15

‘Indelible characters on the surface of the soil’

The clearances in retrospect

Winnipeg in the 1880s was a boomtown. Its breakneck expansion was owed to a politician who as a small boy had been brought to British North America by an emigrant father from Sutherland. This politician was John A. Macdonald. A lawyer by profession and a fixer without rival, Macdonald was a driving force in the negotiations that led in 1867 to the former colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario becoming the self-governing Dominion of Canada. As the new country’s prime minister for much of its first quarter-century, Macdonald was determined to turn Canada – extending, to begin with, no further west than the Great Lakes – into a transcontinental union. His first move, made in 1869, was to acquire the territories previously under the jurisdiction of the Hudson’s Bay Company; his second, accomplished in 1870, was to turn part of those territories into an additional Canadian province, Manitoba; his third, achieved in 1871, was to persuade residents of faraway British Columbia, on North America’s Pacific coast, to join the nation taking shape thousands of miles to the east. To hold the resulting confederation together, Macdonald was clear, it would be necessary to construct a railway around the northern shores of the Great Lakes and on, by way of the prairies and the Rocky Mountains, to a Pacific terminal at Vancouver. Construction of this railway began in 1881. That same year, a dispute about the railway’s route was settled in favour of its passing through Winnipeg, a little town in the vicinity of the Assiniboine’s junction with Red River, where, nearly three-quarters of a century before, the Earl of Selkirk had installed an emigrant population from the Strath of Kildonan.

Winnipeg in 1871 had perhaps 200 residents. Fifteen years later, it was a thriving city of 20,000, a busy transit point for the thousands of European immigrants who, courtesy of the now completed Canadian Pacific Railway, were transforming Manitoba and the area to its west into one of the world’s premier grain-producing regions. Most Manitobans by this point were recent arrivals with little or no awareness of their being, in effect, the fulfilment of Selkirk’s belief that the prairies could be settled and farmed. But there was in mid-1880s Winnipeg one man, Charles Napier Bell, secretary to the Winnipeg Board of Trade, who made it his business to commemorate the Selkirk era and to seek out memories of it. ‘During this summer’, Bell commented in an 1887 publication, ‘I have personally interviewed the last survivors of the original [Red River] colony who were old enough on the date of their arrival to remember the events that transpired in connection with the trouble between Lord Selkirk and the Northwest Fur Company. Herewith I give the substance of the information obtained from these old people . . . and, wherever possible, I use their own words.’1

Bell’s key interviewee, the Board of Trade man wrote, was ‘a wonderfully clear-headed and physically active old gentleman’ whose recollections filled between four and five densely printed pages. ‘My name is Donald Murray,’ this man told Bell. ‘I was born in Kildonan, Sutherlandshire, in or about the year 1801. I came to this place in 1815 . . . and I have lived here ever since.’ Murray went on to speak in detail about Red River’s past and, on checking his informant’s recollections against such documentation as he could find, Bell judged the 85-year-old’s memory ‘singularly perfect’. The same is true of Donald Murray’s account of his early life. He had indeed been born in 1801 – in October 1801 to be precise – at Suisgill. This was one of the localities incorporated into the Strath of Kildonan’s first sheep farm. That development is likely to have led to the Murray family being moved, when Donald was five or six, to another part of the strath. It may also have resulted in Donald’s father, Alexander Murray, being more than usually apprehensive about the likely consequences of the additional sheep farms – Kilcalmkill and Torrish – that began to impact on the Kildonan area in the early part of 1813. Alexander, at all events, ensured that Donald’s two older brothers, John and Alexander junior, were among the people who left that year for Red River. The two lads’ remit, their younger brother told Charles Bell, was to prepare the way for the rest of the family: Alexander senior, his wife Elizabeth, Donald, a further brother and two sisters, who, in 1815, left Kildonan to join them.²

‘We had a fine voyage out’, Donald Murray said in 1887, ‘and no sickness among the people. We left Thurso, as nearly as I can recollect, early in June . . . We arrived at the [Red River] Settlement, I suppose, about the end of October. It was a very cold, snowy fall and we had a hard and stormy journey up from York [Factory].’3

At York Factory, Donald Murray recalled, his parents were greeted by the distressing news that their elder sons, as Donald put it in 1887, ‘had been sent down to [Upper] Canada by the North West Company’. During their time at Red River, however, the Murray brothers had built two houses. It was in one of these that Donald, his siblings, his mother and father stayed until – in the wake of the settler–Métis clash of June 1816 – they and others fled north to the HBC post at Jack River. There, Donald Murray told Charles Bell, they remained until the summer of 1817 when word came that Lord Selkirk – ‘a tall, slender man’ in Murray’s (entirely accurate) recollection – had himself arrived at Red River at the head of about 100 armed men.⁴

This force had been recruited by Selkirk – who came personally to North America in the fall of 1815 – from among soldiers demobilised at the close of the war that ended with the Battle of New Orleans. With those men’s help, Selkirk had at last been able to impose his will on the NWC, whose principal base at Fort William, on the western shore of Lake Superior, the earl seized and occupied. His taking of the law into his own hands in this fashion would embroil Selkirk in complex and stressful legal proceedings that contributed to his early death in 1820. But at Red River in 1817 the earl was nevertheless able to arrange matters to his satisfaction. ‘I remember’, Donald Murray said of what ensued ‘that Lord Selkirk held a great meeting with the colonists . . . At this meeting new arrangements were made with all the settlers as to their lands. Before leaving Scotland the agreement was that we should pay five shillings an acre for our lands, but at this meeting Lord Selkirk gave them to us free of charge.’⁵

Donald Murray would live to see those same acres valued – by the real estate dealers who flooded into 1880s Winnipeg – at hundreds of times the price Selkirk had proposed to charge for them. In the interim, to be sure, the new Kildonan – which Murray served first as a river freighting specialist and afterwards as a magistrate – experienced plenty of setbacks. Crops failed regularly to begin with. The Red River flooded. Winters were skin-searingly cold. Donald Murray, however, never had any regrets about his parents’ decision to take him out of Sutherland; and in this he was typical of his community. ‘The Scotch’, HBC governor George Simpson reported in the course of one of his traverses of the Bay Company’s empire, ‘consider Red River as much their home as the land of their nativity formerly was. They never will think of leaving the colony.’⁶

That was in 1824, by which point a now peaceful Red River was reaping the benefit of hostilities between the HBC and the Nor’Westers having ended in 1821 when, at the British government’s insistence, the two companies amalgamated. Thirty or so years later, Lord Selkirk’s colonists from Kildonan were still more securely attached to the farms Selkirk had made over to them. ‘These people’, one observer commented in the 1850s, ‘surpass in comfort those of the same class in most other countries. Rich in food and clothing, all of them have likewise saved more or less money. Abundance on every hand testifies to their industry and economy . . . The evidence of domestic happiness everywhere meets the eye. No want of blankets here on the beds; the children well clothed, and the houses warm and comfortable; the barns teeming with grain, the stables with cattle.’ Nothing like that ever would, or could, be written or said about post-clearance Sutherland’s crofting townships.7

Angus MacKay was Donald Murray’s exact contemporary. When Donald was being raised at Suisgill, Angus was growing up in Strathnaver. And just as Murray’s experiences were put in print by Charles Bell in 1887, so Angus’s life story – a little of it at least – was preserved when, in July 1883 at Bettyhill, he was questioned by Lord Napier and other members of Prime Minister Gladstone’s commission of inquiry into crofting conditions. In response to this questioning, Angus MacKay (as recounted earlier) told how he had come close to drowning in the River Naver on the morning in June 1814 when Patrick Sellar’s men unroofed his boyhood home. MacKay spoke too of what had happened subsequently to his parents and himself.

Following their 1814 expulsion from Sellar’s Rhiloisk farm, Angus said, the MacKay family was sent to Skail. This was on the River Naver’s western bank and a little further down the strath. There the MacKays built a new home. It was one they were permitted to occupy for just five years, for in 1819, when Sellar took over the west side of the Naver, the MacKays were again evicted. On this occasion, Angus told Lord Napier and his colleagues, they were allocated a newly demarcated croft on Strathy Point. ‘It is just a wild, nasty place,’ Angus MacKay said of that rocky, exposed and treeless headland. ‘Never a man should be put there at all.’⁸

‘Strathy Point is two miles in length on one side’, MacKay elaborated, ‘and three upon the other. The westerly wind blows upon it; the north-west wind blows upon it; the north wind blows upon it; the north-east wind blows upon it.’ Here – where Strathnaver’s woods, long-established rigs and plentiful hill grazings at once took on the aura of a paradise now lost – the MacKays were obliged to construct yet another house and to make what shift they could on land so poor it had never before been occupied.9

On crofts like those at Strathy Point – and there were hundreds of such crofts on the ‘improved’ Sutherland Estate – only one crop could be grown in quantity. That crop was potatoes; and when, in the 1840s, potatoes repeatedly fell victim to a devastating blight, food shortages in Sutherland became acute. Before the clearances, James Loch had forecast that crises of this kind would cease as soon as Sutherland’s supposedly scarcity-afflicted straths were depopulated. Instead hunger, even starvation, threatened on all sides, disaster being averted only by famine relief measures far in excess of any required prior to ‘improvement’.¹⁰

In such circumstances, there could be no crofting equivalents of the fine homes and well-stocked barns common by the mid-nineteenth century in the several localities – in Nova Scotia and Ontario as well as Manitoba – inhabited by North America’s numerous immigrants from Sutherland. In post-clearance crofting settlements, prosperity of that sort was nowhere to be found. Angus MacKay, as the 1883 commission heard, had been obliged to trek regularly into Caithness where, until disabled by a limb-crushing accident, he earned a precarious livelihood in that county’s flagstone quarries. Nor were the commission’s other Sutherland interviewees any more positive than MacKay about their situation. The only way for someone of Sutherland crofting background to make good, it seemed, was to move elsewhere as soon as possible.

