Before the middle of the eighteenth century the vast majority of Scottish families, whether living in the Highlands or rural Lowlands, had a place on the land, however small, as tenants, subtenants and cottars. A century later, and in many parts much earlier, that old world had passed away into history across the Lowlands and had also changed radically north of the Highland line.
In the Lowlands by the 1830s only a few had legal rights to land for specified periods of time as possessors of farm leases. There was but one regional exception to the pattern – the settlement of crofter families in the moorlands of the north-east counties as an economical way of bringing waste land into regular cultivation. But there, as everywhere else in the Lowlands, the old landholding population of cottars had vanished. An entire social class which had numbered between a quarter to a third of the population in many rural parishes in old Scotland was no more. Those who now worked the improved landscape were landless wage-earning servants and labourers. Rural tradesmen with smallholdings within the fermetouns of the past had abandoned them when they were broken up and often moved off to neighbouring villages, where they paid rent for their homes and sold their skills and wares in the competitive market place for monetary return. In areas of pastoral husbandry like the Borders, the hill country of southern Lanarkshire and the western parishes of Angus and Aberdeenshire, the development of large-scale stock farming for sheep and cattle squeezed out the people and left whole districts stripped of the indigenous population. In some parts only the scattered cottages of shepherds and a few hamlets survived to mark where human habitation had once existed. The loss of landholding must have caused stress, pain and anxiety as a centuries-old way of life came to an end within a few decades in the later eighteenth century. But the majority of the dispossessed in the Lowlands were spared large-scale destitution or long-term unemployment because critically the first phase of the agricultural and industrial revolutions down to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 significantly increased demand for rural labour. Former tenants and cottars might have to move and find work in villages, towns and cities. Many who had once had the status of rent-paying farmers faced downward mobility into the massed ranks of the landless wage earners. But there is little evidence that many of them were thrown on the mercies of the local Poor Law authorities as a consequence of their displacement. The cushion of rising employment levels during the period of major structural agrarian change partly helps to account for the intriguing level of silence and stability in the Lowland countryside at the time. Nor should the fundamental point be forgotten that many people in the countryside, and perhaps the majority, left for the towns and overseas not because they were forced to do so but because they saw there greater opportunities for advancement and a better standard of living.
In the Highlands, the patterns of change were more convulsive but varied across the region. On the fringes, in southern Argyll, Highland Perthshire, eastern Inverness-shire and Easter Ross, much of the Lowland style of farming was replicated but to a more limited and nuanced extent. The great river valleys which breached the Highland massif from end to end were now by the 1840s for the most part colonized by sheep walks of immense breadth and extent. The people whose ancestors had worked the land in these straths from time immemorial had gone, sometimes across the Atlantic or to the cities and towns of the south or been removed to live in minuscule crofts on the coastlands or barren moors in the interior judged by landowners to have some potential for reclamation by hard labour. Many of the settlements optimistically planned to support a thriving fishery for the crofters in the eighteenth century, like Tobermory, Bunessan, Lochcarron, Plockton, Lochaline, Tobermory, Dornie, Shieldaig and others, now became slum villages, packed with the dispossessed and destitute poor in the wake of the extensive clearances which became common after c.1820.
But it was indeed ironic, in light of the notoriety of the ‘Highland clearances’, that many crofters still clung on to some land, despite much trouble, strife and misery, along the coasts of the western and northern Highlands and on many of the Hebridean islands, at the same time as total landlessness became the lived experience of the vast majority of people in the rural Lowlands. At the census of 1861 the four Highland counties, even after famine and clearance, had a population of nearly 300,000, 36,000 more than in 1801. The Highland total was also some 20,000 greater than the Border counties at the same census. Of course, there had been a substantial haemorrhage of people through migration and emigration in the intervening years without which the population totals would have been much higher. But that was the pattern in all rural counties in Scotland in Victorian times. By the later nineteenth century, demographic historians have conclusively shown that only a single region, the west-central counties of concentrated industrialism, was actually gaining people from elsewhere. All other country parishes from the far north to the English border by that time were losing their inhabitants by net out-migration, sometimes on a large scale. Several of the smaller Hebridean islands like Eigg, Muck, Ulva, Lismore and Rum had been swept clear of their inhabitants by clearance. But elsewhere, particularly in the Outer Hebrides of Barra, Harris, Lewis and South Uist, population recovered after the destitution, widespread removals and compulsory emigrations of the famine years. Having a stake in the land, however small, was actually more common in the Western Highlands and Islands per head of regional population than in the Lowland counties at the end of the era of dispossession. And after the passage of the Crofters Holdings Act of 1886 those who dwelled on these small lots of land were protected from summary eviction and rack renting.
