he started an English newspaper. ‘For the service he rendered Napoleon in crushing republicanism during the besieging of Rome, etc., the Emperor presented him with a gold pin, and a few days afterwards sent a gendarme to him with a brief notice that his service was not any longer required, and a warning to quit France in a few days.’

  Before Mulock left the Highlands, however, he had spoken his mind about the evictions then taking place in the Isles.

  ‘Oh, dear man, the tears come on my eyes!’

  THE GREAT CHEVIOT came to the Hebrides last of all, but it came to them all in time, to the Long Island and to Mull, to Raasay, Skye and Barra, to Mingulay and Tiree. Though the land that made this shield of islands offered less to the animal than Sutherland or Argyll, and although many of the sheep-walks were later abandoned, they were still a profitable alternative – the only alternative to men. By 1830 there were too many men in the Hebrides. At the end of the eighteenth century, when mainland proprietors had begun to remove their people, the lairds of the Isles were importing labour to work their property, and in Lewis and the Uists there were no songs sung about a land taken from the people, or of white-sailed ships taking away the best of the youth.

  The reason was kelp, the rich vegetation which a restless ocean vomited on to the shores of the islands. For sixty years seaweed brought a twilight prosperity to districts where, shortly after Culloden, an Englishman had seen ‘the poor prowling like other animals along the shore to pick up limpets and other shell-fish, the casual repast of hundreds during parts of the year in these unhappy islands.’ Kelp could be made into a rich fertilizer, urgently needed as Britain's agricultural economy expanded. It required no planting, no cultivation, only a vast army of men, women and children to tear it from the rocks with hooks and sickles, to carry it to great kilns and there burn it over peat until it became hard, brittle and multi-coloured. Island lairds and tacksmen, clinging to their warrior patronymics, were in fact seaweed farmers, shipping thousands of tons every year to middlemen in Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull or Newcastle. Prices rose to £12 a ton, on which the landlord (paying a family £4 or £5 a season to work his shores) could expect to make a profit of £7. The supply, brought by willing tides, never faltered.

  Hebridean proprietors had used all their influence to secure the passing of the Passenger Act of 1803, hoping that it would restrict emigration and therefore guarantee them a reservoir of labour. Because of kelp, the population of the Isles increased by 63 per cent overall, and in South Uist the figure was 118 per cent. The lairds grew rich. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the second Lord Macdonald of the Isles had an annual income of £20,000 from kelp alone. Macdonald of Clanranald, whose people were spread across a dozen islands, large and small, as well as much of the mainland, received £18,000, most of which he spent as a Regency buck in London. Lord Macdonald, Clanranald, Lord Seaforth and the Duke of Argyll between them enjoyed the profits of nearly half of the industry. The rents of sub-tenants were increased beyond what their holdings could be expected to produce in cattle, and thus were the people forced to work on the beaches or at the kilns. An island rent-roll, once counted in swordsmen, now depended on the manuring of English fields.

  But it ended. The price of kelp began to fall in 1811, having reached £20 a ton for some grades. With the close of the Napoleonic Wars import duties on competitive products were reduced or lifted, and when the salt excise duty was abolished in 1825 kelp was no longer the green treasure-chest of the Isles. The industry continued in decline for another quarter of a century but long before then the people who had been drawn to the islands to work it were being driven out, and the great Seaweed Chiefs sank into a bankruptcy from which only the Great Cheviot could rescue them.

  The wide Clanranald estates, stretching from Moidart and Arisaig on the mainland to South Uist in the Isles, were the first to crumble. Ranald George Macdonald of Clanranald, eighteenth captain of the clan, was more at home in London or Brighton than he was in Arisaig, and he had little
feeling for his people, being inclined to remove them if he thought their cabins spoiled the view from his windows. Even one of his more merciful tacksmen, John Macdonald of Borrodale, did not question his right to do this (they ‘being so close to your house and policies’, he said), but he wished that Mac-'ic-Ailein had given the people earlier warning of the fact that they were not wanted. Clanranald began to dispose of his lands in 1813 by selling some to his tacksmen and kinsmen, continued by selling Arisaig and Bornish to the trustees of Lady Ashburton, and concluded in 1838 by parting with the whole of South Uist and Benbecula to John Gordon of Cluny, one of the most ruthless removers in the Isles. For all of his property, which his ancestors had held by sword or charter through seventeen generations, Clanranald received £214,211 11s. 7d. He was left with the island and castle of Tirrim, which supported his threadbare claim to be a landed chief for another thirty-five years.