Napier and his team heard from two such individuals. John MacKay had been born in Rogart in 1822, Angus Sutherland near Helmsdale in 1848. MacKay had gone south in the 1840s. There he became involved in railway construction, trained as a civil engineer and, by the 1880s, was managing his own company. Sutherland, for his part, became a pupil-teacher (an older student who helped younger counterparts acquire basic skills) in Helmsdale, went on to take a teacher training course in Edinburgh and, when he appeared before the inquiry commission in 1883, was teaching maths in Glasgow Academy.

Such instances of individual success, it has been suggested, are evidence of ‘improvement’ having contributed, in the end, to upward mobility of a type that might not otherwise have occurred. That view was not shared by Angus Sutherland or John MacKay. Neither attributed any aspect of their personal advancement to the post-clearance social order from which they had escaped. Both in fact were committed to its destruction. A good deal of MacKay’s substantial wealth was invested – by way, for example, of subsidising radical newspapers – in the cause of land reform. Sutherland, by the 1880s, was one of that cause’s most eloquent and most effective spokesmen. In this capacity, he collaborated closely with the Irish Land League, which, in 1881, had won security of tenure for its thousands of smallholder members. Both in the Highlands and elsewhere, in speech after speech, article after article, Angus Sutherland insisted that, in order to forestall the possibility of renewed clearances, crofters were entitled to similar safeguards. They were also entitled, he contended, to have restored to them the land from which they, their parents or grandparents had been evicted.11

Sutherland’s impassioned advocacy of a new deal for crofting communities led to his becoming a key figure in the organisation that, during the 1880s, was to obtain Irish-style security for crofters across the north of Scotland. Known initially as the Highland Land Law Reform Association and later as the Highland Land League, this organisation set out – much as Thomas Dudgeon had tried to do in 1819 – to mobilise crofters with a view to propelling their concerns on to the national stage. In this the Land League was helped by 1884 franchise reforms that gave crofters (male crofters anyway) voting rights and, by so doing, made it feasible for the league to run parliamentary candidates in Highland constituencies. One such candidate was Angus Sutherland, who in 1886 became his native county’s MP. Nothing could have been more illustrative of the crofting population’s growing assertiveness than the fact that a man of Angus Sutherland’s background now occupied the position filled for so long by George MacPherson Grant and other Stafford nominees. Hence the stress laid in an admiring press profile on Angus’s ancestry and, in particular, on the new MP’s paternal grandfather having been ‘burnt out of the Strath of Kildonan’ prior to his being ‘compelled as best he could to build up a new home for himself on a barren hillside in the vicinity of . . . Helmsdale.’¹²

This same piece of family history was mentioned in the course of Angus Sutherland’s evidence to the 1883 commission. In 1813, Angus said, his grandfather had not long been married, and had chosen to stay on in Kildonan when Angus’s great-grandparents and the rest of their family joined what Angus called ‘Lord Selkirk’s expedition to Red River’. Those comments, together with what is known about the composition of the Selkirk ‘expedition’, make it possible that Sutherland’s future MP was descended from John Sutherland* who helped direct Kildonan’s anti-clearance uprising in January 1813 and who, later that year, died of typhus at Churchill. If so, Angus inherited his great-grandfather’s hostility to ‘improvement’. The ‘poverty’ and ‘present grievances’ of crofters in the coastal townships around Helmsdale, Angus stated in 1883, ‘had their origin’ in the period when ‘homes were being burned in Kildonan Strath by those who [then] had the management of the Sutherland Estate’.¹³

Lord Napier was to hear a great deal of similar testimony – his Bettyhill hearings, for instance, being enlivened by a declaration to the effect that the area’s crofting difficulties were traceable to hundreds of families having ‘been cruelly burnt like wasps’ out of Sutherland’s straths prior to their being ‘forced down to the barren rocks of the seashore’. Privately (as will be seen) Napier had no doubt as to such burnings having taken place. But knowing that their extent (and even their occurrence) would be challenged by beneficiaries of the land-use pattern resulting from mass eviction, Napier took care to stress in his 1884 report that evidence as to the prevalence and impact of clearance was not confined to what had been said to him and his fellow commissioners. While in the Highlands, Napier wrote, he had heard a great deal about ‘oppression and suffering’ allegedly suffered at the hands of evicting landlords or their agents. ‘Many [such] . . . allegations’, Napier observed, ‘would not bear a searching analysis. Under such a scrutiny they would be found erroneous as to time, to place, to persons, to extent . . . It does not follow, however, that because these narratives are incorrect in detail, they are incorrect in colour or in kind. The history of the economical transformation which a great portion of the Highlands and Islands has during the past century undergone does not repose on loose and legendary tales that pass from mouth to mouth; it rests on the solid basis of contemporary records, and if these were found wanting, it is written in indelible characters on the surface of the soil.’¹⁴

It was in the hope that Lord Napier would take the chance to see something of these ‘indelible characters’ that Angus MacKay urged him to inspect the sites of Strathnaver townships like the one Angus had run from on the day of its destruction. ‘I am very glad to know that your lordship is to go up the strath,’ another of the commission’s Bettyhill interviewees, Ewan Robertson, commented on its emerging that Napier was to do as MacKay had advised. Robertson, who had himself explored Strathnaver localities cleared between 1814 and 1819, was right to be gratified. Even today, two centuries after bliadhna na losgaidh, it is easy in Strathnaver to find traces of the valley’s once plentiful settlements. Well over a century ago, when Lord Napier inspected what an accompanying Glasgow Herald reporter called ‘a valley . . . now entirely devoted to sheep farming’, those traces must have been a lot more obvious. It is by no means improbable, then, that the hours Napier spent in Strathnaver on Wednesday 25 July 1883 helped frame his contention that the clearance record can be read by anyone who looks around Highland landscapes.15

What also became apparent to Lord Napier in Strathnaver was the stark contrast between the quantity and quality of the land occupied by its sheep farmers – the most prominent such farmer in 1883 being one of Patrick Sellar’s sons – and the two, three or four acres on which crofters were expected to get by. The ‘principal matter of [crofting] dissatisfaction’, Napier reported to Gladstone’s government, was ‘the restriction in the area of [croft] holdings’. This was nowhere more apparent than in Farr, the parish including Strathnaver. Just one of Farr’s sheep farmers – Sellar’s son and namesake Patrick – occupied land worth two and a half times as much as all the land available to Farr’s 293 crofting families. Hence Napier’s verdict that Farr exemplified ‘the extremes of subdivision and consolidation’ resulting from clearance: ‘There is a striking absence of intermediate positions; the small farmer and substantial crofter disappear entirely; there is not one single holding which can afford a competent occupation and support to a small tenant [or crofter] labouring his land and living by it; there is a complete extinction of those graduated stations which offer an encouragement to the development of individual intelligence and industry.’¹⁶

None of late nineteenth-century Farr’s crofters, in other words, could aspire to be a full-time agriculturalist of the sort to be found throughout Sutherland’s pre-clearance straths. Nor, as predicted by early nineteenth-century opponents of clearance, had it been possible for Farr crofters to capitalise on the marine resources James Loch, Patrick Sellar and the Staffords had insisted would be open to them. Sutherland’s north coast, Alexander Sutherland pointed out in his Star articles of 1813, lacked harbours and, in their absence, there could be no north coast fishery. Seventy years later, the same point was made over and over again to Lord Napier. The unavoidable consequence, Napier remarked, was that ‘the intended fisherman . . . remained an indigent crofter’, his plight made all the more unenviable by the fact that crofts, mostly consisting of land that was desperately poor to start with, had been left ‘exhausted’, as Napier put it, by decade after decade of constant cropping.17

