3

‘There should be blood’

Rebellion in Kildonan

Anyone entering the National Gallery of Scotland, off Edinburgh’s Princes Street, soon encounters a towering portrait – nearly eight feet high – of a tall, well-set, auburn-haired man wearing the uniform of one of early nineteenth-century Britain’s many military formations, the 54th (West Norfolk) Regiment of Foot. This portrait, thought to date from between 1809 and 1811, was painted by Henry Raeburn, one of Scotland’s most renowned artists. But if the identity of the portrait’s painter is clear, its subject has been something of a puzzle to the National Gallery. The gallery’s online catalogue describes him simply as ‘Major William Clunes, died 1829’; and when, in 1997, his portrait was featured in a comprehensive exhibition of Raeburn’s work, the exhibition’s organisers did not have much more to say. Observing that ‘little is known’ of Clunes,* they added only that he ‘is believed to have been a native of Sutherland’ who, having joined the 50th (West Kent) Regiment of Foot in 1790, was promoted to lieutenant in 1794, to captain in 1797 and to major in 1809 – by which point he had transferred from the West Kents to the West Norfolks with whom he served until quitting the army in 1811.¹

The National Gallery gets wrong the date of William Clunes’s death, which actually occurred in February 1830. Otherwise the gallery’s account of him is accurate, if slight. But for all that it might be good if more information were available, no one needs to know who Clunes was in order to appreciate the subtleties of Henry Raeburn’s composition – a composition from which the major, his face more brightly lit than its surroundings, looks out self-assuredly at the viewer. Clunes’s right hand is on his hip. His left rests on the back of the horse he is about to mount, its head turned away from both Clunes and from his portrait’s painter with the result that the animal’s tail and hindquarters loom large in the picture’s foreground. It is this last feature that led Alison Watt, one of twenty-first-century Scotland’s leading artists, to single out the Clunes portrait when asked to pick a particular favourite from among the National Gallery’s collection. ‘It’s almost impossible to choose a favourite’, Watt responded, ‘but there are several paintings I return to again and again. One of those is Raeburn’s breathtaking portrait of Major William Clunes . . . Few artists have the skill or chutzpah to design a portrait in which the rippling hindquarters of a horse take up a large proportion of the canvas. It’s a dazzling picture.’2

What makes this outstanding piece of art all the more significant, in a Sutherland context at any rate, is the insight it offers into the appearance, maybe even the character, of a man whose presence in the Strath of Kildonan on the evening of Tuesday 5 January 1813 – just two or three years after Raeburn painted Clunes’s portrait – precipitated the sequence of events that brought the Sutherland clearances to national attention.

Clunes lodged that January night in the home of Alexander Sage, Kildonan’s long-serving parish minister. Years later, Donald Sage, the minister’s son, was to write an account of his upbringing in that same Kildonan manse. There Sage touches on the major, his family background and his military career. That career, because it commenced just prior to the start of prolonged conflict between Britain and France, resulted in Clunes seeing a lot of action, the major, according to an 1830 obituarist, having ‘had the honour of sharing the toils and the fame of our army in the Peninsula [meaning Portugal and Spain], Egypt and [elsewhere]’.³

Unsurprisingly, Clunes was wounded more than once and by 1811, or so his father, Gordon Clunes, informed Lady Stafford, was ‘in a very bad state’. That, Clunes senior thought, might make it possible – all the more so if the marchioness was prepared to assist – for him to persuade the military authorities to let William return to civilian life. This, Gordon Clunes wrote, had become all the more necessary because his own health was failing and, if William was not permitted to come home, there would be no one to succeed to the tenancy of Crakaig, the Sutherland Estate farm the Clunes family had occupied since the early eighteenth century.⁴

Thus it came about that when Gordon Clunes died in 1812, William – whose case Lady Stafford did indeed take up with the army’s high command – was in place to take over at Crakaig. Situated on Sutherland’s eastern coastal plain some five miles south of Helmsdale where the Strath of Kildonan opens on to the North Sea, Crakaig contained (as it still does) a substantial tract of arable land. On becoming the farm’s tenant, William promptly set about reorganising this land in a manner that attracted the approval of James Loch, who, when visiting Sutherland, was more than once a beneficiary of what Loch called the major’s ‘gentlemanlike hospitality’. But Loch, despite his being wined and dined from time to time at Crakaig, was never quite sure where William Clunes’s ultimate loyalties lay. This was partly because of the complex web of marital connections between the Crakaig family on the one hand and, on the other, the family which, until 1812, owned the Carrol Estate. William’s mother was a daughter of one Gordon of Carrol. His sister Anne, whom Donald Sage remembered as a ‘dashing young woman’, became the wife of another – this being Joseph Gordon whom the Staffords and their senior employees regarded (as already stressed) with unremitting hostility.5

Joseph, like James Loch, was an occasional visitor to Crakaig. Exactly how Carrol’s ex-laird got on there with William Clunes, Joseph’s cousin as well as his brother-in-law, cannot be known. But it is reasonable to suspect that the two men were sometimes at odds. Joseph Gordon, after all, was an arch-opponent of ‘improvement’. William Clunes, in contrast, was among its beneficiaries. By the 1820s, when his rent payments to the marquis and marchioness approached the then enormous sum of £1,000 annually, Clunes, while still tenant of Crakaig, was also in control of much of the Strath of Kildonan, where he kept thousands of sheep on land from which a lot of people had been cleared.⁶

