Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 3 on 5/7/2002.

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Highlands and lowlifes

The widespread eviction of tenant crofters in the Scottish highlands in the late 18th and 19th centuries transformed the landscape. James Irvine Robertson examines the consequences

From the peak of Ben Bragghie in the far north of Scotland, a mighty 100-foot statue stares majestically out across the North Sea. Largely paid for by his sorrowing tenants, it is a memorial raised in 1834 to the first Duke of Sutherland. He invested huge sums of money from one of the
greatest fortunes in England into replacing people with sheep to improve both his income and the lot of the remaining population across
his wife’s vast estates. Instead of wealth, he created bitterness.

Between 1807 and 1821, thousands of families were evicted from the land, often at sword point, their cottages burned before their eyes, and forced to emigrate to the industrial cities of the south or overseas. Many died of hunger or disease on the emigrant ships and the so-called improvements failed, leaving those behind in abject poverty. These were the greatest and most notorious of the Highland Clearances which are still raw in the Scottish psyche – a people brutally ejected from their ancestral homes by their chiefs; a culture destroyed; one of the great wrongs of history.

Today when one looks at the Highlands, it seems extraordinary that this chilly, damp, infertile, inhospitable – but breathtakingly beautiful – landscape could support the hundreds of thousands of people who once wrested a living from it. Glen after glen, which now supports no more than the odd shepherd, gamekeeper or forestry worker, is littered with the tumbled ruins of deserted villages. The old way of life in the Highl.....

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By James Irvine Robertson

Section : Scottish Shopping

Page number : 36