In the run-up to the ejection of thousands of Sutherland Estate residents from their homes, Lord Stafford had barred his wife from the Highlands. But in September 1820, the marquis judged it safe for her to venture north again. ‘Many, many thanks for letting me come here,’ the marchioness wrote to her husband from Dunrobin. He might think her excursions to her ancestral territories nothing other than a giving in to ‘childish fancy’, Lady Stafford went on. But it brought her ‘immense satisfaction’, especially since, on this occasion, ‘everything [in Sutherland] appear[ed] to be in the most perfect style’. At Dunrobin the castle was ‘in a state of neatness and cleanness . . . never [seen] . . . before’; Francis Suther had got the adjacent home farm ‘into equal order’; the castle’s flowerbeds were filled ‘with large fat roses’; its kitchen gardens with strawberries, apples and greengages ‘of a richer flavour than [those available] in London’. Further afield, everything hoped for from ‘improvement’ was in place. The straths were ‘entirely cleared’; ‘difficulties [were] now really over to all important purposes’; ‘the people all quiet’; newly settled crofters ‘happy and comfortable on their lots’.¹⁸

The marchioness was escorted around Sutherland by her son, Earl Gower. Fresh from being greeted everywhere in Staffordshire by shouts of ‘Fire!’, he must have found it comforting to be among people who, if only from fear of what might follow any hint of discontent, were unfailingly obsequious. ‘We went into every house’, his mother reported of her and Gower’s day-long inspection of crofting townships near Brora, ‘and talked to all the people and gave great satisfaction.’ There and elsewhere, Lady Stafford added, she had handed out ‘prizes to . . . builders of the best cottages’. Similar awards were made to crofters judged to have made most effort to cultivate the ‘waste’ on which they had been installed. ‘I leave . . . with the utmost satisfaction’, the marchioness noted at the end of her trip, ‘not only in thinking that all is put in so excellent a way . . . but in seeing also that this visit of ours has been a great encouragement . . . to the people who are quite happy in thinking they are attended to.’¹⁹

James Loch, also in Sutherland at this point, was equally content. Towards the end of 1815, Loch had published a 20-page pamphlet intended to counter the torrent of anti-Stafford comment unleashed by Patrick Sellar’s arrest and imprisonment. Now he had seen into print a much expanded – indeed book-length – version. His aim, Loch explained, was to tackle head-on ‘malicious’ and ‘false’ claims of the sort the Trans-Atlantic Association and its allies had ‘circulated . . . through the medium of the public press’. Stafford policy in Sutherland, Loch maintained, had been – whether in conception or execution – ‘humane and considerate’. Statements to the contrary were ‘totally and completely false’. Prior to ‘improvement’, conditions in the Sutherland interior had been ‘wretched and deplorable’; ‘indolence and sloth’ were commonplace; people lived, amid an ‘accumulation of filth’, in homes ‘of the most miserable description’. Now these same people had been provided with coastal crofts they had ‘begun to cultivate . . . with much industry’ and on which they would ‘be enabled to bring up their families in decent comfort’.20

‘This is the system’, Loch wrote of post-clearance Sutherland, ‘which a few interested and malignant persons have attempted, for selfish, or pecuniary, or still worse motives to revile . . . [despite its having] brought blessings and happiness . . . of which [the Sutherland Estate’s inhabitants] must have forever continued ignorant if it had not been for the steady and praiseworthy perseverance of the owners of this extensive and important property.’²¹

Henry Brougham read James Loch’s book ‘with the greatest satisfaction and delight’. General David Stewart (of whom more shortly) spoke for critics of ‘improvement’ in dismissing it as a rehash of arguments Loch had been advancing for several years. Loch, Stewart remarked, was motivated mainly by an ‘eager desire to praise Lady Stafford . . . and to run down poor people’. ‘I wish to have no feeling in common’, the general commented of the Sutherland clearances’ principal architect, ‘with a person who, for the sake of gain, causes . . . misery to unoffending human beings.’²²

That Loch was revisiting the standard case for clearance is undoubted. But for all this case’s long-standing reliance on one-sided – indeed dishonest – descriptions of life in Sutherland’s now emptied straths, Loch was able, by 1820, to point to post-clearance successes. One such success was the transformation of Helmsdale into what a mid-nineteenth-century commentator called a fishing port of ‘the first rank’. ‘The curing yards at this station’, the same commentator went on, ‘have long been famed as about the most complete on the [Moray Firth] coast . . . roomy, substantial and having every necessary appendage’. Unlike Sutherland’s north coast, then, Helmsdale was provided with a buoyant fishing industry. This, as things turned out, did a lot less than predicted for nearby crofting communities like Marrel, West Helmsdale and Gartymore. Those localities’ crofters – many of them evicted from the Strath of Kildonan – lacked the capital required to get into fishing on their own account. At the height of each summer’s herring season, it followed, most of the 200 or more boats operating out of Helmsdale were not owned by people from crofting families. But this deficiency notwithstanding, it is easy to understand why the Marchioness of Stafford was so enthused by what she saw of the place when, in the course of her 1820 stay at Dunrobin, she organised – in collaboration with Earl Gower, James Loch, Francis Suther and others – a ‘great expedition’ to the Strath of Kildonan and to the fast-growing village at its foot.23

‘I cannot better describe Helmsdale’, Lady Stafford informed her husband, ‘than by saying we saw about six herring establishments each with their cooperages . . . and so full of people . . . that [the harbour area] looked more like a part of Liverpool than anything else, so handsome are the buildings and so great the bustle . . . Besides these, there are various good houses, shops, [a] post-office, a large inn [with] a room in it calculated for large companies to dine in . . . It is very singular to look out of the windows . . . of this room and to see . . . the curing houses and . . . the port where lay three large vessels from London and Leith to carry off fish and wool . . . the old castle* opposite quite surprised at all those novelties’.²⁴

The wool the marchioness mentioned came from Major William Clunes’s Kildonan sheep farms. From Helmsdale, Clunes (‘dressed,’ Lady Stafford observed, ‘in a pink and green tartan jacket’) escorted the marchioness’s party – its members seated in three ‘very good’ gigs – to Torrish where, Lady Stafford noted, Clunes, had ‘built a . . . neat cottage’. The now largely uninhabited Strath of Kildonan, which the marchioness was glimpsing for the first time, seemed to her ‘a narrow, wild valley . . . very pretty . . . [its] birchwoods smelling sweet’. Clunes, Lady Stafford added, afterwards invited her and her companions to dine with him at his Crakaig farmhouse where, the marchioness noted approvingly, the major received his guests ‘hospitably’, providing them with ‘a very good dinner in a gentleman-like way [while] a man played on the bagpipes at a distance, so as not to be troublesome.’²⁵

Helmsdale’s prosperity was not to endure into the twentieth century – the village falling victim, like many comparable communities, to the 1920s’ collapse of Scotland’s herring industry. But the road on which the Marchioness of Stafford travelled up the Strath of Kildonan to Torrish – a road completed only months before – is still there and still in use. So are the other roads, together with scores of burn-spanning bridges, constructed at much the same time in Strathbrora, Strathnaver and other parts of the Sutherland Estate.

There were Stafford expenditures, then, that continue to yield value. Thousands of vehicles daily cross the Mound, the embankment thrown across Loch Fleet between 1814 and 1816 and today an integral part of the A9. At Brora the brewery, brickworks and coalmine on which the Staffords spent heavily are no more. But their Clynelish Distillery, opened in 1819 with a view to utilising barley that might otherwise have found its way to operators of illicit stills, remains in production, turning out what its present-day owners, international drinks combine Diageo, describe as ‘a fruity, waxy, slightly smoky single malt’.

Perhaps the most striking survival of the ‘improvement’ period, however, are the arable farms fringing the modern A9 from Cyderhall (adjacent to the Dornoch Bridge) by way of Culmaily (where Patrick Sellar once farmed) to Crakaig (where, in 1820, William Clunes entertained Lady Stafford). Prior to the commencement of ‘improvement’, practically all those farms consisted (as they had done for a long time) of rigs occupied, in large part, by subtenants of the sort ejected (as described previously) from Culmaily. This meant that when Cyderhall (to cite one instance) was taken over in 1817 by George Rule, who had moved north from Roxburghshire, the farm was home to a plethora of families whose ‘cottages’, according to James Loch, ‘were dispersed all over it’. ‘The small portion of [Cyderhall] that was [then] arable’, Loch recalled, ‘was interspersed with heaps of stones collected off the land, or with portions of grass which, being pastured, exposed the crop to the continual depredations of . . . cattle.’ Three years later, Loch wrote, nothing of this remained: ‘The collections of stones have been used either in the construction of dykes . . . or have been employed in the construction of roads. The intermediate portions of grass . . . have been ploughed up, and the farm has . . . begun to assume a regular shape and cultivation. The enclosures [meaning the walled-in fields that took the place of rigs and other open areas] are proceeding . . . and will soon be finished.’26