If there was friction between William Clunes and his wife’s brother, it is likely to have been aggravated by the beginnings of Clunes’s sheep-farming involvements having been bound up with the Staffords’ 1812 purchase of Joseph Gordon’s Carrol Estate, a necessary prelude (as indicated previously) to the establishment of Gabriel Reed’s Kilcalmkill sheep farm. Because that farm stretched from Strathbrora to the Strath of Kildonan, it included Glen Loth, a smaller valley halfway between the two straths. This meant that William Clunes lost access to Glen Loth grazings that had been available to his father and previous Crakaig tenants. His loss, however, was quickly made good by the Sutherland Estate’s then newly installed factor, William Young, who took the view that Clunes should get – ‘in return’ for his surrendered Glen Loth pastures – a sheep farm in the Strath of Kildonan. This farm was to be centred on Torrish, four or five miles up the strath, and its creation, Young calculated, would account for a sizeable proportion of the many evictions that would be required if, in the spring of 1813, William Clunes and Gabriel Reed were to be granted vacant possession of Torrish in the one case and Kilcalmkill in the other.7

Although it had been agreed in principle that Clunes should have Torrish in addition to Crakaig, William Young reported to the Marchioness of Stafford, he and the major ‘were not at one about [its] value’. With a view to helping fix the farm’s rent, Young continued, he had decided that, during the first week of January 1813, Clunes should ‘survey’ Torrish in conjunction with two men the factor described as ‘people of skill’. These were Ralph Reed and James Hall. Both were eventually to become Sutherland Estate tenants in their own right. In 1813, however, Ralph Reed, Gabriel Reed’s younger brother, had not yet got a farm of his own, while Hall, who had earlier left Roxburghshire for Caithness, would not move on to the Sutherland Estate until 1818 when (as will be seen) he took over a large part of Strathbrora.⁸

As arranged by William Young, Clunes met with Hall and Reed on the morning of Tuesday 5 January 1813 and, as he put it, ‘proceeded up the Strath of Kildonan’ in their company. Since, even on horseback, it would have taken the three men a little time to reach their destination and since, in early January, daylight does not last long in the Highlands, the major and his two associates, on getting to Torrish, were able to inspect only ‘some part’ of the area under review. It was agreed, therefore, that all three should meet again at Torrish the following morning, meantime spending the night in such accommodation as they could find in the vicinity. Leaving his companions to make their own arrangements, Clunes duly rode off to Alexander Sage’s manse. This was some four miles distant, the manse being hard by the township of Kildonan which gave the wider strath its name and which owed its own designation (rather like Kilcalmkill) to its supposed connection with one of the Highlands’ early medieval saints.⁹

‘Major William Clunes’, according to a Donald Sage pen-picture that accords with Henry Raeburn’s painting, ‘was a gigantic, handsome, soldierly-looking man of a truly noble countenance.’ The figure that pitched up at the Kildonan manse as dusk was gathering that winter’s afternoon in 1813, then, was a striking one. And just as (thanks to Raeburn and Sage) a good deal has been preserved of Clunes’s appearance, so it is possible to get a sense of the home where, with night coming on, he hoped to find a bed.¹⁰

That is because this home (though it no longer houses a minister) is still to be seen in Kildonan. Today one of the locality’s oldest residences, it was far from new even in Clunes’s time. But the manse (because all such buildings were intended to accommodate clergymen’s visiting colleagues as well as their often large families) was nevertheless substantial. Its eight rooms made it the largest house in this part of early nineteenth-century Sutherland and the only one to have a slated, rather than thatched, roof. As was everywhere standard, the manse also possessed a range of outbuildings more than sufficient to provide the major, prior to his making his way inside, with stabling for his horse.11

Alexander Sage would prove less than enthusiastic about the ‘improvements’ that were shortly to depopulate his parish – improvements including the sheep farm Clunes had come up the strath to look over. Sage would also grow to detest Clunes personally, describing him as a ‘vile’ man who, though married, had ‘debauched’ a series of young women. The first of these – with whom, or so Sage and his fellow clerics noted, the major eventually ‘acknowledged a criminal connection’ – was Janet Matheson who lived near Crakaig and who, as a result of what appears to have been a brief relationship with Clunes, ‘brought forth a child in fornication’. Nothing of this, however, became public knowledge until 1814; and when, just five days into the preceding year, the major turned up at Alexander Sage’s door, he appears to have been received warmly enough. Clunes and his family, after all, were well known to Sage and still better known to the minister’s wife, Jean, who had grown up not far from Crakaig. Indeed Jean Sage* and William Clunes, while not exactly related, were connected by an intricate kinship chain of a kind common among the Sutherland gentry class to which both belonged – Jean’s sister, Elizabeth, being an aunt-by-marriage of William’s brother-in-law, Joseph Gordon.¹²

But if, on 5 January 1813, William Clunes expected to enjoy a restful evening with long-standing acquaintances, he was to be disappointed. This is clear from evidence collected in the course of enquiries into the turbulent events that were to unfold, over the next 24 hours, both in the vicinity of Alexander Sage’s home and elsewhere in the Strath of Kildonan. That evidence includes a statement made by Robert MacKay, a Helmsdale man who happened to call at Kildonan manse just before Clunes’s arrival. ‘The major’, MacKay said, ‘had not been long seated when he was informed by Mrs Sage that some people were at the door’ and that those people ‘wanted to speak with him’.¹³