Clearance is an omnibus term with a whole range of implications. The forcing out of people by factors, sheriff officers and police in the Highlands is the most notorious and best documented in press sources of the time and has by far the highest profile in popular understanding of clearance. However, a myriad set of influences and pressures made for loss of land in addition to these familiar and dramatic events. These included: the impact of increases in rental; division of larger holdings to impose living space for soldier veterans among existing tenantry; landlord unwillingness to accept accumulation of rent arrears; refusal to provide relief when crops failed; prohibition of working on kelp shores; confiscation of cattle to meet accumulated arrears; refusal to assign leases to sitting tenants; relocation of cottars and small tenants to crofting townships and new villages; punitive prohibition of illicit whisky making so undermining local peasant economies; rigorous prevention of subdivision of land among kinfolk; long-run attrition of multi-tenancies until single occupiers became the sole tenants on compact enlarged farms; and the combined interaction of internal pressures to leave coupled with the lure of land overseas or higher wages and better opportunities in towns. Nature as well as man could also have a critical effect on migration from those parts where people lived close to the edge of subsistence. In the Highlands, for instance, serious harvest failure in 1836–7, followed by the even more devastating impact of the potato blight between 1846 and 1855, must have forced many to flee their holdings without notices of eviction needing to be enforced. In later times too it was more common for townships to be abandoned rather than cleared.
With the exception of the famine, all of these factors to a greater or lesser extent were common across the length and breadth of Scotland and not confined to any one region. This, therefore, was indeed the Scottish clearances. If so, a fundamental question then comes into focus. If dispossession was Scotland-wide, why has loss of land come to be exclusively associated in the popular mind with the Highlands?
Dispossession was undeniably more disruptive in most of Gaeldom and collective acts of clearance more common and dramatic. Landowners broke up traditional townships by adding them to sheep walks and introducing crofting settlements which were often populated by peasant families displaced to make way for large pastoral farms. These crofts were not designed to provide a full living subsistence from land alone. On the contrary, they were shaved down to a planned minimum size in order to force the occupying families to labour in fishing and kelp gathering and burning. Many proprietors also encouraged the unregulated splitting of land among cottars and squatters by packing more people into their estates to expand the labour force for these bi-employments.
However, the whole system proved to be not only unstable but ephemeral, as most growth sectors collapsed or stagnated after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, leaving a hugely increased population anchored in pitifully small patches of land, where they scraped a living from potatoes and meagre earnings from temporary migration for work in the Lowlands. Eventually, as far as the proprietors were concerned, only sheep farming offered a viable and long-term economic alternative. But, tragically, pastoralism offered little in the way of employment and was more of a mortal threat to the possession of land by the peasantry. Because of factors outside their own direct control, west Highland and Hebridean landlords certainly had fewer long-term options than their Lowland counterparts as no sustained industrial or urban development became established in the region which could have drawn people willingly from the land. Nonetheless, geographical impediment and market influence were not the only reasons why the region eventually degenerated into an overpopulated rural slum. Many landowners also bore some responsibility for this disastrous outcome.
A few years after the potatoes failed in 1846 some proprietors, especially in the Hebrides, unleashed an unprecedented wave of larger-scale clearances. Some of them were enforced with casual brutality by estate factors and sheriff officers on very poor communities which had not entirely recovered from the hunger and immiseration of famine. The objective was explicit and overt: it was once and for all to cut out from the population those families deemed incapable of paying secure rental, together with many of the cottar and squatter class which paid nothing at all. To ensure that they were fully and finally expelled from the Highlands, schemes of ‘compulsory emigration’ were introduced to transport the ‘redundant population’ across the seas to Canada and Australia, from there never to return. There can be little doubt that racist dogma also scarred the history of this period. The correspondence of relief officials, government servants, trustees of estates and opinion columns in some Scottish newspapers abound with references to the lazy, feckless and inadequate Celts, who had to be forced from their habitual indolence to earn their bread abroad so that the Highlands might be spared the ‘Leprosy of Ireland’. Nothing close to this kind of trauma ever took place in the Lowlands during the entire cycle of dispossession.