Like their Culmaily counterparts, Cyderhall’s cottages were swept away. So were those cottages’ occupants who, Loch noted, had ‘been settled upon the Dornoch Muirs’. There, in the several crofting settlements that took shape at this time on what had been uncultivated moorland to the west and north-west of Sutherland’s county town, Cyderhall’s previous occupants joined (or were joined by) people displaced from one or other of the several more Cyderhall-like farms then taking shape on the coastal plain between the Dornoch Firth and Golspie. Unlike the emptying of the Sutherland Estate’s inland valleys, however, this aspect of ‘improvement’ attracted little or nothing by way of critical comment. This may have been due in part to affected families having lacked the financial and other resources that enabled the cattle-rearing and whisky-producing residents of the interior straths to organise all manner of anti-clearance protest. But it is also likely to have owed something to the fact that transformations of the Cyderhall sort were, from a wider Scottish or British perspective, by no means unusual.27

As James Loch pointed out in 1820, the open fields that were medieval England’s equivalent of Culmaily or Cyderhall’s rigs had been subject to ‘enclosure’ and ‘consolidation’ from ‘as far back’ as Tudor times. In Lowland Scotland, identical processes had been under way since the early eighteenth century, spreading north, by the century’s close, into Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, Moray and Easter Ross. Had the Sutherland ‘improvements’ consisted solely of the changes made by men like Cyderhall’s George Rule, it follows, no more would have been heard of them than was heard of what thousands of Rule’s predecessors and contemporaries had done or were doing in the rest of the country. What brought infamy to Stafford-owned, Loch-managed Sutherland was the total – and fire-accompanied – depopulation of Strathbrora, Strathnaver and the Strath of Kildonan. There had not been, and would not be, any English or Lowland equivalents of that.²⁸

The speed, scale, completeness and brutality of the 1819 and 1820 clearances on the Sutherland Estate meant that they attracted lots of press coverage. Over subsequent decades, and for identical reasons, the same clearances were picked over, analysed and almost invariably condemned by a host of commentators. Among the first (as already indicated) was General David Stewart, a Perthshire laird as well as a veteran military man. Stewart’s critique of the Stafford and Loch case for clearance was ‘founded’, he explained, ‘on a long intimacy with [Highlanders] both as inhabitants of their native glens and as soldiers’.²⁹

David Stewart thought it implausible that troops whose conduct led a senior army commander to call the 93rd Regiment ‘an example to all’ could have been products of the broken and bankrupt society Loch had supposedly met with in Sutherland. By portraying inhabitants of the Sutherland straths ‘as dishonest, irregular in their habits and incapable of managing their farms’, Stewart maintained, James Loch had chosen falsely to blacken those people’s character in the hope of defending the otherwise indefensible decision to have ‘fire . . . applied to [Sutherland homes] to effect their [occupants] more speedy expulsion’. It may well have profited the Staffords, their land managers and their sheep-farming tenants to turn ‘whole glens and districts, once the abode of a brave, vigorous and independent race of men, into scenes of desolation’. But nobody should for a moment accept at face value what the organisers of evictions had to say about the communities they destroyed: ‘The people [of Sutherland] ought not to be reproached with incapacity or immorality without better evidence than that of their prejudiced and unfeeling calumniators.’30

When published in 1822, the book containing those remarks sold 500 copies in London alone in less than a week. Much quoted in the years ahead, David Stewart thus helped keep the Sutherland clearances in the public eye. Plenty of others did likewise. One was Beriah Botfield, a Shropshire-born industrialist and Tory MP who visited Strathbrora when touring the Highlands in the later 1820s. No ‘pursuit of prospective advantages’, in Botfield’s opinion, made it legitimate ‘to transgress the laws of humanity’, as had been done, he thought, in Sutherland. ‘In this secluded valley’, Botfield wrote of Strathbrora, ‘all was silent and dead; no token of its once peaceful and happy inhabitants remained, save the blackened ruins of their humble dwellings . . . When we reflect that all this desolation has taken place under the abused name of improvement, we must deeply regret that . . . more humane measures were not pursued.’³¹

In a Sutherland context, Botfield was an outsider. Hugh Miller, who (as mentioned earlier) made occasional trips to Gruids from his boyhood home in Cromarty, was not. The adult Miller, however, is unlikely to have had cause to reflect angrily in print on the Sutherland clearances and their consequences had not the Stafford family responded in typically repressive fashion to the 1843 emergence of the Free Church, of which Miller, then a prominent journalist, was an enthusiastic backer.

Disenchantment with the established church – from which the new grouping broke away – was no novelty in Sutherland. But discontents stemming in part from the way the generality of Church of Scotland clerics behaved during the clearances had been fanned in the 1820s and 1830s by lay preachers who operated outside the jurisdiction of the Church of Scotland and posed open challenges to its teachings. Those men attracted followings. By so doing they paved the way for the Sutherland population’s practically unanimous adherence to the Free Church, a denomination founded, as its name suggests, on the principle that congregations, not landed proprietors, should appoint ministers. This principle, according to the Free Church, had a theological basis. But it also had secular implications. As was symbolised by the dead dog Free Church supporters suspended over the pulpit in Farr’s abandoned parish church, the mass exodus of Sutherland crofters and their families from the Church of Scotland deprived that church of authority. It also deprived estate managers of the means of exercising social control of the sort Sutherland’s parish ministers – most of them at any rate – had been all too willing to impose on the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford’s behalf.32

By 1843, both the marquis and the marchioness were dead. Ownership of the Sutherland Estate had consequently passed to the former Earl Gower, now (as inheritor of the title his father had been granted in 1833) Duke of Sutherland. ‘He scarcely resides there at all,’ a leading Free Church minister said of the duke’s relationship with his Highland property. ‘He can have very little knowledge of [Sutherland] people.’ Perhaps not. But the duke was certainly aware of the risks inherent, from a Sutherland Estate perspective, in crofters having ready access to an ecclesiastical institution immune from proprietorial influence. Hence his 1843 rejection of Free Church attempts to buy or lease sites for its churches, manses and schools. In Sutherland, then, Free Church services had to be conducted in the open air. That, in turn, led to Hugh Miller travelling north from Edinburgh, where he now lived, to experience one such act of worship at first hand.³³

The service Miller witnessed, and went on to write about, was held in a crofting township south of Helmsdale. Prior to its taking place, Miller rode up the Strath of Kildonan. There he saw the ‘multitude of scattered patches of green’ and the still more numerous ruins – ‘well nigh levelled with the soil and . . . still scathed with fire’ – that continued to testify to the extent of clearance. ‘All is solitude within the valley’, Miller wrote of Kildonan, ‘except where, at wide intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen; but at its opening, where the hills range to the coast, the cottages for miles together lie clustered as in a hamlet. From the north of Helmsdale to the south of Port Gower, the lower slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, minute patches of corn and endless cottages. It would seem as if, for twenty miles, the long withdrawing valley had been swept of its inhabitants, and the accumulated sweepings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is the present state of Sutherland.’³⁴

The congregation he joined, Miller went on, consisted of between 600 and 800 people: ‘We have rarely seen a more deeply serious assemblage; never certainly one that bore an air of such deep dejection. The people were wonderfully clean and decent; for it is ill with Highlanders when they neglect their personal appearance, especially on a Sabbath; but it was all too evident that the heavy hand of poverty rested upon them, and that its evils [in consequence of Sutherland Estate hostility to the Free Church] were now deepened by oppression. It might have been a mere trick of association; but when . . . plaintive Gaelic singing, so melancholy in its tones at all times, arose from the bare hillside, it sounded to our ears like a deep wail of complaint and sorrow.’35

Hugh Miller’s account of how Sutherland’s interior had been ‘improved into a desert’, drew on David Stewart and on Donald MacLeod, whose own press articles about the clearances had appeared just three years before Miller’s own. Nor was MacLeod, who became one more of Sutherland’s many post-clearance emigrants to North America, himself finished with the topic. In 1857 – by which point he was in Ontario – MacLeod republished his 1840 narrative of what had been done by the Staffords and their agents in places like his native Strathnaver where MacLeod had been among the Rossal men on hand at Badinloskin when, on Patrick Sellar’s orders, William Chisholm’s home was set alight. To his account of episodes of that sort, Donald MacLeod now added fresh material, its vigour proving that this ‘old . . . broken-down stonemason’, as MacLeod described himself, had lost none of his facility with words.³⁶

MacLeod’s revisiting of events of 40 years before had been precipitated, like Hugh Miller’s denunciation of the clearances, by the actions of the second Duke of Sutherland, who with the encouragement of his wife, every bit as forceful a personality as her mother-in-law had been, decided in the early 1850s to align herself with the campaign to end slavery in America’s southern states. This led to the duke and duchess hosting in London one of the USA’s most prominent anti-slavery activists, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, in gratitude, took it upon herself to castigate MacLeod’s 1840 writings, which, Beecher Stowe noted, ‘had been industriously circulated in America’. Well briefed by James Loch, still in overall charge of Sutherland Estate matters, Beecher Stowe, in a book entitled Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, dismissed MacLeod’s material as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘absurd’. What had taken place on the Sutherland Estate, she commented, was ‘an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in . . . elevating in a few years a whole community to a point of education and material prosperity which, unassisted, [it] might never have attained.’³⁷