According to his own subsequent testimony, Clunes, on going out, found four men and a woman waiting for him. Those people asked the major what had brought him to Kildonan. More specifically, they asked who – meaning Ralph Reed and James Hall – he had been with that afternoon and what it was exactly he, Hall and Reed had been doing in and around Torrish. On Clunes supplying at least some of the information thus requested, his interrogators next wanted to know ‘whether he had taken a lease’ of land or ‘grounds’ (in the terminology of the time) in Torrish or its neighbourhood – ‘to which he [the major] answered that he had not yet taken [these] grounds in tack [or tenancy] but it was likely that he should do so’.14

This was not well received by the five-strong deputation clustered around the Kildonan manse’s door. Appealing, in vain as it proved, to the major’s feelings for his late father, a man warmly regarded locally, Clunes’s questioners told the aspiring sheep farmer that his conduct was not what they would have expected of ‘his father’s son’. Tempers, evidently, were rising. They rose further when one man said angrily ‘that if sheep were put upon that ground [meaning land earmarked for inclusion in the planned Torrish sheep farm] there should be blood . . . and that it would be as well for them [the Strath of Kildonan’s established occupants] to be killed as set adrift upon the world – to which the [only] woman [present] then added that there should [indeed] be blood and no little of it’.¹⁵

The origins of the troubles thus initiated – troubles that were to become acute the following day – can be traced to 1810 when William Young, to whom the Sutherland Estate was then unfamiliar territory, made several forays into the estate’s interior. One of those trips (as already noted) resulted in Young’s first encounter with Donald MacKay in Strathbrora. Another, made in August 1810, took Young into the Strath of Kildonan.

Today’s single-track road through the strath keeps to the left or north bank of the Helmsdale River, reckoned by anglers to be one of the best places in the world to fish for salmon. Young, whose horse would have taken an hour or two to cover the nine miles from the strath’s eastern end to Alexander Sage’s manse – where he stopped off briefly – followed much the same route. What that route’s surroundings looked like can be seen from a large-scale and colourful map commissioned by Britain’s military in 1794 when the Highlands were considered a potential target for French raids and incursions. As this map shows, William Young, on riding up a valley he (rightly) thought ‘beautiful’, would have seen, both on his own side of the River Helmsdale and on the river’s opposite bank, township after township. Each of those communities was surrounded, as shown on the 1794 map, by many acres of intensively cultivated land. The crops grown on this land, or so Alexander Sage commented at much the same time as Kildonan was mapped for the military, were sufficient to ensure that the strath’s riverside residents, as well as ‘supply[ing] themselves with provisions’, could export surplus foodstuffs to less favoured localities.16

Nor were the minister’s parishioners – all of them resident in the Strath of Kildonan or in smaller valleys opening on to it – short of livestock. ‘The number of horses in April 1791’, Sage wrote, ‘[was] computed at 812; cows, 2,479; sheep, 5,041; and goats, 570. For these . . . good prices have been got at the markets. Horses of the best kind draw from £4 to £6 sterling; cows from 50 s[hillings] to £4 [and ten shillings].’ Since Sage, himself a part-time farmer, appears to have enumerated only breeding cows, it is likely that the Strath of Kildonan, where few such animals are to be seen today, would have contained 4,000 or more cattle when William Young first passed through. And especially if allowance is made for cattle of that time being smaller than their modern counterparts, the prices they obtained – as given by Alexander Sage and converted into present-day cash equivalents – were better than those fetched in Scottish livestock markets at the start of the twenty-first century. Of course, as is true of every agriculturally dependent locality that has ever existed, the Strath of Kildonan experienced bad years as well as good. But the place, it is clear, was more than capable of sustaining a whole set of viable communities, which Alexander Sage’s son Donald was afterwards to write about in detail.¹⁷

‘The [Helmsdale] river . . . was . . . the finest feature in the landscape,’ Donald Sage recalled of the locality where he spent his boyhood. But he remembered with equal pleasure woodlands William Young would have encountered three or four miles into his August 1810 journey: woodlands of ‘black willow, oak, aspen, alder and wild gean [or cherry], the mountain ash or rowan, the black flowering-thorn and the birch tree’. In the vicinity of those woodlands, Young would have rode through the township of Kilfedder, ‘a lovely spot,’ Sage thought, ‘past which a rushing torrent breaks through the copse-wood’. Not far from Kilfedder was Torrish, which William Clunes, James Hall and Ralph Reed were to ‘survey’ in January 1813 and which, prior to its becoming part of the resulting sheep farm, was a densely peopled settlement where, Donald Sage commented, ‘the houses or cottages of the tenantry were built closely together’. Beyond Torrish, Sage went on, were places (and the spellings here are Sage’s) like Balbhealach, Dalhalmy and Dibail. This information derives from recollections set down in Donald Sage’s old age. But his memory’s accuracy is confirmed by the military map of 1794, which shows all the settlements Sage listed and several more besides. On the Helmsdale River’s southern bank, for example, the map’s compiler, whose name was George Brown, gave precise locations of (from east to west and with Brown’s spellings) Manyle, Gruidsarry, Elderable, Olbsdale, Gilable, Killearnen (‘a township of great extent’ according to Donald Sage), Tordarroch, Badfleugh and Leist.18

