Driven from the south in massive flocks before southern Scots and English shepherds, the Cheviot came up the old cattle roads and crags to feed on the cotton grass and the alpine plants. They poured into glens and towns and villages like a bleating white river. To the landowners, armies of agents now offered previously unheard of rents. The only thing standing in the way of this tide of modernisation was the people.
The Napoleonic Wars, coinciding with the advent of the factory system and the new English industries of the early nineteenth century, brought the demand for wool to a crescendo. Public land was enclosed, fences appearing where none had existed before.
Unlike in some European countries, such as Switzerland, the rights of peasant tenants in the Highlands were not guaranteed. Even in England, the agricultural labouring classes had some hold on their tenure. Not so in Scotland. Families that had lived and died on the same plots were now handed eviction notices and ordered to leave. Many still spoke only the Gaelic and as they gathered as a village to listen to what these strangers from the south—the agents, the factors and the sheriffs—read to them, they could not understand a word of it. When they finally did, they could not believe what they were hearing.
Peacefully at first, the bewildered Highlanders accepted their lot with resignation. They were given the chance to dismantle their ancient wooden homes piece by piece and transport them to one of the new plots promised to them in a different part of their lord’s estate. These were usually on the wild coast or in the Western Isles, where they would now be forced to learn new ways of life as herring fishers or kelp harvesters—trades about which they knew absolutely nothing. Better still, they were told, a berth was always ready for them on one of the emigrant ships waiting in Greenock to take them to far-away America, Canada or, later, Australia. Many of the landowners were so keen to be rid of their people that they paid their fares, up front, no questions asked.
As surely as the native inhabitants of Australia and America were dispossessed in the name of progress and industry, so too were the Highlanders of Scotland, forced out by the sheep farmer colonists, and their so-called four-footed clansman of the Highlands: the Cheviot.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, as landowners began to taste the riches that ridding their lands of people and converting them to sheep pastures could bring, the Clearances accelerated both in scope and bitterness. Land that had been worth pennies per acre to the gentry now yielded shillings and pounds. Yet the people were not leaving fast enough.
Perhaps the most brutal episodes of the Clearances took place across the vast shire of Sutherland, owned almost in its entirety by the phenomenally wealthy George Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford and later first Duke of Sutherland. Said to be one of the richest men of nineteenth-century Britain—exceeding in wealth the fortune of even Baron Rothschild—he dubbed himself the ‘Great Improver’, although almost all he owned came through his wife, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, nineteenth Countess of Sutherland. Not that his thousands of tenants would have recognised him. It was said that in twenty years, he had visited his vast northern estates just once. His agents, sheriffs and factors, on the other hand, would soon become extremely familiar.
In the valleys of Strathnaver, entire towns and villages were cleared away like worn-out furniture. Any delay, any resistance to the evictions—even verbal protest—was taken as defiance and dealt with ruthlessly by Stafford’s men, particularly the infamous Factor for the Sutherland Estates, Patrick Sellar. His name, even today, induces a shudder of loathing to people in Scotland’s north.
Sellar employed teams of men to move people on with increasing brutality. Those slow to respond to the writs of removal had their houses torn down, with teams of horses being used to rip out beams and walls. Gone were the days when they were at least permitted to take their timbers with them—wood being a rare commodity in the Highlands. Then fire became the preferred tool. Entire villages of Strathnaver were set ablaze, houses lit at both ends at once, often with their inhabitants still inside. No pity was shown for age. Old women and children were ordered out or pushed into the elements, their furniture—often their only worldly possessions—smashed to pieces or going up in flames with the houses. In one such eviction, an old woman perished inside a house Sellar had set alight. It took two years for him to come to trial, only to be acquitted in minutes by a jury of fellow landowners and agents, along with a grovelling apology from the presiding magistrate.
Local ministers of God, not even remaining silent throughout their ordeal, sided almost exclusively with the landowning gentry, who promised them new manses and carriage roads leading up to their front doors. Thus bought, they turned on their own flock, threatening the more stubborn evictees with hellfire and eternal damnation for the slightest disobedience. Bleating waves of Cheviot sheep broke over the hills even before some tenants had had time to obey the eviction orders.
The evicted Highlanders were given no real compensation, offered no halfway houses, and no emergency or interim accommodation, no transport and no assistance to reconstruct their lives in whatever place it was they had been sent to. They were simply ordered to pack up, leave their crops to rot in the ground, take their few cattle and go.
The alternative coastal allotments generously provided by the Duke and Duchess to their ejected and homeless tenants were so miserable and so inadequate that, in many instances, it was all but impossible to eke out an existence. Rocky stretches of worthless moor and bog, whipped endlessly by the winds and waves rolling in from the Arctic. Unused to seas and tides, many were drowned or swept out to sea attempting to learn such alien activities as salt-making. The soil was, for the most part, thin and unproductive. Crops were attempted, but seeds that were not blown away on the wind sprouted weak green shoots that were killed by salt and mildew. People who had, over generations, established sustainable patterns of harvest on their modest plots now simply had to rely on what was provided by the merciless sea. In a sense, it did not matter where they had been sent:
Once expelled from the glen they had occupied for generations, it was of small consequence to them whether they travelled ten miles or four thousand. The loss was the same, the pain as great.[2]
One Highlander remembering his home before the time of the Clearances described being able to see the next village not more than three-quarters of a mile away from his own, with the next one the same distance beyond that. Now, four shepherds, their dogs and 3000 sheep occupied land that had once supported five townships.[3]
There were indeed improvements in the Highlands, but as one local observer, and one of the few local and articulate critics of the Clearances, Donald MacLeod, observed in a series of letters written to Edinburgh newspapers:
Roads, bridges, inns and manses to be sure, for the accommodation of the new gentlemen, tenantry and clergy, but those who spoke the Gaelic tongue were a proscribed race, and everything was done to get rid of them, by driving them into the forlorn hope of deriving subsistence from the sea while squatting on their miserable allotments where, in their wretched hovels, they lingered out an almost hopeless existence.[4]
There was some mobbing and deforcing of sheriff officers, and riots occasionally erupted at places like Strath Oykel and Gruids, but such resistance was quickly and ruthlessly put down in the courts. Soon, it petered out into resignation and despair:
4
D. McLeod, 1841,