There is also the issue of the traditional values of the Gael to be considered. They included the belief, inherited from the old martial society, in the right to land and, even after the death of clanship, that the élites had an obligation to protect the people on the lands in return for rental and service. It hardly needs saying that forced eviction was likely to be the grossest violation of that expectation. Also important was the vexed issue of ‘land given in return for sons’, a key feature of the recruiting mania during the three great wars between 1756 and 1815. Sometimes the agreements between proprietors, tenants and cottars to secure holdings in return for military service were entered into for fixed periods, but others were for life. These solemn contracts did lead to the deaths of fathers and brothers in battle and from disease overseas. When they were broken and families cleared as landowners went bankrupt in the bad times after 1820, bitterness, resentment and a sense of betrayal were likely to be aroused and passed down through the generations in the oral culture and traditions of the people.
Expectations of this kind had long gone from the Lowlands by the time dispossession began there in earnest. This is not to suggest that having a stake in the land was not important to tenants and cottars elsewhere in Scotland. Before the age of improvement the connection between land and people was fundamental: to be without a patch of land in a subsistence-based society threatened not only penury but survival itself. Yet the values did differ. Traces of benevolent paternalism existed in the Lowlands after the 1750s, but essentially the relationship between landlord and tenant had by then become economic in nature. The land was seen as an asset from which proper value should be extracted. The tack or lease specified the length of tenure to a holding for a given period and there was broad social acceptance that the proprietor had a right to take back the tenancy at the end of the agreed term of occupancy, or indeed even earlier if any of the clauses in it were neglected or broken.
By comparison with the north-west and the islands, therefore, dispossession seems to have caused much less dislocation in most parts away from the upland districts of the Borders and other zones of hill country where pastoralism offered the most profitable option by the later eighteenth century. Indeed, even before the rural revolution itself there had long been a widespread culture of mobility among Lowland cottars, servants and small tenants. They seem to have moved regularly between farms, estates, communities and parishes within the bounds of traditional localities and regions. Historians of migration have used this level of short-distance mobility to help explain the basis of the extensive long-distance movement to northern and central Europe and Ulster in the early modern period.
In addition, the consolidation of farms under single husbandmen in arable districts was a gradual and protracted process, mainly carried out by the normal method of letting and reletting of holdings at end of term. Cottars were forced to surrender their plots of land, but there was the possibility of finding work in rural villages and small towns, which, unlike those of the same type in the Highlands, often had a sustainable economic future because of the successful expansion of country textile industries. But the vexatious nature of that process should not be underestimated. Cottar families left the traditional townships for an uncertain future in which new opportunities existed but could not necessarily be guaranteed. The experience was one of dispersal and not always of carefully planned transfer from an old to a new environment. The silence of the people should not be interpreted as the happy acceptance of a life-changing process.
It was, however, their good fortune that during the first stages of improvement demand for labour on arable and mixed farms increased and for a time wages of servants and day labourers rose also in order to secure enough workers. A massive advantage, of course, was the industrialization and urbanization of the Lowlands, which took place close to most rural districts. This conjuncture helped draw people off the land and so made Highland-type congestion less likely in the southern countryside. The methods of hiring and housing agricultural labour also ensured that over time a rough equilibrium of supply and demand for male and female farm servants was normally achieved in most years. Those unable to gain a hire at the fairs had to move on. Accommodation went with the job so to be without a fee was also to be without a place to live. As a result it was often the slum districts of the cities which became over-populated with migrants from the countryside, rather than the rural parishes of Lowlands Scotland.
The issue of comparative chronologies should also be taken into account. Dispossession in the Lowlands took place in the period from the later seventeenth century but outside the Borders was concentrated in the decades between the 1760s and the 1820s. This was a time when landlord authority and the rights of property were rarely effectively challenged. When they were, as in the early 1790s by the forces of French and Paineite-inspired radicalism, the regime showed tough resilience, and opposition to the rule of the propertied élite soon disintegrated. This remained a rigidly hierarchical society and the widespread impact of the writings of the classical economists like Smith, Ricardo and Mill gave continued intellectual legitimacy to the rights of private property and freedom of enterprise within the market.