MacLeod’s rebuttal, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland, was unforgiving. Slavery was ‘damnable’ and ‘it [was] to be hoped that Americans [would] soon discern its deformity, pollution and iniquity’. But ‘the British aristocracy’s sympathy with American slaves’ was a ‘burlesque’, a charade. The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland might pose, for self-serving and publicity-seeking reasons, as ‘the most liberal sympathisers with foreign victims of oppression and injustice’. Nearer home, however, they were unashamedly benefiting from policies that had turned much of Sutherland into ‘a solitary wilderness’ and left its inhabitants ‘huddled together . . . along the sea-shore’ in ‘the most impoverished, degraded [and] subjugated . . . condition that human beings could exist in’.38

Much the same point was made at much the same time by the London correspondent of the New York Tribune, then the most widely read newspaper in the world. It was characteristic of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, wrote Karl Marx, to have selected as ‘objects’ of their ‘philanthropy’ people ‘as far distant from home as possible’. It was equally characteristic of the British press, when reporting the couple’s anti-slavery stance, to have failed to notice that ‘the history of the wealth of the Sutherland family [was] the history of the ruin . . . of the Scotch-Gaelic population [of their Highland estate]’. In Sutherland ‘from 1814 to 1820’, Marx went on, ‘about 3,000 families were systematically expelled’ from their homes. ‘All their villages were demolished and burned down, and all their fields converted into pasturage.’³⁹

Both in his Tribune dispatches and in Capital, the book that became the principal source of communism’s theoretical underpinnings, Marx portrayed the ‘reckless terrorism’ of the clearance years as an unavoidable result of capitalism’s wider need to have landed properties organised in ways intended to ensure that their owners’ financial interests took precedence over all other considerations. In this, as he acknowledged, Marx was following the Swiss economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, whom Hugh Miller also cited as a powerful critic of developments in Sutherland. Sismondi, in an ‘Essay on Landed Property’ published in 1834, contended – much as Highlanders themselves contended – that it had been clanship’s practice to acknowledge that clansfolk, whether in Sutherland or elsewhere, had rights in the land they occupied. Customary entitlements of that sort, Sismondi argued, ought to be incorporated into law, as had long been the case, he pointed out, in Switzerland and some other parts of continental Europe. Landowners like the Staffords, Sismondi believed, had ‘no more right to drive from their homes’ the inhabitants of their estates ‘than a king to drive out the inhabitants of his kingdom’. If once Britain’s landlords came to ‘believe that they have no need of the people’, he warned, ‘the people may in their turn think that they have no need of them.’40

Sismondi, Hugh Miller, Donald MacLeod, David Stewart and others were cited by Highland Land League spokesmen like Angus Sutherland. So were later theorists such as Henry George and Alfred Russel Wallace. George’s Progress and Poverty, published in New York in 1880, was a sustained – and influential – attack on the many iniquities allegedly arising from private property in land. Wallace’s Land Nationalisation, published in London in 1882, was a call for such property to be brought into public ownership, not least on the grounds that episodes like the Sutherland clearances, which Wallace thought ‘a positive crime against humanity’, underlined the cost to society at large of permitting a tiny minority of a country’s citizens to do much as they liked with that country’s basic resource, its land.⁴¹

But for all that it was helpful to the Land League to be able to refer to external indictments of Highland landlords, people in Sutherland, or so Farr’s Free Church minister Donald MacKenzie said in 1883, needed no such prompting to make them aware of the need for reform. ‘We required no one from the outside to come and agitate us,’ MacKenzie told Lord Napier at Bettyhill. This, the minister added, was a consequence of demands for security of tenure being fuelled principally by the way in which memories of evictions had been handed down from one generation to the next: ‘The accounts of the old men living . . . in the different townships [on Sutherland’s north coast]’, MacKenzie said of what he had been told about the clearances, ‘are more graphic, vivid and harrowing than anything that has been written on the subject.’ All such accounts are today beyond recall. But at least a little of their emotional impact, it is safe to guess, is preserved in Gaelic songs and poems dating from a time when dispossession and dispersal were everyday realities.⁴²

In his clearance novel, Consider the Lilies, written in the 1960s, Iain Crichton Smith, himself a poet as well as an author, imagines a conversation between Patrick Sellar and Donald MacLeod. ‘Have you ever read any poetry?’ MacLeod asks. ‘Poetry?’ Sellar is uncomprehending. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ MacLeod says. ‘There are some poets, we call them bards, who have written songs about you . . . You see, Mr Sellar, you will become a legend . . . Children will sing about you . . . They may even recite poems about you in the schools.’⁴³

An especially bitter set of such verses was put together by a song-maker called Donald Baillie, perhaps one of the several Baillies who left Strathbrora for Pictou around 1820. Transmitted from singer to singer in Canada and finally published there in 1890, Baillie’s lines date, their content suggests, from the immediate aftermath of Patrick Sellar’s 1816 trial, and they are fiercely resentful of Sellar having gone free. ‘’S truagh nach robh thu ’m prìosan,’ Baillie’s song runs, ‘Rè bhliadhnan air uisg’ is aran’: ‘What a pity that you were not in prison for years, existing on bread and water, with a hard shackle of iron, strong and immovable, about your thigh.’44

Baillie takes consolation from his having had a dream in which he sees Sellar burning in hell. So irresistible was this image – an eternity of hellfire suffered by a man who, in life, burned homes – that it became an enduring motif in poetry deriving from, or inspired by, the clearances. In one of Crichton Smith’s own poems, while ‘stars shine over Sutherland’, the factor’s ‘hot ears’ are forever subject to the sound of ‘thatch sizzling in tanged smoke’. Sellar fares no less grimly in this Scots version, by twentieth-century poet and folksong revivalist Hamish Henderson, of a Gaelic song made by Ewan Robertson who (as touched on earlier) was one of the men questioned by Lord Napier at Bettyhill:

Sellar, daith hath ye in his grip;

Ye needna think he’ll let ye slip,

Justice ye’ve earned, and, by the Book,

A warm assize ye winna jouk.

The fires ye lit tae gut Strathnaver,

Ye’ll feel them noo – and roast forever.⁴⁵

Sellar, by Henderson’s time or even Robertson’s, had become a historical figure. But that was not so when Donald Baillie’s song took shape. His Sellar is a living presence about whom Baillie delights in being offensive. Thus the factor’s nose is akin to a porpoise’s snout and his lower quarters resemble a donkey’s behind. By attributing these and other animal-like features to Sellar, it has been suggested, Baillie was hinting at the factor’s iniquity having stemmed from his ‘not belong[ing] to the human race’. But even if its deeper meaning is left unexplored, Baillie’s description of Sellar – a description tallying, in the case of his prominent nose at any rate, with what is known of his appearance – serves as a reminder that Patrick Sellar was visible in clearance-era Sutherland in a way the Staffords and James Loch were not. Baillie clearly saw Sellar and may have had dealings with him. The same was true of lots of other people on the Sutherland Estate. Loch, the marquis and the marchioness, in contrast, were more rarely glimpsed and still more seldom spoken with. That, in part, is why, in the Sutherland population’s collective memory, Patrick Sellar, who died in 1851, came more and more to encapsulate and personify the complex array of influences underpinning ‘improvement’.46

This, as members of Sellar’s family and their descendants were to protest in the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth, was not quite fair. In 1883, in evidence to Lord Napier and in a book published just months later, Thomas Sellar, eldest of Patrick’s sons and a man who was himself to die the following year, argued that Sellar senior, when a Sutherland Estate factor, took his orders from Loch who, in turn, was ‘acting under Lord and Lady Stafford’s instructions’. This, while understandable in light of Thomas Sellar’s determination to rescue his family name from ‘unmerited obloquy’, was erroneous: the Sellar of the clearance era had been anything but the man said by his son to have ‘had really no power of initiative’. The underlying point, however, was sound. Ultimate responsibility for the Sutherland clearances, and for everything that happened in the course of them, did not rest with Patrick Sellar. Nor did it rest with William Young, Francis Suther or James Loch. It rested with the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford.⁴⁷

But Thomas Sellar was not content with allocating, or reallocating, liability for clearances. In the manner of James Loch a lifetime earlier, he set out to show that to have had sheep farmers take the place of the thousands of people removed from the Sutherland interior was, from every point of view, a good thing. This was never a convincing claim. By the 1880s it had been rendered wholly unpersuasive by the financial and other difficulties then confronting inheritors of the sheep-farming structure Loch and Patrick Sellar had been at pains to establish.