In the published version of Donald Sage’s memoirs – not made available until 1889 – 20 closely printed pages are given over to an account of these and other settlements as they were at the close of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth. This account concludes: ‘I have thus minutely delineated the local features of my native parish for two reasons. First, because with every one of those features is connected a crowd of associations of my early years . . . [Second], because [those same features] are now . . . almost wholly obliterated. The townships . . . which once teemed with happy life are . . . desolate and silent; and the only traces visible of the vanished, happy population are, here and there, a half-buried hearthstone or a moss-grown graveyard.’¹⁹

Such was the eventual – and still apparent – outcome of William Young’s Strath of Kildonan reconnaissance of 1810. At that point, according to Young, there were between 1,200 and 1,500 people living in the Helmsdale River valley and its offshoots.* All or most of them, the factor commented, would one day have to be removed. This followed from its having become ‘perfectly clear’ to him, Young told the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, that the strath was ‘adapted for the sheep farming system’, sheep farmers, Young stressed, having the capacity to deliver ‘much higher’ rents than could be looked for from people committed, as was the case in pre-clearance Kildonan, to mixed farming of the sort Young called ‘corn and cattle husbandry’.²⁰

William Young first arrived in Sutherland in May 1809. Then in his mid-forties, he owned property in both Aberdeenshire and Moray, counties where he launched a variety of business ventures. One of those was centred on the Moray port of Burghead, which Young aimed to expand and revitalise. With this in mind, he came north by sea, in the hope of getting Lord and Lady Stafford to invest in the establishment of a regular shipping service between Burghead and Sutherland. Because road access to Sutherland from the south was poor in 1809 and would remain so for some time, such a link made commercial sense. The Staffords duly took a stake in the project and soon a sizeable sailing craft, ‘often full of goods’ and carrying ‘many passengers’, was leaving every Friday for Burghead from Little Ferry, located south of Golspie and at the entrance to the narrow channel linking the saltwater inlet of Loch Fleet with the North Sea.21

With him to Sutherland from Moray, William Young brought some of his business associates. Among them was a 28-year-old man who, though trained as a lawyer, had been taking a closer and closer interest in farming. This was Patrick Sellar. Like his companions, he was familiar with the way that, from anywhere on Moray’s coastline, the Sutherland hills – assuming reasonable visibility – are a constant feature on the north-western horizon. Neither Sellar nor his companions, however, had previously ventured across the Moray Firth, the bight-like expanse of North Sea waters separating Caithness and Sutherland from Moray and points east. But if Sutherland in 1809 was new to Patrick Sellar, it was also the part of Scotland where he was to spend much of his life and, by so doing, make himself wealthy. Hence, perhaps, Sellar’s later tendency to dramatise the impact on him of his first encounter with the Moray Firth’s northern shore: ‘We came into Dunrobin Bay . . . a little after sunrise; and I shall never forget the effect produced on us by the beauty of the scenery – the mountains, rocks, woods and the castle reflected on the sea as from a mirror.’²²

Sellar and Young stayed on in Sutherland for several days, riding up and down the county’s coastal plain. What they saw surprised and intrigued them. Moray and Aberdeenshire at the start of the nineteenth century were places where older agricultural systems had been giving way for some time to farms of the sort still to be seen there today: farms equipped with substantial, stone-built farmhouses and the equally substantial barns and other outbuildings known in Scotland as steadings. In Sutherland in 1809, Young and Sellar found only one set of such steadings – at Clynelish on Brora’s northern outskirts. Everywhere else, farms looked much as they had done for centuries. Neatly walled and carefully drained fields on the southern pattern were nowhere to be seen; neither were the sown grasses and turnips on which Aberdeenshire and Moray farmers increasingly fed their cattle. ‘Morayshire [was then] by no means a well-improved county,’ Patrick Sellar later remarked of his 1809 inspection of the countryside between Helmsdale and Dornoch. ‘But at that time Sutherland seemed a century behind it.’²³

Paradoxically, however, Sellar and Young scented an enticing opportunity in what seemed to them Sutherland’s backwardness. This new found land, as Sutherland was from their standpoint, seemed to the two men to be one they could readily reshape to its – and their – advantage. In much the same gung-ho spirit as was evident among the settlers then transforming Britain’s North American, Australian and other colonies, the two Moray men began bombarding the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford with ideas as to how Sutherland’s ‘improvement’ – something the Staffords were already committed to – could be accelerated, driven through, made real. Up-to-date farms, well-planned villages, harbours, fishing fleets, towns, even factories were envisaged. Detailed proposals as to how all this could be accomplished were drawn up. The originators of those proposals, it was hinted, would themselves be prepared – for appropriate rewards – to make their services available. An impressed, indeed bowled over, marquis and marchioness responded positively. By the summer of 1810, when William Young first explored the Strath of Kildonan, it had accordingly been decided that the Sutherland Estate’s previous factor, Cosmo Falconer, was to be dismissed and that, with full effect from May 1811, Young and Patrick Sellar were to take charge of estate administration. One of their priorities, everyone agreed, would be to establish new sheep farms.

