The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600

Introduction

I have thought, written and taught on several of the issues in this book for nearly forty years. But this is the first time I have tried to bring all the parts of a fascinating historical jigsaw into a single framework. The main purpose of doing so is to consider through a comparative investigation the dispossession of people from land in the Highlands and rural Lowlands during that extraordinary period almost three centuries ago when it can truly be said the modern nation of Scotland was born.

In 1814 Sir Walter Scott published Waverley, Or, ’tis Sixty Years Since, a novel which opened at the time of the last Jacobite rising in 1745–6. The book quickly became an international bestseller and launched Scott into literary stardom. In the preamble to the text he has the anonymous narrator look back and comment on the previous six decades of Scottish history from the standpoint of an observer living in the second decade of the nineteenth century:

There is no European nation, which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland …

The increase of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time.

For Scott, then, the transformation of his native land was rapid, profound and comprehensive. A trio of radical developments, all interacting and taking place simultaneously from the 1760s, had changed the face and character of the country. These powerful forces were industrialization, urbanization and agricultural revolution. This book focuses on the social effects of the last of these at the time when an old Scotland began to fade into history and the new age of market capitalism was in the early stages of formation. In the history of the Scottish Highlands this period has become known as the Age of the Clearances.

The Highland clearances have not only been a central topic of historical interest but have also long entered into the popular and cultural consciousness of Scots both in the homeland and throughout the global diaspora. It is widely assumed that the removal of peasant communities took place exclusively north of the Highland line with the empty glens and remains of crumbling townships in the hill country bearing mute physical testimony to that fact. The Canadian writer of Highland ancestry Alistair MacLeod, in his short story ‘Clearances’, has his main character pay a visit to Ardnamurchan on the west Highland mainland during the Second World War. There, in the land which his forefathers had left many years before to sail across the Atlantic for a new life in Cape Breton, he begins to grasp for the first time the original meaning of ‘clearance’:

Where once people had lived in their hundreds and their thousands, there stretched out only the unpopulated emptiness of the vast estates with their sheep-covered hills or the islands which have become bird sanctuaries or shooting ranges for the well-to-do. He is himself as the descendant of victims of history and changing economic times, betrayed perhaps by politics and poverty as well.

In similar vein, the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn wrote of the deserted lands of Sutherland from where his own kinfolk, the MacKeamish Gunns, had long disappeared:

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. (Caithness and Sutherland, published 1935)

Few would deny that these evocations are both haunting and compelling. The Scottish Highlands, contrary to the image projected in countless tourist brochures, are not one of the last great wildernesses in Europe but in many parts can be more accurately described as a derelict landscape from where most of the families who once lived and worked the soil have long gone. Numerous townships which had existed from medieval times were cleared or abandoned in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth, never again to be inhabited. A number of commentators then and since have taken the view that the dispersal of the people across the seas was caused by greedy landlordism and the brazen subordination of human need to human profit.

Yet the actual historical record shows that the realities of diaspora were far from simple. Many more Gaels left the Highlands after the removals came to an end in the later 1850s than during the age of the clearances itself. Nor did evictions necessarily cause widespread depopulation in all parts of the region as they undeniably did in specific estates, glens, coasts and straths. The decennial censuses confirm that the population of the Highland counties, with the exception of Argyll, which reached its peak in 1841, continued to rise during the clearance period and only started to fall into decline after the removals came to an end. A thorough scholarly study of one parish, Morvern in west Argyll, which suffered from clearance on a particularly extensive scale, estimates that of all the people who left there in the nineteenth century probably only around a quarter did so as a direct result of eviction, and it is by no means certain that all those who were forced from their homes left the parish for elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the profile of the Highland clearances, nationally and internationally, is remarkable. By no means confined to historical writing alone, the subject has also become embedded in works of fiction, poetry and across the genres of music, drama, film, art and museology. A selection of the creative output on the subject could include: Neil Gunn, Butcher’s Broom (1934) and The Silver Darlings (1945); Fionn MacColla, And the Cock Crew (1945); Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies (1968) and Collected Poems (1992); Kathleen Fidler, The Desperate Journey (1964) – a widely read story for primary schoolchildren; John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974), a hugely popular stage play which has been reprised several times over the years; and the television film Yet Still the Blood is Strong (1984). The clearances not only have profound historical resonance but have metamorphosed into an even broader Scottish cultural and political phenomenon. Even those who would not claim to know much about the history of the nation have usually heard about the Highland clearances.