Although the price slump that followed Waterloo made for an occasionally rocky start, a great deal of money was made in the post-clearance straths, not least by Sellar who, in the late 1830s, was wealthy enough to set himself up on a substantial estate of his own at Ardtornish in Argyll. The good times, however, were not to endure. Everywhere they went in 1883 Napier and his colleagues were dinned with tales of sheep-farming difficulty. In the mid-century, it was recalled, soaring wool prices had meant that ‘landlords and sheep farmers alike . . . waxed fat and prosperous’. Now sheep farmers, as Angus Sutherland took pleasure in informing Napier, ‘[were] unable to meet their . . . obligations and going to ruin generally’. This was to exaggerate; but not by very much. Sheep farmers were certainly struggling. Leases were being thrown in; vacant farms could not be let; Highland sheep farming, it was beginning to be apparent, would never again be the wildly successful enterprise* it had been in the decades following the clearances.⁴⁸

This late nineteenth-century crisis had a number of causes. One was competition from colonies like Australia and New Zealand where high quality wool could be produced a lot more cheaply than in Scotland. But an additional source of trouble lay in the nature of Highland sheep farming itself. Post-clearance sheep farmers had benefited hugely from the fertility bequeathed to them by practitioners of the mixed farming that had gone on in inland Sutherland for centuries. Previously cultivated rigs, though no longer put to the plough, continued to provide what James Loch called ‘a sweet and luxuriant herbage’. Hill pastures, where pre-clearance communities had grazed their cattle each summer, were similarly productive, yielding, as a present-day Highland farmer has put it, a ‘rich variety of sweet grasses, herbs and clovers’. But this same farmer, Reay Clarke, is unequivocal as to the damage done by practices integral to ‘improvement’. Cattle, Clarke points out, consume ‘both fine and rough herbage, thus improving the sward’. Sheep, on the other hand, graze selectively with the result that pastures given over to their exclusive use are gradually overrun by coarser and less nutritious types of vegetation. ‘In the natural world’, Clarke writes, ‘all grazing systems have a variety of animals to harvest the herbage. In Sutherland, the mixed summer grazing of former years by cattle with a few sheep, goats and ponies was changed [at the time of the clearances] to an all the year round defoliation by a single species – sheep.’ The consequence, as admitted on all sides in the 1880s, was that the stock-carrying capacity of Sutherland’s hills was in steep decline while the tracts of old arable around the sites of former townships were increasingly overrun by moss, heather and bracken.⁴⁹

Nothing of this was acknowledged by Thomas Sellar, to whom it seemed as self-evident as it had done to his father that there was no merit in the complex mix of land uses swept away by a sheep monoculture that, like most monocultures, proved – after a first flush – precarious. Instead Thomas sought to defend ‘improvement’, much as James Loch had done, by disparaging its critics. The charges laid against his father in 1816 were ‘a fabric of fiction which had been erected by malice and credulity’. Donald MacLeod’s writings were ‘sensational’; Hugh Miller’s the product of an ‘ardent imagination’; Sismondi’s and Wallace’s little better.50

But Thomas Sellar, in finding only virtue in what his father had done and in how he had done it, was spitting in the wind. Both Lord Napier’s report and the evidence on which it rested were condemnatory of clearance, and while Napier was by no means supportive of everything the Highland Land League wanted, he was clear as to the pressing need to rescue crofters from the plight they had been left in by management of the Loch variety. Nor were the many journalists and publicists among the Land League’s members and sympathisers anything like as circumspect as Napier in their analyses of the population transfers that had contributed so much to creating the problems Napier was trying to solve. What had occurred in Sutherland between 1813 and 1821 began again to be castigated in the press. Alexander MacKenzie, an Inverness-based publisher, produced a best-selling History of the Highland Clearances in which the Sutherland experience loomed large. Donald MacLeod’s Gloomy Memories was reissued and, thanks to its sheer verve, attracted numerous readers.

‘I was present at the pulling down and burning of the house of William Chisholm’, MacLeod had written of the episode at the centre of Patrick Sellar’s trial, ‘in which was lying his wife’s mother, an old bedridden woman of near a hundred years of age . . . I informed the persons about to set fire to the house of this circumstance, and prevailed on them to wait till Mr Sellar came. On his arrival, I told him of the poor old woman being in a condition unfit for removal. 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 . . . She died within five days.’⁵¹

This scene looms large in the literature of modern Scotland, most strikingly in Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom, the finest of several fine novels and plays dealing with the Sutherland clearances. In Butcher’s Broom, Sellar is Factor Heller – his altered surname hinting perhaps at his being destined for damnation – and presides over evictions identical to those described by Donald MacLeod. Told in Gunn’s novel of there being an elderly woman in a house about to be set ablaze, Heller curses ‘the old bitch’ and calls on his men – ‘half-mad with drink and the growing lust of destruction’ – to press on. ‘Factor Heller’, Gunn writes, ‘was a wise man. This work had to be done; it would, by God, be done thoroughly . . . Clear them out! Rid the land of such human vermin! . . . House by house they took . . . giving the occupants a brief space in which to haul out their belongings before destroying the dwelling. Pitiful mothers, miserable old men, moaning old women, wailing children, left islanded with their one or two earthly possessions and no home or shelter in the broad world for them. It was a remarkable landscape, acquiring slowly an unearthly, demoniac appearance.’52

Neil Gunn grew up in Latheron, the Caithness parish where lots of people from the Strath of Kildonan, some of Gunn’s forebears among them, set up home when the strath was emptied. ‘They had come from beyond the mountain which rose up behind them’, Gunn wrote of those folk, ‘from inland valleys and swelling pastures, where they and their people before them had lived from time immemorial. Their landlord had driven them from these valleys and pastures, and burned their houses, and set them here against the sea-shore to live if they could and, if not, to die.’⁵³

‘I’d always felt the need to write of the clearances,’ Neil Gunn told a biographer. This requirement was intensified by Gunn’s strong sense of Sutherland as a place so scarred by ‘improvement’ as to make even its landscapes a source of unease. ‘In a happy, thriving community’, Gunn commented, ‘the very land, to our senses, takes on a certain pleasant friendliness . . . On the other hand, in Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill, of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed.’⁵⁴

Something of that same feeling is evident in the recollections of Calum Maclean, a pioneer collector of Gaelic story and tradition. Maclean, who came from the island of Raasay, between Skye and the mainland, first visited Sutherland in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like other visitors, he found the county ‘beautiful’. But what ‘struck [him] most of all was [its] terrible emptiness’, a consequence, Maclean wrote, of Sutherland’s population having been ‘hounded from the rich inland straths and forced . . . to eke out a precarious livelihood on barren, crowded coasts’. ‘There is a strange dignity about them’, Calum Maclean wrote of Sutherland’s people, ‘but deep down in their hearts there is an undercurrent of bitterness and resentment.’ Those emotions, Maclean continued, were mostly kept from strangers. They might, however, be shared with other Highlanders who, ‘discover that, no matter how it starts, the conversation will sooner or later veer round to the clearances [which] . . . in Sutherlandshire . . . will neither be forgotten nor forgiven’.55

When Calum Maclean was in Sutherland – where, two lifetimes after bliadhna na losgaidh, he heard Gaelic tales of the cruelties inflicted by Domhnall Sgios or Donald Bannerman – Dennis MacLeod was a boy in Marrel, one of the crofting townships near Helmsdale that served as receptacles for families swept, as Hugh Miller’s telling image had it, from the Strath of Kildonan. ‘Calum Maclean got the clearances – I mean the way the clearances were thought of and spoken about – exactly right,’ MacLeod says. ‘When crofters got together in Marrel, their talk – once the problems of the day had been sorted out – would often turn to the evictions, to the burnings, to us being confined to Marrel and its none too productive crofts because of our people having been shut out of the strath. Sometimes, I remember, you could detect a feeling of regret – on the part of some folk anyway – that their ancestors hadn’t left for Canada when they had had the chance. People were where they were of course. They knew they couldn’t turn back the clock and change that. But always, I believe, they felt that they – or, if not them, the folk who’d gone before – had been treated badly, harshly, unjustly. What made this sense of having been wronged much worse, I think, was the lack of any kind of acknowledgement, whether from the British government, the Church of Scotland or anyone else that bad things had happened in Sutherland, that politicians and the church had been party to those things, and that we – I mean people living in places like Marrel – were being left to put up with the consequences.’⁵⁶

In the 1960s, as so many others had done, Dennis MacLeod quit Sutherland. Taking a career path a little reminiscent of the one followed by Rogart-born railway-builder John MacKay in the previous century, Dennis went into mining, first in Zambia, then in South Africa and finally in Canada. Like John MacKay, Dennis did well. Like MacKay, he set up his own company. Like MacKay, he made money. And like MacKay, Dennis MacLeod wanted, on getting older, to invest a part of his cash in ways that would keep people engaged with the historical significance and continuing implications – global as well as local in MacLeod’s opinion – of the depopulation of Sutherland’s straths. One outcome was the installation in Helmsdale of a public artwork – pressed for and largely financed by Dennis MacLeod – intended both to commemorate the clearances and to draw attention to the achievements (not least in Canada where MacLeod made his home) of folk the clearances had set adrift.