As far as the Staffords were concerned, the case for such farms was strong. When, during 1807 and 1808, the Sutherland Estate’s then management team had taken the experimental step of creating two tenancies of this new type, it had been shown that any given area of land was likely to be worth at least three times more to the estate if occupied by a sheep farmer instead of by the same area’s previous occupants.24

The largest of the 1807–08 farms spread across a big expanse of hill country – around 100,000 acres in extent – west of Strathbrora and south of Strathnaver. This farm was tenanted jointly by Adam Atkinson and Anthony Marshall. Like Gabriel Reed, they came from Northumberland and (the sheep-farming fraternity being nothing if not close-knit) their senior employees included Gabriel’s brother Ralph, one of the two ‘people of skill’ who, in January 1813, accompanied William Clunes to Torrish.²⁵

It was in Torrish’s general vicinity, as it happened, that the second of the 1807–08 farms had taken shape. Named Suisgill, after one of the three settlements it displaced, this farm, as William Young discovered in August 1810, occupied much of the area ‘betwixt Kildonan Manse and Kinbrace’ in the Strath of Kildonan’s upper reaches. However, its tenant, unlike Marshall, Atkinson and the Reeds, was no newcomer to Sutherland, Thomas Houston having occupied for some time the coastal farm of Lothbeg near William Clunes’s Crakaig.26

By retaining his Lothbeg tenancy in addition to his Suisgill one, Houston pioneered an arrangement that Clunes was also to adopt and which afterwards became widespread on the Sutherland Estate: that of sheep farmers, of whom Patrick Sellar was destined to be one of the most successful, usually looking to rent both inland landholdings (laid out in such as way as to include extensive hill grazings) and lower lying farms like Lothbeg. This was sometimes seen as territorial aggrandisement for its own sake. But while such motives may not have been absent, practical considerations loomed larger, notably the benefits to be got from being able to move younger and more vulnerable sheep out of the interior during winter months when those sheep might otherwise have fallen victim to blizzards of the sort that sometimes left higher parts of Sutherland under deep snow for weeks, even months, at a time.

While the Suisgill experience was a pointer to how the wider Strath of Kildonan might be reorganised in the way William Young suggested in 1810, it was well into 1812 before Young was clear as to the precise nature of the ‘many valuable improvements’ he aimed to bring about in the strath. At the core of the factor’s projected changes was the creation of two further sheep farms. These were Kilcalmkill and Torrish; and for all that it had taken Young longer than he would have liked to get to the point now reached, he clearly expected subsequent progress to be faster. At first, this expectation seemed justified. Tenants for the new farms, these being Gabriel Reed and William Clunes, were found readily enough. Nor, looking ahead, did William Young anticipate any difficulty in dealing with the many people who would have to be turned out of Kildonan in advance of Reed’s and Clunes’s flocks moving in.

Young’s blithe assumption that all would be plain sailing may have derived in part from there having been no substantial resistance to the establishment of Thomas Houston’s Suisgill farm. This time, however, many more townships were scheduled for clearance: from the south side of the strath in the Kilcalmkill case and from its northern flank in the case of Torrish. It is not surprising, therefore, that some at least of the Strath of Kildonan’s about-to-be-ejected residents should have begun to debate what they might do to safeguard their communities from destruction, with the result that, before the end of 1812, Patrick Sellar got ‘several dark hints’, as he put it, of a ‘conspiracy’ to thwart the planned evictions. This intelligence, however, was not shared with William Young who, having assured Lord and Lady Stafford that ‘improvement’ was firmly on track, left Sutherland on Sunday 3 January 1813 to attend to estate business in Edinburgh. Three days later, the Strath of Kildonan was in turmoil.27

Before breakfast on the morning of the Wednesday following William Young’s Sunday departure for Edinburgh, William Clunes stepped out of Alexander Sage’s Kildonan manse in order to see to his horse. He was promptly ‘surrounded’, he reported subsequently, by as many as 50 men, most of them ‘armed with sticks’. One of those men, described as ‘spokesman of the party’ by Clunes, ‘entered into conversation’ with him. What this man had to say was much the same as had been said by the people the major had encountered the previous evening. The ‘threats’ then made to Clunes – threats that blood would be shed if he pressed ahead with his projected sheep farm – were repeated. It was also made clear ‘that no inspection of the [disputed] grounds [not just around Torrish but more widely] should be allowed . . . that day’.²⁸

Here and there in the Strath of Kildonan that same January morning, life was going on more or less as normal. In the township of Kildonan, not far from the spot where William Clunes was mobbed, two of the township’s tenants, John Sutherland and Donald Gunn, both of them among the men who had lobbied Clunes the day before, were busy, as Gunn put it, ‘preparing a barn for a wedding’. This wedding took place the next day. The bride was John Sutherland’s daughter Jean; the groom a young man by the name of Angus MacKay. When, following their marriage, people gathered in what is likely to have been Jean’s father’s barn to sing, dance, drink and eat, as was customary in such settings on such occasions, they would be celebrating (as things turned out) the last marriage to take place in the Strath of Kildonan before the strath’s families – Angus and Jean (as will be seen) among them – began to be scattered in the way Donald Gunn and his companions feared when telling William Clunes they might as well ‘be killed as set adrift upon the world’.²⁹

This conviction that nothing could be worse than expulsion from one’s home locality helps explain why – though they must have known the odds were very much against their long-term success – so many Strath of Kildonan people took the stand they did on Wednesday 6 January 1813. Also important, however, was endorsement of their actions by locally influential individuals.

