And then the sheep came

The Highland Clearances remain a singularly heartbreaking reminder of the life-wrecking human toll so cruelly and callously exacted during the rise of capitalism

Image: After the Highland Clearances - David Stratton Watt

During the hundred year stretch from 1750-1860, thousands of people were evicted from their ancestral homes in the Scottish Highlands. Following the routing of the Scottish Highlanders by the British at the Battle of Culloden, thus ending the Jacobite rising of 1745, England began to take steps to enforce its rule in Scotland. In an effort to force assimilation and to break up clan bonds and organization, many traditional Scottish forms of attire or custom were outlawed, legal standing and privileges for clan chiefs were stripped, making them little more than landlords. The following decades saw many English “improvers” come to Scotland, intent on renovating and repurposing the land for more efficient and high-yield agricultural production and sheep farming.

The year 1792 was called The Year of the Sheep. England was in need of more meat to feed a growing population, and prices of wool from Florence had skyrocketed, providing motivation to expand the English wool market to supply the growing manufacturing and export industry. The Scottish Highlands, territory inhospitable to cattle and other livestock, turned out to be optimal for a new breed of sheep, the Cheviot, which had been specifically bred to yield more wool and meat and to withstand harsh climates and winters. Highland chiefs who had debts of their own and saw the huge amount of money to be made in sheep farming “began, willingly or unwillingly, the great betrayal of their children.”¹

Clan chiefs, recruited with tantalizing promises of wealth and access to English nobility, turned on their clans, and would, over the next decades, participate in the forcible eviction of thousands of families from the Scottish Highlands to make way for sheep pastures; “Four shepherds, their dogs and three thousand sheep now occupied land that had once supported five townships.” The highlanders revolted on a few occasions, such as in the Ross-shire Sheep Riot, where they drove sheep out of their ancestral lands through the country and over the roads, but in the end, they were forced to surrender and “accepted the sheep as they accepted famine and pestilence.”

Tenants on the chief’s land had no formal leases, and when their customary agreement to remain on the land (often held in the family for generations) was denied, many were forced into nearly unlivable settlements on the coast, or left Scotland altogether. They resisted, sometimes forcefully and violently, but in the end, with the force of the law on the side of their chiefs and the landowners, eviction was inevitable. The sense of loss and betrayal suffered cannot be overstated:

Exile to the highlanders was not a matter of miles. 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. Unprepared for change, they held to the old ways, of which an acceptance of the chief's authority was among the strongest. He might dispose of them as he thought fit, but he was also their only protector, and when he began to use the power and ignore the obligation they were helpless. Aware of betrayal, they sometimes walked into exile with the meekness of the animals that replaced them.

Clearances were particularly brutal in Sutherland, one of the largest counties in Scotland. These were overseen by William Young, who was the Commissioner to Lord Stafford, the owner of much of the county and one of the richest men in Britain, and the estate manager, Patrick Sellar. There were some 25,000 tenants in 1801. These were viewed as dirty and uncouth people. Relics from another time that needed civilizing, their lands needing improvement. They were lazy and poor, and not worth the land they lived on. Thus were the Sutherland Highlanders vilified before their eviction.

The clearances started slowly, with a few townships first, their “confused and bewildered” tenants moved to the coast or to emigrant ships. The clearances accelerated over the next two decades, as did the cruelty and callousness with which they were carried out. The people could not even rely on their clergy to help them, as they had been enticed and corrupted by gifts and promises of prosperity from the landowners

With a few noble exceptions, the ministers chose the side of the landlords, who built them new manses, made carriage roads to their doors, and invited them to share in the new prosperity now and then with the grant of a few acres of sheep pasturage. In return the churchmen gave God's authority to Improvement, and threatened the more truculent of the evicted with damnation.

The evictions were carried out systematically. Tenants were informed they had to leave, and then the sheep came, ready or not; “To the sound of phrenetic bleating, they pulled down their house timbers and walked with them to the coast where the villages in which they were to live had not been built, the boats from which they were expected to fish had not been launched, the nets unspun.”

In Strathnaver, a valley with more than sixty separate communities of some 338 families, people were served the first eviction notices on January 15, 1814, instructing them to “flit and remove themselves, their husbands, wives, bairns, families, servants, subtenants, cottars, dependents, and whole goods and effects”² by May 26, 1814. They were confused and refused to leave, so were still there in June, when Sellar came back to enforce his evictions. Sellar had begun burning the lands to prepare them for sheep farming, a common practice called muirburning. Sellar was impatient to claim ownership of much of the land he was clearing, as he had his own flocks of sheep to pasture, and he feared if he did not act the tenants might organize and resist with violence. He had previously allowed families to pack up their wooden homes and take them with them to their new settlements, but now declared that those homes that remained uncleared were to be burnt and the occupants were to be compensated for the lost timber.

The scene of horror that transpired is hard to imagine; “he would be a very cruel man who would not mourn for the people.” Firsthand accounts of those who experienced the clearings at the hands of Sellar and his men can only illustrate a fraction of the terror and brutality

The burning of the house-timbers began as soon as a cottage was emptied, and even before if the occupants were laggardly. The smoke roiled oily and thick in the moist air. The bowl of the valley held the resolute noise of barking dogs, shouted orders, the crying of women and children… Betsy MacKay was sixteen and she lived at the river’s edge by Skail. ‘Our family was very reluctant to leave,’ she remembered, ‘and stayed for some time, but the burning party came round and set fire to our house at both ends, reducing to ashes whatever remained within the walls. The people had to escape for their lives, some of them losing all their clothes except what they had on their backs… The people were driven away like dogs who deserved no better, and that too, without any reason in the world.’