This artwork, the creation of sculptor and pop artist Gerald Laing, features a family group – an adult couple, their young son and their baby. What he wished this family to depict, Laing wrote, were the feelings of ‘loss, disorientation and anxiety’ caused by all human displacements – whether ‘voluntary or involuntary’. ‘I have represented these emotions,’ Laing commented, ‘in [this] sculpture. The man is tense, wary, anxious but determined. The boy is looking to his father for guidance but, at the same time, is ready for adventure. The woman, holding the newborn child, looks back . . . [up the Strath of Kildonan] at the . . . place she is leaving.’57

Because Gerald Laing’s sculpture, unveiled at Helmsdale in 2007, was cast in bronze, it could be replicated. Hence the unveiling, the following year, of a twin piece in Winnipeg. There it stands amid traffic in the new Kildonan, just a few feet from the Red River’s western bank where, in the summer of 1814 and in the fall of the following year, Sutherland families like the one in Laing’s sculpture stepped out of the boats that had brought them from York Factory.

Just as the events that caused those families’ departure from the Strath of Kildonan gave rise to one great novel, Butcher’s Broom, so their arrival in Manitoba is integral to another: Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. Central to Laurence’s book, published in 1974 and a Canadian classic, is Morag Gunn. Orphaned as a child in the fictional Manitoban town of Manawaka, Morag is raised by Christie Logan. Manawaka’s town scavenger and a man inclined to be a drunkard, Christie is a marginalised figure, but he is also a teller of tales; tales featuring Morag’s supposed forebear Piper Gunn; tales Christie deploys in ways that have the effect of restoring, building up, enforcing the fragile little Morag’s self-esteem.

Piper Gunn – his quasi-magical attributes akin to those possessed by heroes of the Gaelic sagas Donald Sage heard John Sutherland narrate in Kildonan’s manse – is not the real-life Piper Gunn who piped the Kildonan emigrants out of their Churchill River encampment at the start of their long trek south. This Piper Gunn, in Christie Logan’s or Margaret Laurence’s hands, is a towering, almost messianic, figure who, it becomes apparent, is the one person in Sutherland capable of organising its people’s escape from the miseries imposed on them by the Marchioness of Stafford, transformed, in Christie’s stories, into a villainous ‘Bitch-Duchess’ whose heart is ‘as dark as the feathers of a raven’ and who loves ‘no creature alive’. ‘And her [men] rode through the countryside’, Christie says of the Bitch-Duchess, ‘setting fire to the crofts and turning out the people from their homes . . . And it was old men and old women with thin shanks and men in their prime and women with the child inside them and a great scattering of small children, like, and all of them was driven away from the lands of their fathers and on to the wild rocks of the shore.’58

For a time, Piper Gunn plays laments ‘for the people lost, and the people gone, and them with no place for to lay their heads’. Soon, however, he sets his pipes aside and, ‘in his voice like the voice of the wind from the north isles’, speaks of a ship that is coming and of how all must board this ship ‘and go with it into a new world across the waters’. ‘But the people were afraid, see,’ Christie tells Morag. ‘They did not dare. Better to die on the known rocks in the land of their ancestors, so some said. Others said the lands across the seas were bad lands filled with . . . terrors and . . . demons and the beasts of the forests . . . Then Piper Gunn changed his music, and he played the battle music there . . . They say it was like the storm winds . . . like the scree and skirl of all the dead pipers who ever lived, returned then to pipe the clans into battle. Then what happened? What happened then to all them people there homeless on the rocks? They rose and followed! Yes, they rose, then, and they followed, for Piper Gunn’s music could put the heart into them and they would have followed him all the way to hell or to heaven with the sound of the pipes in their ears . . . And that was how all of them came to this country, all that bunch, and they ended up at the Red River.’⁵⁹

Towards the close of 1889, from his home in Hereford, John MacKay CE, as that self-made civil engineer always entitled himself, mailed to Lord Napier a copy of Memorabilia Domestica, Or Parish Life in the North of Scotland. This was Donald Sage’s autobiography, which, 20 years after Sage’s death, had been published by his son. MacKay’s accompanying letter has not survived. But it is clear from Napier’s reply, which has, that John MacKay directed him to what Sage had to say about two issues MacKay had raised when, at Golspie, he appeared before Napier and his royal commission colleagues. One was the extent of the ‘burnings’ that had occurred in 1819. The other was the mal-treatment, as John MacKay saw it, experienced by the 93rd Regiment’s New Orleans veterans. One of those, MacKay said at Golspie, was ‘an uncle of my father’. Like lots more ex-soldiers, this man had been refused a croft on the Sutherland Estate. But what was worse, in John MacKay’s estimation, was the manner in which the estate’s owners and managers had reneged, or so MacKay believed, on guarantees that parents of men who joined the 93rd in 1799 and 1800 ‘were never to be deprived of their land’.⁶⁰

Stafford apologists, as MacKay well knew, were in the habit of querying all such contentions. Had homes really been set on fire? Had men whose sons signed up for military service truly been guaranteed immunity from eviction? On both points, Sage’s book offered corroboration of MacKay’s position. That was why he sent the book to Napier.

Napier stressed his personal acceptance of what John MacKay had said to him six years before. ‘I never had any doubt’, he wrote, ‘either of the burning of the cottages or the violation of the promises [made to tenants with sons in the 93rd].’ House burnings, Napier thought, were a ‘natural, almost inevitable, result of the cruel policy of eviction’. As for the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford’s ‘faithlessness’ in the matter of recruitment, it was to be hoped, Napier commented, that the explanation lay in ‘their conscience[s] . . . hav[ing] been perverted by bad counsel and false theories of social management’.61

‘I have never yet quite understood the real motives of the Duchess-Countess and her husband,’ Lord Napier told John MacKay. ‘I have always hoped that they were misled by prevalent, though erroneous, views of economical and national policy; that they really believed that they were doing permanent good by [inflicting] transitory suffering; that they were not actually heartless or moved by rapacity. However this may be, I have always thought that there [will] not be a true expiation of the guilt of the great eviction till some representative of the [Stafford] family lead back a band of crofters to repeople, in part at least, the wilderness of Kildonan and Strathnaver.’⁶²

Three years prior to this Napier–MacKay exchange, parliament, in response both to Napier’s 1884 report and to pressure from the Highland Land League, had granted crofters security of tenure, thus making renewed clearance impossible. Nothing had been done, however, to meet the Land League’s further, and equally insistent, demand that people should be restored to places cleared decades earlier. It was with a view to looking into the implications of some such initiative that, in 1892, government ministers established a new royal commission, to report, its remit stated, on whether or not localities that had earlier been emptied of people were ‘capable of being cultivated to profit, or otherwise advantageously occupied, by crofters’.⁶³

Because of sheep farming’s continuing difficulties, much of the land in question had been given over to deerstalking and grouse-shooting, estate managements having found that grouse moors and deer forests were now capable of generating higher revenues than land (other than best-quality arable) in any form of agriculture. This made the remit of the 1892 inquiry, dubbed the Deer Forest Commission by the press, more contentious than it might otherwise have been, Highland landlords being determined to block crofting encroachments on to areas that, despite sheep having gone from them, continued to yield lucrative returns. Predictably, then, the Deer Forest Commission’s eventual findings – to the effect that a great deal of formerly settled land could indeed be repopulated – brought nothing in the way of instant action. Towards the nineteenth century’s close, however, parliament was persuaded to take tentative steps in the direction of what had come to be called land settlement. A new organisation, the Congested Districts Board (CDB), was made responsible for aiding the inhabitants of hard-pressed and overcrowded townships of the sort Lord Napier had heard so much about when taking evidence on the Sutherland Estate. Much of the CDB’s modest budget, it emerged, was earmarked for small-scale infrastructure projects – access roads, piers and jetties being favoured items under this heading. But some funding was available for land settlement initiatives; and, not long after the CDB’s formation in 1897, an opportunity for just such an initiative arose in Strathnaver as a result of the Sellar family deciding to sever their last links with Sutherland.