None of the works cited above, however, has ever had the popular appeal of the biggest selling Scottish history book of all time, John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances, published for the first time in 1963. Since then it has achieved world-wide sales of more than a quarter of a million copies and remains to this day the most widely read text on any aspect of Scottish history in North America. Recent research among the diaspora across the Atlantic has confirmed that the clearances are known there primarily by a reading of Prebble’s book, some historical fiction, consulting a few websites and visiting heritage centres on trips to Scotland which draw on the same written sources. The Highland Clearances is part of a Highland trilogy, Fire and Sword, which also includes Culloden (1961) and Glencoe (1966). In the foreword to Glencoe, Prebble wrote: ‘I have written this book because its story is, in a sense, a beginning to what I have already written about Culloden and the clearances – the destruction of the Highland people and their way of life.’

John Prebble (1915–2001) was born in England but emigrated, aged six, to Canada with his parents, later returning to the UK as a young boy of twelve. It is suggested that early friendships among members of the Scottish emigrant communities in Canada first stimulated his interest in Highland history. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain as an adult but left it after the end of the Second World War. However, Prebble never lost his critical approach to the human impact of market capitalism, or sympathy for its victims.

Some scholars have rubbished The Highland Clearances as a work of faction, or a fusion of fact and fiction, rather than a serious history. Predictably the book rarely features in the prescribed reading lists of Scottish universities, except perhaps as an exemplar of partisan historical interpretation. I recall a colleague once setting students the essay question: ‘Prebble’s The Highland Clearances is not a good history but it is a good novel. Discuss.’

But most readers seem not to care about the ferocious criticisms which the volume has sometimes attracted from members of the academy. For the general public, Prebble tells a compelling story in very readable prose presented as a dramatic saga of betrayal, loss, tragedy and forced exile of the Highland clans from their native glens which in his interpretation remain empty to this day as silent memorials of man’s inhumanity to man.

The author makes his own position perfectly clear from the outset: ‘This is the story of how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed. It concerns itself with people, how sheep were preferred to them, and how bayonet, truncheon and fire were used to drive them from their homes.’ The book is an accessible and fluent read, in part because the author does not even try to come to grips with any of the many challenging complexities of Highland history. Those in the dock are always the former chieftains of the clans, by the later eighteenth century transformed into commercial landlords, whose greed, Prebble insists, led them to sacrifice their erstwhile clansmen for filthy lucre. At root, indeed, the volume is concerned with a classic struggle between the forces of good (the defenceless people of the Highlands) and evil (the brutal landlords and their callous lackeys, the notorious factors (estate managers) of ill fame). Prebble’s perspective on clearances had been fashioned by almost a century of polemic, political and fictional writing which stretched back into the Victorian era. Most of the documentation in the book relies on these earlier works with little evidence of original research by the author. Almost all of this passionate oeuvre was produced at the height of Victorian controversies about clearances between the 1840s and the 1880s. It was deeply sympathetic to the people who had been displaced, strongly supportive of the vital need for land reform and bitterly hostile to what was seen as oppressive and brutal landlordism.

However, there was one significant and salient gap in the genre. No academic history of clearance based on original sources was published until the second half of the twentieth century. Popular accounts were therefore in the vanguard over many decades while the professionals lagged very far behind in their research and writing. Scottish historians in the universities before the great expansion from the 1960s were few and far between, and most of those who were active in research and writing tended to focus on the history of the independent nation before 1707. The new Burnett-Fletcher Professor of History at Aberdeen stated in his inaugural lecture in 1964 that modern Scottish history was less studied than the history of Yorkshire. Malcolm Gray’s pathbreaking The Highland Economy 1750–1850, published in 1957, was an exception, but even in that book clearances appeared only incidentally in the text. Not until 1982 did a professional historian attempt to tackle the subject in a comprehensive fashion, with the appearance of Eric Richards’s A History of the Highland Clearances. Since then a number of books have been published on aspects of clearance. The new interest in the subject from the 1960s has helped to influence current political debates in the devolved Scottish Parliament on land reform.