Subsequently it would be claimed that the four men (among them Donald Gunn) and the woman (her name was Ann Polson) who sought out William Clunes on the evening of Tuesday 5 January had been put up to this by George MacLeod who, like Gordon Ross in Strathbrora, was a schoolmaster (though his school, unlike Ross’s, was one of those run by the Church of Scotland and not by the SSPCK). MacLeod may or may not have done as alleged. But what is certain is that the militant stance adopted by another of the Strath of Kildonan’s leading figures, George MacKay, helped persuade his neighbours to participate in events that amounted, or so the authorities claimed, to a full-blown riot.30

MacKay, father of Jean Sutherland’s newly acquired husband, was Kildonan’s catechist, meaning that, in close collaboration with the parish minister, Alexander Sage, he had the job of subjecting members of the Kildonan congregation to close and regular questioning of a sort meant to ensure they were acquainted with the doctrines and teaching of the Church of Scotland. Recalled by the minister’s son Donald as an ‘eloquent’ man ‘of great natural ability’, the catechist was described by John Gordon, in whose company MacKay spent part of the night of 5–6 January 1813, as ‘the wisest person’ he knew.³¹

John Gordon was miller in Killernan. George MacKay lived in Liribol. Both townships were within a mile or two of the Kildonan manse – Liribol on the north side of the strath and Killernan on the Helmsdale River’s other bank. Although he would have had to ford the river en route, it would have taken MacKay just a few minutes to get from his home to John Gordon’s mill – one of the places where, in the run-up to their Wednesday morning confrontation with William Clunes, a number of people from different Strath of Kildonan townships met to work out what they might do to forestall their imminent ejection from their homes.

There was strong – eventually more or less unanimous – feeling to the effect that, as one participant in the Killernan debate was reported to have said, ‘the men of the Strath of Kildonan ought to rise’ and forcibly prevent William Clunes and his associates from completing the survey they had begun on Tuesday 5 January. There was equal feeling that any such action should involve ‘both sides of the strath’. While only those townships north of the Helmsdale River were threatened by Clunes’s plans, people living on the strath’s southern flank, it was agreed, were every bit as much at risk because just as many – indeed more – townships in that quarter would cease to exist if Gabriel Reed’s Kilcalmkill farm was permitted to take shape.³²

Most of the men – from Eldrable, Torrish, Killernan, Liribol, Dalhalmy and other settlements – who argued those matters back and forth in John Gordon’s mill while Tuesday turned into Wednesday were among the older and more responsible members of their communities. They were well aware of the risks inherent in what they were proposing. They knew too that, if they stopped William Clunes, Ralph Reed and James Hall going about their business, they would not only be defying their landlord, the Marquis of Stafford, they would also be breaking the law. Perhaps with a view to reassuring themselves that the course they were set on – though illegal – could be considered morally justifiable, they turned to George MacKay, their catechist, for advice. MacKay, it appears, endorsed the proposition that Strath of Kildonan people were entitled to oppose Hall, Reed and Clunes by violent means. The catechist added, however, that he ‘would go himself to speak with Major Clunes’ whom, he thought, might be dissuaded ‘from oppressing poor people’.33

The person who acted as ‘spokesman’ when William Clunes found himself surrounded outside Alexander Sage’s manse at first light on Wednesday 6 January, then, was George MacKay, this ‘most attractive Christian character’, as Donald Sage would one day describe him. But if MacKay hoped that words alone would induce Clunes and his associates to abandon their survey of the area the major intended to rent, the catechist was denied the opportunity to put this to the test. By the time George MacKay met with William Clunes, events in the Strath of Kildonan had acquired their own unstoppable momentum.³⁴

On the evening of Tuesday 5 January 1813, when William Clunes went in search of lodgings at the Kildonan manse, his companions, Ralph Reed and James Hall, rode a couple of miles further up the strath to a house occupied by John Turnbull and his family. Turnbull was one of the shepherds hired by Thomas Houston to look after the sheep stock Houston had installed on his Suisgill farm, and Turnbull’s home,* built for him by his employer, occupied a spot immediately to the west of the Suisgill Burn’s confluence with the River Helmsdale.³⁵

Hall and Reed were not John Turnbull’s only guests that Tuesday. He had been entertaining a fellow shepherd, John Cleugh, since the preceding Sunday. As Tuesday evening wore on, moreover, the Turnbulls, Reed, Hall and Cleugh were joined by two more shepherds. One was John Cleugh’s 18-year-old son, George. The other was James Armstrong, whose place of work was on the Caithness estate belonging to Sir John Sinclair, one of the north of Scotland’s most prominent landlords and a man who, like the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, very much backed ‘improvement’ in general and the expansion of sheep farming in particular.36

That so many shepherds and sheep farm managers had assembled in the Strath of Kildonan at this point may have owed something to less than a week having passed since New Year’s Day, the only holiday granted to working people in early nineteenth-century Scotland. It is more probable, however, that the men who met in John Turnbull’s Suisgill home were there because they scented opportunities in the far-reaching changes getting under way on the Sutherland Estate. Not many years later, after all, no fewer than three of them would be among the estate’s leading sheep farmers. That was because John Cleugh, like Hall and Reed, was to make the transition from shepherding or farm management to tenancy, this transition leading, in Cleugh’s case, to his leasing (as will be seen) a sheep farm on the upper reaches of the Blackwater not far from Ascoilemore.³⁷