When, in 1898, Patrick Sellar junior died, his son, Patrick senior’s grandson, decided not to retain – even at a reduced rent – the Syre farm tenancy his grandfather had taken over in 1819. This development made it possible, a Highland newspaper commented, for the Sutherland Estate ‘to do something practical to repair the mischief caused by the management, or rather mismanagement, of a century ago’. But there was to be no prospect of the fourth Duke of Sutherland, the marquis and marchioness’s great-grandson, atoning in the way Lord Napier had suggested he might for the Stafford family’s role in the clearances. He had no intention, the duke made clear, of renting any part of Strathnaver to crofters. He might consider the transfer of about a third of the farm to the CDB, with the board, rather than the Sutherland Estate, thus becoming responsible for resettlement.* But any such transfer would be on the basis that the CDB pay a full market price for the land on offer. No concession, not even a token one, would be contemplated. Asked privately by a government minister, Lord Balfour, Secretary of State for Scotland in the Conservative government of the time, ‘to reconsider the question of price’ with a view to facilitating a settlement scheme of obvious symbolic significance, the Duke of Sutherland was adamant. The CDB, if intent on installing crofting families in Strathnaver, must meet his terms. If unable to do so, the board could go hang.64

It took the better part of three years for the CDB to finalise its purchase of an area now designated North Syre. But at last, in May 1901, this area – located, the board announced, in a ‘beautiful glen’ containing a ‘considerable’ quantity of cultivable land – ceased to be part of the Sutherland Estate. Soon North Syre’s former arable had been divided into 29 substantial crofts. Because demand for those crofts was in excess of supply, applicants for them were interviewed by CDB personnel. The successful candidates included Donald John MacKay. Prior to this he had been living at Ardvinglass, one of the townships created at the time of the clearances on rocky, windswept and formerly uninhabited terrain in the vicinity of Strathy Point. There MacKay occupied a croft of around three acres and shared, with several neighbours, a 60-acre common pasture. MacKay’s Strathnaver croft, its fields a lot more productive than their Ardvinglass equivalents, was around six times the size of his previous holding. Still more striking was the disparity between Ardvinglass’s common grazing and the grazing in which MacKay now had a stake. The second was nearly 200 times more extensive than the first.⁶⁵

When, in October 1901, the CDB’s board members toured North Syre, they were ‘greatly pleased,’ they reported, ‘with the excellent houses which were being erected . . . [on] sites overlooking the River [Naver]’. One of these, still to be seen today, was built by Donald John MacKay. Not far away, on the opposite bank of the Naver, is the site of Rhiloisk, cleared by Patrick Sellar in the wake of his acquiring his first Strathnaver farm. Following the destruction of their homes by one of Sellar’s evicting parties, Rhiloisk’s inhabitants had been moved (as described earlier) to other parts of Strathnaver. Later, when the strath was emptied completely, they had been moved again, this time to the north coast.⁶⁶

One of the Rhiloisk families treated in this way included a baby girl born in Strathnaver in 1817. When in her early twenties, this girl, Barbara MacKay, married William MacKay, whose parents had been ejected from another of Strathnaver’s cleared townships, Rivigill. William and Barbara had several children. The youngest, born in 1859, was Donald John MacKay who, when in his fortie s, quit Ardvinglass for North Syre. By that point, Donald John’s father was dead. But his mother was not, and shortly after he took over his CDB croft she left Ardvinglass, where she and Donald John had shared a home, to join him. This means that when, a year or two into the twentieth century, this elderly woman travelled – probably by horse and cart – from Ardvinglass to Syre, she made a unique journey. Among the thousands of victims of the Sutherland clearances there was only one, Barbara MacKay, who managed at last to come home.67

The part of Strathnaver acquired by the CDB in 1901 and still in crofting occupation extends along the River Naver’s western bank for several miles. It comprises, however, only a small proportion of the area affected by Strathnaver’s clearance. Depopulated localities on the Naver’s eastern bank – Rhifail, Rivigill, Rhiloisk and Rossal, for instance – remain uninhabited. So do the strath’s upper reaches, including Achoul, Grumbeg, Grummore and other former settlements around Loch Naver.

What is true of the bulk of Strathnaver is true of the Strath of Kildonan and Strathbrora in their entirety. Occasionally there have been attempts to alter this. The one with most prospect of success occurred in the early 1960s when the Highland Panel, an officially appointed group set up to advise government ministers on Highland policy, recommended that land settlement of the sort undertaken more than half a century before at North Syre should be considered in Kildonan. In 1965 this proposal was referred to the then newly established Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB), a government agency with responsibilities akin to those the CDB (wound up in 1912) had exercised much earlier. It was expected, said Robert Maclennan, elected Sutherland’s MP in 1966, that the board would ‘open up to more productive and socially useful purposes’ a strath that had become, Maclennan complained, ‘the exclusive preserve’ of ‘sporting estates’. In the event, however, the HIDB ducked this challenge. All concept of renewed land settlement, whether in the Strath of Kildonan or anywhere else, was rejected – the board going so far as to dismiss a request from crofters in Marrel and neighbouring townships that they be provided with some additional grazings in the strath.⁶⁸

Today, therefore, the Strath of Kildonan remains – as far as human presence is concerned – much as it was in the years following its clearance. Strathbrora too is mostly deserted, despite its containing, or so the Deer Forest Commission was assured at September 1893 hearings in Golspie, ‘as good land . . . as you can get in any strath in Sutherland’. Prior to its inhabitants being ‘cruelly removed . . . to make way for sheep’, commission members were told, Strathbrora had contained ‘sixty-two townships’. Today those townships – their names read into the record of Deer Forest Commission proceedings – have been abandoned for 200 years. But to walk Strathbrora’s single-track and unfrequented road – ideally on a summer’s evening when the westering sun picks out the tiniest landscape feature – is to see each long-abandoned settlement’s story ‘written’, as Francis Napier so memorably put it, ‘in indelible characters on the surface of the soil’.69

Look across Loch Brora from the Strathbrora road near a point where the loch narrows to a couple of hundred yards, and you see, just over the water, the green fields that once surrounded Carrol, which James Sutherland, William Sutherland and their families left for Pictou when, in June 1820, the last of Carrol’s houses were unroofed. Continue for a mile or two past Gordonbush, where the Marchioness of Stafford came later that same year to call on Gabriel Reed, and you glimpse, half a mile or so the south, the site of what was once Kilbraur, home, until its clearance, to Donald Baillie, who became another of Strathbrora’s Pictou-bound emigrants and who could have been the source (it is tempting to speculate) of the earliest surviving poem about Patrick Sellar and his eventual descent (in the poem at any rate) into the fires of hell.

Nearer hand – within a stone’s throw of the road in fact – are the remnants of what is reputed to have been the SSPCK’s Strathbrora school. Here (or if not here, nearby) when Gordon Ross was at the start of his teaching career, there must have been no lack of children’s laughter, shouting, chatter to be heard. Now, except for the rattle of water in the nearby river, all is silent.

Walking on from this spot by way of the bridge that crosses Allt a’ Mhuilinn, you pass close to the graveyard where Katherine Ross, Gordon’s daughter, would have been buried when – shortly after this little girl, her mother and her sisters were evicted – she died of whooping cough. Also buried there – though graves of that time seldom have stones or markers of any sort – must be Hugh MacKay, just four years old when, like Katherine Ross, he died in the aftermath of Ascoilemore’s May 1821 clearance by Domhnall Sgios and his men.

Evidence of Ascoilemore’s destruction, the Marquis of Stafford was told by Hugh MacKay’s fur trader father Donald, would be ‘visible to the end of time’. This evidence has certainly lasted into the twenty-first century. It can be seen, in the shape of one of Sutherland’s countless sets of house foundations, by anyone who takes the trouble to go looking.

Just beyond Ascoilemore’s now partly wooded site is the hillside where little Hugh’s part-Cree half-brothers, William and Donald, came with their father’s cattle. From this hillside, you get a wide view of a big part of Strathbrora. Next to no present-day dwellings are in sight. But signs of human impact are everywhere in this landscape: field systems dating from the Middle Ages; a ruined broch; traces of Iron Age, Bronze Age and even earlier habitation. Much of Strathbrora, or so it seems from this vantage point, was occupied – and sometimes densely occupied – for at least 50 centuries. In relation to what went before, then, Strathbrora’s present emptiness – this product of ‘improvement’ – is very, very strange. For that reason, no one should expect it to endure.

One day there will be again, as there was for millennia, a substantial population in Strathbrora. One day there will be homes in places where so many homes were burned down, so many people driven out. When that happens – 10, 50, 100 or more years from now – the clearance of Strathbrora will be seen, in the context of the strath’s long history, as an indefensible departure from the way things were and from the way they should have been.

* This, it should be stressed, has not been established. John Sutherland was accompanied to Hudson Bay in 1813 by his wife and several children. Not every member of his family left with him, however. This creates the possibility of a direct link between Angus and John. But there may be no such link and Angus’s connection with the Selkirk ‘expedition’ might lie elsewhere. This footnote is inserted in the hope that one of the many family historians taking an interest in the Kildonan emigrants of 1813 and 1815 might one day provide a definitive answer.

* Helmsdale Castle, on rising ground south of the harbour, was demolished in the 1970s.

* Such recovery as took place in Highland sheep farming in the twentieth century depended, for the most part, on government subsidy. It also depended on a switch from the production of wool (the post-clearance cash crop but one that has yielded no worthwhile returns in modern times) to the rearing of lambs sold off each autumn for fattening, or finishing, by low-ground farmers. This trade too has encountered problems. At the time of writing in 2015 there are fewer sheep in Sutherland than at any point in 200 years.

* ‘The present [third] duke’, Napier had written of his ‘expiation’ proposal, ‘is now too far gone to do it, [but] his son [the duke with whom the CDB dealt] might still collect some of the grandchildren of the fugitive people, and lead them home.’