At the time of the clearances, there were vitriolic contemporary condemnations of landed iniquity from the pens of Robert Allister, Eric Findlater, Thomas Muloch, Donald Ross and others, though their writings have now been largely forgotten and are mainly of interest to scholars of Highland history. More influential and potent by far in the fashioning of modern thinking were the books by Donald MacLeod and Alexander Mackenzie published in the later nineteenth century. Prebble himself admitted that it was reading MacLeod’s Gloomy Memories of the Highlands of Scotland, subtitled The Extirpation of the Celtic Race from the North of Scotland, which first drew him to write on the history of the Highlands. Mackenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances (1883) was published at the time of the great crofting agitation of the 1880s and the Royal Commission chaired by Lord Napier into crofting conditions in that same decade. The book brought reports of several evictions together in one volume and catalogued the misdeeds of landlordism at considerable length. It was a formidable compendium, overtly propagandist and designed to support the crofters’ cause by publicizing the injustices of clearance. The volume was published at a time when the Liberal Party and some radical politicians were engaged in a much wider assault on the privileges of landlordism throughout Britain. Indeed, at the time clearances came to epitomize the abuse of landed power and the vital need for land reform, which from that point on was rarely off the political agenda in the years before the Great War.

The events in the Highlands also stirred much interest and condemnation outside Scotland. Most famously, Karl Marx, in Chapter 27 of Das Kapital (1867), railed against the clearances as a primary exemplar of peasant expropriation and the ‘reckless terrorism’ which had usurped communal rights in the name of private property.

Until John Prebble and Ian Grimble’s The Trial of Patrick Sellar, published in the early 1960s, few other focused accounts of the removals appeared. But literary works by Neil Gunn and Fionn MacColla had kept interest alive in the 1930s and 1940s. Earlier, scathing attacks on landed élites in general had been integral elements of the polemics by the Labour politician Tom Johnston, later Secretary of State for Scotland in Churchill’s government during the Second World War. His bestselling Our Scots Noble Families (1909) and History of the Working Classes in Scotland (1920) skilfully linked the political quest for political reform directly with the story of the removals in the Highlands.

Since Prebble wrote, others have followed his lead and sometimes gone even further in the intensity of their rhetoric. Clearances in some texts have taken on a modern meaning as harbingers of twentieth-century ethnic cleansing while others even claim in works published over the last few decades that a genocide had been committed in the Highlands and the fate of the cleared Gaels bears comparison to that of the Jews, gypsies, mental patients and homosexuals who suffered in the Nazi death camps. (See Annex A for a sample of these views.) The campaign mounted in recent years to tear down the massive statue to the first Duke of Sutherland, which towers on Ben Braggie, above the town of Golspie on the east coast of Sutherland, has been justified because it is ‘the Murderer’s Monument’. The 100-foot memorial to the Duke, or the ‘Mannie’ as it is known locally, has had graffiti sprayed on it with the word ‘Monster’ in green paint. As recently as 2011 two large sandstone sections of the plinth were removed and more stones have been extracted from it since then. The police believe there is an ongoing campaign to topple the edifice once and for all.

It was of some significance that The Highland Clearances first achieved bestseller status in Scotland during the late 1960s and 1970s, when the country first began to experience the early stages of deindustrialization and rising levels of unemployment as the postwar boom petered out and politically Scotland started to move mainly to the left. For some the history of the evictions became a symbol for the emerging tragedy of an economy in decline, the social impact of deindustrialization sometimes being described as a modern clearance.

This was also the time when Scottish nationalism finally achieved some electoral purchase with Winnie Ewing’s famous victory in the Hamilton by-election of 1967. Nationalism, clearances and victimhood soon became intimately linked by some polemicists, a tendency which has continued to the present day through the proliferation of social media. The contentions were that the historic tragedy of the Gaels had taken place during the Union and sometimes also, against all the evidence, that English landowners and sheep farmers were mainly responsible for the draconian acts of eviction.

The roots of Scottish heritage were starting to attract new interest at the same time as part of a broader ethnic revival in folk culture, tales and song which was proving popular throughout the Western world. Genealogy and family history became fashionable as more and more people became interested in finding out where they had come from and the origins of their personal identities. It was in those decades too that the first glimmers of sartorial neo-Highlandism started to come to the fore. Kilts, sporrans and tartans, formerly favoured almost exclusively by the county set and Scottish military, began to be worn more often at weddings, formal events and graduation ceremonies, though the remarkable universality of Highland dress at those occasions still lay in the future. As Highlandism became more influential, Highland symbolism came to be even more significant as an important marker of Scottish identity, so ensuring that the saga of the clearances could now be incorporated into the heritage of all Scots whatever their ancestral local and regional background. This neo-Highlandism built on the huge earlier influence of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels in Victorian times which invested the Highlands with an extraordinary romantic aura and magical appeal.