  ‘The clearances came upon us,’ said Peggy MacCormack, who had been born a Macdonald in Clanranald's country. ‘There was neither sin nor sorrow in the world for us, but the clearances came upon us, destroying all, turning our gladness into bitterness, our blessings into blasphemy, and our Christianity into mockery. Oh, dear man, the tears come on my eyes when I think of all we suffered, and of the sorrows, hardships and oppressions we came through.’

  The land and the islands were sold and bought and sold again in the exchanges of Inverness, Edinburgh and London by speculators who rarely saw what they bought. Raasay, the green island strip that lies between Skye and the mainland, changed hands four times in sixteen years, and each time it lost some of its people. Barra, where MacNeils had lived for forty generations since Niall of the Nine Hostages sired the line, was sold twice in one year. General Roderick MacNeil (who claimed the hereditary right to sit down to his dinner before any prince on earth) accepted £42,050 for the island in 1839 from a speculator called Menzies. In 1840 Menzies put it up for auction again at Paxton's Coffee House in Inverness, but chose the wrong moment for it fetched £38,050 only, the buyer being Colonel Gordon of Cluny. In 1825 the whole estate of Lewis was brought to judicial sale before Lord Medwyn at a reserve price of £136,000. After some brisk opposition bidding from the Joint Stock Property Company of Edinburgh, Mackenzie of Seaforth bought it for £160,000. Twenty years later it was bought for £190,000 by the young millionaire, James Matheson. He was a benevolent proprietor, and was to spend nearly half a million pounds on the island in an attempt to improve it and to relieve the destitution of its people, but in the end the people went in hundreds to Canada and Australia.

  The Isle of Skye became the property of several proprietors, who, in the four decades following 1840, would serve 1,740 writs of removal, involving nearly forty thousand people, all of whom, whether they were removed or not, had to pay 10s. for the cost of the summonses against them. On Harris the 78th Highlanders were called in to remove the proprietor's sub-tenants. He had been paying them £2 12s. 6d. for the collection of a ton of kelp that was selling for £2 10s. only in Liverpool, and not unnaturally he decided that he would do better with sheep (due to foot-rot in parts of England and Scotland that year, the price of Cheviot wedders had risen handsomely). On the Isle of Mull, from Mornish to Glen Moire, evictions were particularly severe, and the bard Angus MacMhuirich lamented the bitterness which followed.

  The jaws of sheep have made the land rich,

  but we were told by the prophecy

  that sheep would scatter the warriors

  and turn their homes into a wilderness.

  The land of our love lies under bracken and heather,

  every plain and every field is untilled,

  and soon there will be none in Mull of the Trees

  but Lowlanders and their white sheep.

  In 1849 Lord Macdonald decided to evict a hundred and ten families, more than six hundred people, from Sollas on the island of North Uist. He was Godfrey William Wentworth Macdonald, fourth Baron of the Isles, descendant of the Macdonald chiefs of Sleat. His uncle, the second Lord (who had done so well out of fertilizer), had built a fairy-tale castle at Armadale on Skye to the design of James Gillespie Graham, the architect who introduced the horror of Gothic to the Highlands. Macdonald hoped that this absurdity would persuade his descendants to live on their property, and he also introduced the cultivation of hemp, drained marshes, built bridges, churches and mills. But it all depended on seaweed and an overblown population. The fourth baron had a wide property on Skye and North Uist, debts of £200,000, and impatient creditors who soon formed themselves into a body of trustees to intercept some of his rents against the money owing them. Macdonald was a humane man, concerned for the well-being of his people (which is more than could be said for some of his ancestors), and during the Potato Famine of 1846 he spent all of his resources on the relief of destitution among them. It was therefore an irony that one of the most bitter and best-remembered evictions in the Isles should take place on his property. But the pressures on him were as inexorable as those on less charitable lairds, the Great Cheviot could save him as much as them, and in the end he too was petitioning for ‘an armed force to enable the constituted authorities to compel the people to give obedience to the Law’.

