On 15th March 1814 the large scale Sutherland Clearances began.
There are still those out there who push the narrative that the Clearances were natural occurrence, that thousands of families willingly gave up the crofts en masse, leaving crofting settlements that their families had worked and lived in for generations. Ask yourself this, is it likely that the numbers naturally dwindled from a third of Scotland’s population who lived north of the Highland Line; would just fall to the numbers it is today of just five percent? This was a systematic attempt to rid the country of troublesome Highlanders after the Jacobite Uprisings that continued for decades.
In 1811 there were 250,000 sheep there; by the 1840s there were almost a million. Within that period sheep replaced people driven from their homes by direct eviction or through hunger and destitution. After the sheep and overgrazing came deer and the creation of hunting grounds for the elite. By 1884 a tenth of Scotland’s land was given over to deer forests, greater than the size of Wales, and taking up the great majority of the land in the crofting counties (crofts were the small plots of land available to the remaining population)
The eviction of whole communities from Sutherland was done a scale not seen before, or again, during the Highland Clearances.
Families were moved off land to make way for large-scale sheep farming.
Starting in the late 18th Century and running into the 19th Century, the Highland Clearances saw townships occupied by generations of families cleared to make way for large-scale sheep farming and the rearing of deer.
Landowners were seeking to “improve” their estates in line with the industrial revolution.
In some cases people who had lived on the land for generations left voluntarily, while others were forcibly evicted and their homes burned and demolished.
Highlanders did try and fight the movement that saw their ancestral lands given over to sheep farming, 26 years previously and sheep were targeted in 1792 - which became known asBiadna nan Caorach (The Year of the Sheep) - following clearances in Sutherland and Easter Ross.
Four hundred men from families that had been evicted, or were facing eviction, drove thousands of the animals from the hills.
By early August, they had rounded up 6,000 sheep and had reached Beauly, near Inverness, where they were intercepted by soldiers.
Some of the men were tried in court and one man received an order banishing him from Scotland for life.
In the final decades of the 18th century some 200,000 were cleared to make way for sheep.
It wasn’t only English landlords that were against the Highlanders, Scots in the Lowlands, perhaps spoon-fed on propaganda about the Uprisings were as much part of the rhetoric that something had to be done about this quarrelsome people.
A young journalist sent by the “Scotsman” to the Highlands exhibited the this while, writing in 1847 he said, that the Highlanders were “an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon.” Robert Knox, the Edinburgh surgeon who bought the bodies from the West Port murderers Burke and Hare believed in the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and wrote that the Highlanders “must be forced from the soil.”
Then there were the landlords factors, the most hated of whom was another Lowlander called Patrick Sellar , he regarded the Highlanders as racial degenerates. In his racist view they were, “the aborigines of Britain shut out from any general stream of knowledge… ”
Sellar was charged with murder for burning down an old woman’s house, a hand-picked jury of landowners found him not-guilty, but he had brought bad publicity to the Sutherland Estate and lost his job.
James Loch was an Edinburgh lawyer who for 40 years, from 1812, was commissioner for the Marquis of Stafford. He would write an apology for his employers but his racism towards their tenants was never far from the surface, with him complaining:
“… [their] habits and ideas, quite incompatible with the customs of regular society, and civilised life, adding greatly to those defects which characterise persons living in a loose and unformed state of society.” His concern was to provide wool for the “staple manufactory of England” and to convert the people to “the habits of regular and continued industry.
In 1846 matters became desperate as the potato blight brought the likelihood of famine to the Highlands. In response Charles Trevelyan, Under Secretary at the Treasury, wrote: “The people cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.” Two years later he did the opposite in Ireland, letting hundreds of thousands die. Arguing the famine there was “a mechanism for reducing surplus population.
Yet, as starvation became apparent the British government did intervene to feed the population: just two deaths from starvation are recorded, both on the hard hit population of the Isle of Barra (whose people were largely cleared in 1853 and sent to Quebec). This contrasts with Ireland, where the Great Famine killed thousands. While Ireland was nominally part of the UK it was in reality a colony and seen as separate. The Highlands were regarded by the British government as part of the UK, and starvation could not be permitted there (although emigration was encouraged)
The clearances speak volumes about how capitalism came into being, dripping with blood and at the expense of common people.
There were about 7 million sheep in Scotland nowadays, thats over one for each and every one of us,and estimated to be worth £165m to the economy, according to Scottish Government figures.
Brian McNeil wrote, in his song No Gods and precious few Heroes;
So farewell to the heather and the glen They cleared us off once and they’d do it all again For they still prefer sheep to thinking men Ah, but men who think like sheep are even better There’s nothing much to choose between the old vain and the new They still don’t give a damn for the likes of me and you Just mind you pay your rent to the factor when it’s due And mind your bloody manners when you pay…..
Pics are various former settlements from around Scotland and two of the many memorial monuments, the larger one is thr Land Raiders Monument near Coll and Greson the Isle of Lewis, the smaller is on Skye the Glendale Land Leaguers Memorial, commemorates five imprisoned crofters known as the 'Glendale Martyrs'. The drawing is a Highlander looking out from a boat at her home for the last time.
In 1883 tensions were high on Skye between crofters and landowners over grazing rights. After an estate shepherd was assaulted by a group of crofters when he tried to remove their cattle from what had traditionally been common pasture, the police were sent to arrest twenty men held responsible for the assault. Violence ensued and the police were forced to retreat. A government representative arrived by naval gunboat to negotiate with the men of Glendale and it was agreed that a government commission would be set up to investigate the crofters' grievances. In return it was agreed that a token five men (the Glendale Martyrs) would stand trial for the assault. The commission, chaired by Lord Napier, recommended mild reforms but with the Highland Land League gaining support and returning four MPs to Parliament in 1885, Gladstone's government passed the Crofters' Act in 1886 which guaranteed crofters' tenure over their land and ended the threat of eviction.