John Prebble himself never claimed to be a historian and always referred to himself as a historical writer. He seems to have been surprised and somewhat taken aback by the storm of criticism generated by his book. Some thought the furore simply reflected jealousy on the part of an academic establishment whose works might be scholarly and rigorous but could never hope to achieve a fraction of Prebble’s sales. It is also fair to say that he had tackled an important and controversial subject which most historians up until that point had studiously ignored or consciously avoided. But scholars were also right to be concerned that a book which some of them believed to be riven by bias and distortion, as well as being under-researched and devoid of much critical perspective, had been widely accepted by the public as the authentic chronicle of clearance.

Yet Prebble’s publishing success is only the most remarkable example of the lure of the Scottish Highlands for all kinds of writers and artists. Academic historians have also succumbed to the same seduction in recent times. At the last count, more than fifty research-based books have been published since about 1980 on aspects of the history of the Highlands since the eighteenth century. The appeal and romance of the Jacobite Risings partly explain this phenomenon, though books on that subject make up a relatively small proportion of the overall publication list. One distinguished but sceptical professor a few years ago was so annoyed by this explosion of writing on one region that he wrote an article in a learned journal protesting that there was simply ‘too much Highland history’. But his complaint had no effect as studies of the Highlands continued to pour from the university presses. The professor was undeniably correct, however, to claim a gross imbalance in scholarly productivity. Over the last four decades, fewer than half a dozen monographs have been published on the history of the rural Lowlands, the part of the country where the great majority of non-urban Scottish people lived, not only today but at the time of the evictions.

Does this very low profile imply that a concept such as ‘the Lowland clearances’ is either myth or a most remarkable sidelining of a central part of modern Scottish history? Certainly the idea remains controversial, even for some historians, and as a modern coinage has yet to achieve much appeal or interest among the general public. Lowland rural society has in fact long been one of the Cinderella subjects of Scottish history. Scotland had become one of the most urbanized countries on earth by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and it is perhaps not surprising that a nation which has overwhelmingly lived in towns and cities for generations has lost interest in much of its rural past.

Of course, in addition, and crucially, the Lowlands cannot match in any way the human appeal of the story north of the Highland line, set as it is against a background of romantic mythology and world-renowned natural beauty. The Highlands are more than a geographical region for most Scots but have become an iconic land which helps to define their identity and has repeatedly been used to imagine the Scottish nation in story, art, music and film. That unofficial national anthem (or dirge, depending on one’s opinion), ‘Flower of Scotland’, has the famous line: ‘That fought and died for / your wee bit hill and glen’.

For much of the rest of the world, indeed, a once renowned Victorian centre of industry has metamorphosed into a Highland country. The ‘land of the mountain and the flood’ adorns numerous tourist posters, and the familiar symbols of Scottish identity, tartan, kilts, clans and bagpipes, are all of Highland origin. When Europeans ‘play Scots’, as groups of people in several countries of northern Europe, stretching from Russia to Holland, have bizarrely begun to do in recent years, they wear Highland dress, take part in Highland games, become members of pipe bands and masquerade as kilted soldiers in military enactments.fn1 It is said that, during his numerous popular concerts throughout the world, the renowned violinist/conductor André Rieu and his orchestra achieve most emotional impact on audiences with the haunting tune ‘Highland Cathedral’, composed by two Germans, Ulrich Roever and Michael Korb, for a Highland Games held in Germany in 1982. The music is usually set against the backdrop of a Highland castle and massed pipe bands ranked across the stage. Highland culture, whether in authentic or invented form, has an extraordinary glamour which has marginalized the history of the rural Lowlands.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the USA. At the last count, there were 160 American ‘clan societies’, nearly 2,000 pipe bands, over 150 Highland-dancing schools and seventy Highland Games. The sense of identity of those who take part depends on a cult of Highlandism invented and embroidered in Scotland during Victorian times. Many third- and fourth-generation American Scots share the view that Scottish emigration across the Atlantic came from the Highlands and was initiated by force and coercion. The boring reality is that the vast majority left from the farms, towns and cities of the Lowlands and were mainly attracted to North America because they saw it as a fabled land of opportunity to achieve a better life. The mythology, however, has it that the ancestors were driven from their homeland by the collapse of the Jacobite Risings, post-Culloden ethnic cleansing and, above all, by ‘the clearances’. The key sources for these beliefs are John Prebble’s books, a few novels and films, and more recently the hugely popular Outlander fantasy series, now widely televised, by the American author Diana Gabaldon, which is based on time travel between the 1940s and the eighteenth century. ‘Roots Tourism’ to Scotland has a similar bias. Whatever the geographical origins of their families, visitors often admit to feeling a strong and special empathy with the Highlands and its history of exile, victimhood and dispossession. The story is told of one Texan lady of Scottish ancestry who was much disappointed when genealogical researchers reported that her forebears came from the industrial Lowland town of Motherwell rather than a cleared township in Skye.