  A central stud of the great Hebridean buckler, North Uist had once been one of the most profitable of the seaweed islands, but in 1849 it was impoverished and wretched. ‘It is necessary,’ said Mr Finlay Macrae, minister of the parish, ‘to find some proper outlet for the excess of population by emigration, and thus to increase the amount of land possessed by each family. At present it is notorious that there are no less than 390 families paying no rent, but living chiefly on the produce of small spots of potato ground given them by some of their neighbours and relatives.’ Since the decay of the kelp industry, the five thousand inhabitants of North Uist had been living close to starvation, but their attachment to the island was fierce and strong. In 1847, Shaw, the Sheriff-Substitute, had told the Commissary-General that they stubbornly refused to go to the Lowlands for work. ‘Emigration seems to me to be the only means of permanently improving the conditions of the people in these crowded districts, and I think that the cost of maintaining them in idleness or unprofitable employment for a single season would suffice to effect the removal of the superfluous number.’

  It was therefore with the best of motives, and for their own good as it seemed to him, that Macdonald decided to eject the people. He offered to remit the arrears of their rent, to take their crop and stock at valuation, and to supplement the Destitution Board's offer of £1 per head (on condition of emigration) by whatever money was necessary to get them to Canada – if only they would go.

  The district of Sollas was a square mile of flat ground in the north of the island. On the west it bordered a sandy, tidal bay. It lay in a trough between a three-mile drift of dunes and the slopes of the inland hills, over which climbed a wandering road from Lochmaddy. It was the best land on an island that consisted almost entirely of water. The six hundred people there lived in the townships of Dunskellar, Mallaglate (Malaclete), Middle-quarter and Sollas itself. It was a brown, treeless country that took the first anger of the Atlantic weather, and where spring came late and winter early. Yet every corrie, rock and hill had been give a name and a legend, and even in their poverty the people loved the land. Those who belonged to Clan Donald had an independent pride, and an Englishman said that even the ‘poorest and most despicable creature’ among them was vainer than men of property because he carried the name. They called themselves the Children of Colla, the Irish prince who had once ruled the Isles, and they called themselves the Sons of Conn of the Hundred Battles, the High King of Ireland. A seventeenth-century bard had spoken of them as ‘the race of Colla, of vast armies and many tributes, with their full-laden, white-sailed fleet they sail upon the oceans’. All of which was the stuff of dreams only by 1849.

  Highland newspapers, with one exception, were sympathetic to Lord Macdonald's proposal to remove the race of Colla to Canada, and they
praised his desire to make the island productive once more. The one exception, of course, was the Inverness Advertiser. When it was all over, Thomas Mulock hammered away at Macdonald, accusing him of replacing the people by sheep, of sheltering behind his agents, and of being a liar (or at best misinformed). ‘Sollas was foredoomed,’ he said, ‘in order that the district should be partitioned among two or three prospective tacksmen who had found favour with your Lordship's functionaries. The old disposition of Naboth's vinyard is renewed on a larger scale by the Celtic Ahabs.’ Far from the rents being in arrears for years, they had in fact been paid with regularity until 1848, and Mulock quoted a Macdonald factor in evidence of this.

  ‘I respect your Lordship's rank,’ said Mulock, ‘I unfeignedly pity your painful position, but I cannot suffer your Lordship to be screened by the interposition of an underling. No privilege of your order can avail you here…. That the heathery hills of Scotland are suitable for sheep is a truth open to a traveller's observation, but the mighty man of sheep must have every valley as well as every hill…. Aye, but the rent, but the rent? cries some commissioner of Lord Macdonald, or of the Duke of Sutherland, or Mr Baillie of Glenelg.’

  More probably murmuring, Aye, but my debts, my debts! Macdonald moved against the people of Sollas. From Whitsuntide to summer they evaded a direct answer to his offer to ship them to Canada, and to send one of his agents with them in guarantee of his good faith and concern for them. Mr Macrae, the minister, was also unable to persuade them. They said that the season was now too late, or too early, that the midsummer markets would offer better prices for the stock they must abandon, but their real fear was unspoken. They did not wish to leave the brown island and the grey sea, their boats and their cabins, the hills where their kin were buried. In July Patrick Cooper, Macdonald's Commissioner, went to Sollas with Sheriff-Substitute Shaw, and warned the people that they would be forcibly ejected if they did not move. They told Shaw that they would not harm him, for they had good memories of his father, ‘but they threatened instant death to any officer who should attempt to evict them’. Cooper went back to the mainland complaining, through Macdonald, that the people were dishonouring earlier promises they had made, and the petition they had signed asking for aid in emigration.