Turnbull, the two Cleughs, Armstrong, Reed and Hall had much in common. All of them owed their expertise in sheep management to their having come originally from the England–Scotland border country where large-scale sheep farming had been established during the Middle Ages. All of them were recent arrivals in the north. None of them understood Gaelic, with the exception of George Cleugh who, perhaps because of his being younger than the rest, had picked up a smattering of the language. But linguistic divides can be bridged. What could not be surmounted was the fact that John Turnbull and his friends, rather like settlers on some North American frontier, were at the cutting edge of an increasingly commercialised civilisation’s advance into a region where older forms of social organisation remained the norm. Hence the enduring significance of the clash that came to a head in the vicinity of John Turnbull’s Suisgill home on Wednesday 6 January 1813. That clash, to be sure, was a lot less violent than analogous conflicts between homesteaders and Native Americans. But the issue at stake in this Sutherland collision was the same as that posed by North America’s frontier fighting: which of two incompatible ways of life was to prevail?

The first indication of trouble looming at Suisgill came early on Wednesday morning when a lad called Donald Gunn made his way into John Turnbull’s kitchen. Gunn, the son of a Kildonan tenant, also Donald Gunn, was almost certainly acting on his father’s instructions. For his part, the father – probably the Donald Gunn then busying himself with wedding preparations and, if so, one of William Clunes’s Tuesday evening interrogators – is likely to have had a role in planning what now transpired.

That there had been such planning is clear from subsequent assertions to the effect that various individuals – women as well as men – had gone from house to house in the Strath of Kildonan during the hours of darkness; rousing those homes’ occupants; telling folk that ‘shepherds were come’ to the strath; insisting that the ‘shepherds’ in question had to be prevented ‘from inspecting the grounds’ they were intent on looking over. Predictably, some of the men turned out of their beds in this fashion were less willing than others to engage in lawlessness. They were at once informed, or so it was said later, that if they refused to rally round their friends and neighbours, they ‘would be dealt with worse’ than Major Clunes and his associates.38

Donald Gunn junior is unlikely to have needed any such urging. Playing his part to perfection, he told the Turnbulls that he was ‘enquiring for a strayed horse’ and asked if they had seen it. This seemed innocent enough. In the course of the ensuing conversation, however, Gunn took care to elicit the information that Ralph Reed and James Hall were not yet up and about, but that they soon would be and that it was their intention then to ride back down the strath towards Torrish and their planned rendezvous with the major.³⁹

On taking his leave of the Turnbulls, Donald Gunn, according to George Cleugh, recrossed the Suisgill Burn, which he had not long before forded in order to get to the Turnbull home. But instead of returning to Kildonan or searching for his family’s ostensibly missing horse, Gunn and ‘a parcel of boys’ who joined him beside the stream set about ‘amusing’ themselves, as Cleugh put it, ‘at the game of shinney’ or shinty* – a sport that had been played by Highlanders, Strath of Kildonan folk included, for centuries.⁴⁰

If, in retrospect, Donald Gunn’s conduct was thought suspicious, what happened next was truly alarming. Ralph Reed, having had a bite to eat by way of breakfast, as he said afterwards, had gone ‘to put on his greatcoat’ preparatory to mounting his horse and, in James Hall’s company, riding back towards Kildonan, Torrish and – as Reed supposed – the waiting Clunes. But at this juncture, Ralph Reed went on, ‘a woman came running into the house’ to say that ‘a number of men’ had ‘concealed’ themselves nearby ‘with the view of attacking’ himself and Hall.⁴¹

This woman was Jean Murray, whose husband Donald operated a dramshop – then the Strath of Kildonan’s nearest equivalent to a pub – within a short distance of John Turnbull’s house but on the Suisgill Burn’s opposite bank. Jean Murray had evidently become friendly with Mrs Turnbull (whose first name has not been preserved) but, while anxious to ensure the safety both of her friend and everyone else in the Turnbull home that morning, she was equally (and understandably) anxious to conceal her own part in proceedings. Jean Murray, Ralph Reed recalled, ‘requested Turnbull’s wife not to mention’ to anyone what she, Jean, had done, ‘as she [having betrayed the still hidden conspirators] might be murdered for it’.42

It was now decided that Hall and Reed should at once quit the Suisgill shepherd’s house. Hurriedly mounting their horses – which John Turnbull was just then feeding at his door – they accordingly left at speed. Instead of turning down the strath towards Kildonan and Torrish, however, they turned in the opposite direction, Turnbull shouting after them, ‘For God’s sake, gentlemen, make off!’⁴³

At this, Donald Gunn was seen to abandon his game of shinty and run up a nearby hillside in order, it was surmised, to give ‘the watchword to . . . people . . . lying concealed there’. In response, as many as 50 or 60 men emerged from hiding. Had Ralph Reed and James Hall made for Kildonan as planned, this substantial force could readily have ‘waylaid’ or ambushed them. As it was, all thought of ambush now abandoned, the previously hidden men, yelling encouragement to each other in Gaelic, hurtled downhill and through the Suisgill Burn towards the Turnbull home – some of them pausing there and others, presumably the younger and fitter individuals among them, racing past in furious pursuit of the two riders.⁴⁴