The earlier time frame of Lowland dispossession also meant that most of the physical remains of the old townships and cottar huts had long disappeared by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Lowland improvement was nothing if not thorough. The stoneworks from traditional townships were recycled to create new buildings and construct the many miles of drystone dykes and walls which soon stretched unendingly across the countryside. Rural areas took on an antique mantle as if the farm steadings, roads and fields created in the age of improvement had existed since time immemorial. Only in some upland districts in the Borders and a few other places can some traces still be found of the marks of runrig cultivation.
In contrast, the story of clearance and emigration retains a visible physicality in the Highlands and Islands, with the many ruins of abandoned settlements surrounded by old cultivation beds covered in bracken. What happened in the past is much more obvious. In part this is because clearances in the Highlands had a quite different chronology from elsewhere in Scotland. They began later than in the south and still had only limited impact by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. They also lasted for nearly a hundred years, a much longer time frame than dispossession in the Lowlands. Not until the later 1850s did mass removals come to an end in the north-west Highlands and Islands. Indeed, some of the most controversial and highly publicized evictions took place earlier in that decade.
Moreover, by the 1840s the climate of opinion in Britain about unregulated free enterprise was slowly beginning to change. While laissez-faire ideology remained dominant, a new strain of humanitarianism started to question some of the established certainties of economic liberalism. The Victorians were not simply rigid ideologues obsessed with private interest and material gain as the stereotype has it. The ‘Condition of England’ question was coming to the fore and with it a host of social issues such as child labour, factory legislation, female labour and the plight of the poor. Larger questions about property and equality and the obligations of society were also beginning to emerge. It was this mood change which helped to make the novels of Charles Dickens and his depiction of contemporary social problems and abuses so popular.
This broader context helps to explain the developing sympathy for the plight of the Highland people and the vitriolic condemnation of landlordism published in pamphlets and articles by the likes of Donald McLeod, Hugh Miller, Donald Ross and others in the 1840s and 1850s. Crucially, these authors came to describe clearances not simply as a consequence of economic crisis but as a social and cultural disaster which threatened the destruction of an ancient civilization. No charge of this kind was ever levelled at the removals in the Lowlands during the eighteenth century. The national press both in Scotland and in England now started to send reporters to the Highlands who published stories to describe some of the more lurid clearance events, especially those which took place during the potato famine. An influential readership existed for these reports among the upper classes both north and south of the Border since the Highlands by this time had become a mecca for élite tourism and deer stalking. Press commentaries, together with political concerns about the paucity of recruits for the famed Highland regiments during the Crimean War (1853–6) as a result of rising emigration, attracted concern for the people suffering from the evictions and their consequences.
Then, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ‘the land question’ came into focus as a paramount issue in British politics. Landlordism was now under sustained political attack, fuelled in part by the publication of John Bateman’s comprehensive survey, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1883), which showed in detail the quite remarkable concentration of landed power in the United Kingdom. The disputes in Ireland and Highland Scotland came to be publicized as confirmation of the abuses of landlord authority, especially during and after the Irish Land War and the crofting agitation of the 1880s. The Crofters’ War and the subsequent investigation by the Royal Commission chaired by Lord Napier put the clearances in the Highlands well and truly on the British political map. Oral evidence collected by the Commission from aged eye witnesses to the events of the past proved to be particularly telling. At no time did dispossession in the Lowlands ever attract even a fraction of this public attention. The Lowland removals had ended many decades before the 1880s. In the public and literary domain they were already lost to history. Clearances to the late-Victorian mind became exclusively associated with Highland Scotland.
The tide was certainly flowing strongly against Highland landlords by the later nineteenth century and given powerful additional impetus by the publication of Alexander Mackenzie’s The History of the Highland Clearances (1883). Mackenzie, a Highlander from Gairloch in Wester Ross, was editor of the Celtic Magazine and one of the most accomplished Scottish journalists of the age. His achievement was to bring together all the scattered critical reports on clearances into a single large volume which became the definitive guide to landlord iniquity and the most widely read handbook about the evictions. It strongly influenced the modern writings of John Prebble, Ian Grimble and others who successfully embedded dispossession of the clansmen at the heart of a Greek tragedy set in the Scottish Highlands. A famed warrior race which suffered brutal repression in the eighteenth century by the British state, was first abandoned and then betrayed by its tribal leaders, to whom they and their ancestors had given blood loyalty for centuries. The motive of the former clan chiefs, now landlords, was base: nothing other than the temptation of greed and the lust for riches. In a final act of treachery, the betrayed were forced off the land and shipped across the oceans to far-off countries. They left behind them empty glens and crumbling settlements as silent testimony of man’s inhumanity to man.