Daniel Macleod, by his account, was present at Strathnaver that day… ‘I was present’, he said, ‘at the pulling down and burning of the house of William Chisolm, in which was lying his wife’s mother, an old bed-ridden woman of nearly one hundred years of age, none of the family being present.’ When Sellar came to Chisolm’s little hut.. Macleod told him that the old woman was too ill to be removed. ‘He replied, “Damn her, the old witch; she has lived too long. Let her burn!” Fire was immediately set to the house and the blankets in which she was carried were in flames before she could be got out. She was placed in a little shed, and it was with great difficulty they were prevented from firing it also… She died within five days.

Nearly seventy years later, [Iain] Mackay’s granddaughter, Annie, spoke of the effect which those times had on her family. ‘I remember my grandmother, a sadly-depressed woman with a world of sorrow in her faded blue eyes, as if the shadow of the past were always upon her spirit. I never saw her smile, and when I asked my mother for the cause she told me that that look of pain came upon my grandmother’s face with the fires of Strathnaver. Even when my mother was in her last illness, in May 1882, when the present was fading from her memory, she appeared again as a girl of twelve in Strathnaver, continually asking “Whose house is burning now?” and crying out now and again, “Save the people!”

There are many stories such as these. The trauma is unthinkable, the terror and suffering unbelievable. The villages the highlanders were forced into on the coast were worthless, inhospitable and dangerous

the bitter, rocky stretch between the mouth of the Naver and Strathy Point, for example, where there was no safe harbour, where the wind came without interruption from the Arctic Circle, and where men were now expected to live on what an inhuman sea chose to offer them. These men Donald Macleod knew. William Mackay who was sucked away by the waves while inspecting his little lot, and while his wife and children watched. John Campbell who was also drowned the same way. And Bell Mackay, a married woman who was taken by the sea while making salt. Robert Mackay, who fell and was killed when collecting plovers eggs for his starving family. ‘And John Macdonald, while fishing, was swept off the rocks and never seen more.’

Faced with nowhere to go except into the sea or onto the ships, the highlanders were helpless. They were bitter, angry, betrayed, traumatized. The Gaelic poetry that captures this time period reflects this wide-ranging emotional milieu. It expresses the voice of the people with prophetic and heartbreaking clarity.

Thàinig oirnn do dh’Albain crois,

Tha daoine bochda nochdte ris,

Gun bhiadh, gun aodach, gun chluain,

Tha ‘n àird a tuath air a sgrios.

There has come on us in Scotland a cross,

poor people are naked before it;

without food, without clothing, without pasture (?),

the land of the North is utterly destroyed.

It is explicit in its condemnation of the greed that evicted the people, the betrayal of codes of conduct and social custom that bound the people together in times past

Ach fhir shanntaich rinn an droch bheairt,

Liuthad teachlach bochd a ghluais thu.

But greedy one who did the evil deed,

many a poor family you moved.

For others the rage at those responsible and the cry for justice and retribution reaches a biblical pitch. The longing for the suffering and death of those who have visited such misery on them and their kinsfolk is palpable. They strike out at everyone: men, sheep, lambs, shepherds. Their trauma spilling over into vivid and graphic scenes of violence

Nam faighinn-s’ air an raon thu

Is daoine ‘ga do cheangal,

Bheirinn le mo dhòrnaibh

Trì òirlich a mach de d’ sgamhan.

If I had you on the field

and men binding you,

With my fists I would tear

out three inches of your lungs!

‘S nuair thèid spaid de’n uir ort

Gum bi ‘n dùthaich glan;

Cha tèid ni air t’uanchdar-sa

Ach buachar mhart’

Cha bhi gal nam pàisdean

No gàirich bhan;

Cha bhi bantrach ‘s truaghan ann

A bhualadh bhas.

And when a spade of earth goes on you

the country will be clean;

nothing will go on top of you

but the dung of cattle;

there will be no weeping of children

nor wailing of women;

there will be no widow or poor one

striking their palms.

Despite the anger and violence, what remains is the overwhelming sense of loss. Ever-present is the heartbreaking depiction of the ruin and devastation wrought by the clearings of lives and livelihoods to make way for an endless sea of sheep. The sense of loss, of land, of lives, of community, permeates these utterances

Chaochail madainn ait ar n-òige

Mar an ceò air bhàrr nam beann;

Tha ar càirdean ‘s ar luchd eòlais

Air am fògradh bhos is thall;

Tha cuid eile dhiubh nach gluais,

Tha an cadal fuar fo’n fhòd,

Bha gun uaill, gun fhuath, gun anntlachd

Anns a’ ghleann san robh iad òg.

The joyous morning of our youth has changed

like the mist on top of the mountains;

our kinsmen and our acquaintances

are driven away in this country and over the sea;

there are others of them who will not move,

who are in a cold sleep under the turf,

people who were here without pride, hatred, or malice

in the glen in which they were young.

1. Quotes in this essay, unless otherwise specified, are from John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances. Prebble has been criticized by historians for his subjective, personal account and his failure to accurately account for the objective impersonal economic forces at play during the clearances. However, his “history from below” which relies on personal anecdotes and stories from those who were evicted provides an illuminating look at the real human toll exacted by the clearances, without the formality and academic stuffiness of more “rigorous” historians.

2. James Hunter, Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances, 165.