Like the equally intimidating group William Clunes found waiting for him that same morning at Alexander Sage’s manse, this Suisgill contingent carried ‘sticks’ or cudgels. And just as their ancestors had done when launching one of the charges characteristic of clan warfare, many of them threw aside their plaids – heavy, blanket-like garments in which they would have wrapped themselves when hiding out that winter’s morning. This left these men exposed to the weather. But it also helped them, just as it had helped generations of sword-wielding clansmen, to run as fast as possible.⁴⁵

Although it may seem improbable that their pursuers, being on foot, had any chance of catching up with Hall and Reed, the latter in particular, because his horse was not as sound as it might have been, felt himself seriously at risk of being seized, beaten up and otherwise ‘abused’. Nor were his fears without foundation; the fastest of the youths chasing Reed and his companion did not give up until the two mounted men, having passed through Kinbrace at the head of the Strath of Kildonan, reached Achentoul, an isolated settlement on the high plateau beyond the strath’s upper end. Here Reed and Hall were eight miles or more from their starting point. They were also approaching the Sutherland Estate’s boundary. Beyond that boundary was Strath Halladale, a north–south valley which gave a mightily relieved James Hall and Ralph Reed easy, and mostly downhill, access to the comparative safety of Caithness.46

Back at John Turnbull’s house, meanwhile, matters were threatening to get out of hand. The men who had halted there while their comrades gave chase to Reed and Hall had soon been joined by others, the new arrivals having hurried on to Suisgill from Kildonan where they had earlier menaced William Clunes. This meant that Turnbull, his wife, their children, James Armstrong and John and George Cleugh were now hemmed in by perhaps 100 people whose blood was up and whose hostility to shepherds and to sheep farming could scarcely have been clearer. Although much of what individuals among the crowd had to say was said in Gaelic and was therefore incomprehensible to the Turnbulls and their guests, the crowd’s threatening demeanour became ever more apparent. Among the mob, as it would afterwards be described, were some who counselled caution. But others advocated stern measures. The younger Cleugh, the one man among the encircled shepherds who could follow Gaelic, overheard an especially heated discussion as to what should be done with his father, who had been in Sutherland for some years by this point. Because John Cleugh ‘was the first shepherd who came into the country [meaning the Strath of Kildonan area]’, it was said, ‘his tongue should be cut out of his head or he should be burned alive’.⁴⁷

Those and other equally lurid threats may not have been meant seriously. But there was no mistaking the aggressive intent of those – admittedly few – members of the Suisgill crowd who set about the Cleughs’ collie dogs with their sticks. Although they were urged by others to desist, there was a cruel logic to those men’s actions. To maim or kill a shepherd’s sheepdogs was to deprive him of the tools of his trade, just as to scare shepherds out of Sutherland, which is what many Strath of Kildonan people were trying to do that January morning, would be to leave the county’s established and intending sheep farmers, or so those same people hoped, without the means of carrying on farming.⁴⁸

Eventually, with tempers cooling somewhat, one of the crowd’s leading moderates, a Liribol tenant by the name of Alexander Fraser, began to impose a kind of order on proceedings. An immediate beneficiary of this development was James Armstrong who, ‘being apprehensive of danger’, had hidden himself inside John Turnbull’s house. Told in English that his life was not at risk and that he would be permitted to go on his way as long as he did not challenge or contradict anything said to him, Armstrong stepped cautiously into the open. There the shepherd was ordered, once more in English, to promise that he would never again show his face in the Strath of Kildonan. He did as he was told. Then, as instructed, James Armstrong crossed the Suisgill Burn and, doubtless looking repeatedly over his shoulder, began walking quickly in the direction of Kildonan, Torrish, Helmsdale and – though getting there would have taken Armstrong two or three days – his Caithness home.49

At Alexander Fraser’s insistence, the Turnbulls and Cleughs were also allowed to go in search of places of safety, Fraser directing Mrs Turnbull and her children, in the first instance, to his own house where, he assured the Suisgill shepherd’s wife, she would be well looked after. After this, the men surrounding the Turnbull home started to disperse. Their mission, after all, had been accomplished. That is evident from Major William Clunes’s reaction to what he learned from James Armstrong whom the major met as the shepherd – ‘much frightened and in a state of trepidation’ – tramped past Alexander Sage’s manse. On hearing from Armstrong something of what had taken place at Suisgill and on discovering, in consequence, that he would be seeing no more of James Hall and Ralph Reed for some time, the major decided that it was ‘in vain for him to proceed further in the business’ that had brought him to the Strath of Kildonan the day before. Saddling his horse, he rode home to Crakaig.⁵⁰

* It is likely that the major’s surname was pronounced as two syllables, Clu-nes.

* Jean was Alexander’s second wife (his first having died) and thus Donald Sage’s stepmother.

* According to that year’s census, there were 1,574 people in the parish of Kildonan in 1811.

* This shepherd’s cottage was replaced by another such cottage in the 1870s. That building, in turn, has been much renovated and extended in modern times. It is today available for rent by holidaymakers.

* The piece of level ground where this happened has long since been surrounded by a stone wall. But it would still make a reasonable shinty pitch.