The narrative is compelling and poignant but one in which some uncomfortable truths rarely intrude: the limitations of natural endowment in the Highlands; a marked increase of population on poor land with no long-term alternative for subsistence or employment for a people who had always lived close to the edge of subsistence in the old clan-based society; the destruction of infant Highland manufacturing by Lowland competition; bankruptcy of the traditional landed class; the overwhelming power of market capitalism; and the absence of any viable long-term alternative to pastoral husbandry. These were all factors of fundamental importance and cannot be ignored in any serious examination of the history of the Highlands. There is no question, however, that those who seek to defend the people affected by these forces have in the main avoided or downplayed them. Instead, they have opted for the single explanation of human wickedness, a resolution of the problem which does not fit with the historical evidence which is now to hand.
An impartial verdict on Highland landlordism during the age of clearances is unlikely to reach clear-cut conclusions. Some of the wealthier magnates, such as the Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland, and a few of the new breed of tycoon-landowners, like Sir James Matheson in Lewis, spent small fortunes for a time in attempts to bring viable economies and employment opportunities to their estates, but to little or no avail. Their doctrinaire plans failed to bring the people with them. Distance from markets and unrelenting competition from steam- and coal-based Lowland industrialism were also just too powerful. Some proprietors agonized over decisions which would lead to evictions. Others avoided clearance for many years against the advice of their managers, although it was in their economic interest to have acted sooner. Only when properties became insolvent and hereditary families had to abandon their patrimonies did the trustees for their creditors act to enforce the most draconian removals of all. It is also the case that many Highland landowners won praise from both government and the Free Church during the first crisis years of the potato famine for the provision of relief at their own expense to the starving poor of their estates. Civil servants publicly congratulated them on their support which in their view was in stark and positive contrast with the inadequacy of their counterparts across the Irish Sea. Yet benevolence soon changed to systematic policies of expulsion as the Highland crisis persisted and deepened.
Indeed, there is another side to Highland landlordism which warrants consideration. Human will and subjective decision, underplayed by some historians in their focus on the power of demographic and economic forces, must also be considered in any satisfactory analysis. In the case of most landed families, the temptations of consumerism seem to have had an easy victory over financial rectitude. Material display in houses, internal furnishings and clothing was deemed essential by the Victorian élite to confirm and perpetuate gentlemanly status and social rank. But many Highland lairds seem to have been congenitally incapable of trying to live within their means on a sustained basis and of tailoring their lifestyles in the southern capitals to the modest incomes of their properties in the north. There was, for example, the extraordinary case of Sir Duncan Campbell of Barcaldine, the owner of extensive lands near Oban in Argyll. His finances had been in serious difficulty for some time and in 1842 the 30,000-acre estate, in the ownership of his family for centuries, was sold to pay off debts. Yet, on the eve of this disaster, Campbell had a huge extension built in the 1830s to Barcaldine House, which was designed by a fashionable London architect and intended to provide space for a new library. This in effect was nothing other than an act of financial suicide.
Moreover, the radical restructuring of their estates by several landlords in the western Highlands and Islands in the late eighteenth century led to the widespread introduction of tiny smallholdings which were not viable in the long run as sources of subsistence and led to a further splintering of crofts and even more dependency on the potato crop while population continued to rise. The maintenance of some connection with the land, however slight, served to impede permanent migration and instead encouraged reliance on temporary movement to the seasonal labour markets of the Lowlands.
The objective of this crofting policy was to exploit what some at least among the landed class knew to be ephemeral wartime profits from kelp and other enterprises. This can only be described as an outrageous gamble. The windfall gains were mainly squandered on servicing debt and consumer expenditure and little on long-term investment which may or may not have significant long-term benefit. The croft system which proprietors embedded in the north-west and the islands also made it impossible for a middling tenant class to emerge which might have given the region some resilience in the difficult years after 1815. But, in addition, landlords aided and abetted the reckless subdivision of holdings among kinfolk and most took little action to impose effective controls even when the rationale for packing estates with labour power vanished after c.1820. This negligence then led eventually and inevitably to further large-scale clearances as wartime employment and profits dried up in the years of peace and destitution spread across the crofting townships like a malignant virus.