It would be impossible to alter the marginalization of the rural Lowlands in popular culture as Highlandism and its associated mythologies are just too deeply embedded and potent in the popular imagination for such an attempt to have any chance of success. However, it might be more realistic to address the much more limited question of historiographical imbalance in relation to the single issue of dispossession from land. The definition of ‘clearance’ is now subject to broader scholarly interpretation than it was in the nineteenth century, when the term came into popular usage for the first time. Then it referred exclusively to the removal, usually by force, of traditional peasant communities in the Highlands in order to make way for sheep farms. But modern scholarship has shown that that time-honoured concept of ‘the clearances’ cannot capture the full range and complexity of the actual historical experience of dispossession.

The historical geographer Robert Dodgshon has argued convincingly on the basis of research published in recent years that:

whilst the wholesale clearance of touns (the standard farm unit in Scotland before improvement) to make way for sheep is still rightly seen as the prime means by which many highland touns were restructured, it is clear that a significant number did not experience a clearance of this kind.

We have long known that many along the western seaboard were tidied up into newly configured crofting townships rather than cleared. Others experienced a clearance but via a gradual reduction in tenant numbers. Still others were reorganised or divided up into small consolidated farms.

Finally, a sizeable number of highland touns did not undergo any form of fundamental structural change at all, other than enclosure, in their transition to modern forms since, even by the time they first appear in late seventeenth century rentals, they were held and worked as single tenancies.1

This perspective now makes more achievable the task of carrying out a comparative analysis which covers both Highland history and the much less familiar narrative of what happened in the rural Lowlands. It might even be that the evolution of the two regions had more in common than implied in the older historiography. Equally, however, demographic, economic, cultural and geographical differences between the two might explain why dispossession in the Highlands is remembered while loss of land by communities in the Lowlands has for the most part been ignored and forgotten except by a few scholars.

The Scottish experience of rural transformation was a national variant of broader developments in Europe. A primary determinant across the Continent and in Britain as a whole was a sustained revolution of increasing population which soon generated immense pressures on traditional modes of food production. In the past, a significant rise in humans had usually hit barriers of disease, harvest failure and other natural disasters. As a result any surge in numbers eventually tended to fall away. Thomas Malthus in his seminal text, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), argued that population had a tendency to grow as increases in food supply improved human health and well-being. Equally, however, the rise in numbers would be transitory because more people would soon press upon the capacity of agriculture to feed extra mouths, thus causing susceptibility to disease and famine. Mortality crises would then cut back the size of populations to the earlier levels which had existed before the increase. This so-called ‘Malthusian trap’ was one explanation for the cataclysmic rise in death rates and mass emigration associated with the Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840s. Elsewhere, however, a revolution in food production based on higher grain yields, innovative crop rotations, developments in long-distance transportation and improved organization of farming ensured the trap was not sprung in most parts of Western Europe.

To achieve this positive result, different nations and regions took a wide spectrum of routes to agrarian modernization. In France it took the form of assertion of peasant individualism and the eradication of feudal controls during and after the Revolution. In Denmark it was the state which was influential and tried to achieve some social equity in the distribution of improved holdings. In Scotland, and much of mainland Britain, the pattern was different again with landed magnates deploying their power to introduce far-reaching changes from above. Some of their decisions resulted in dispossession of traditional rural communities on a large scale. As a result only a small minority of the many families who once had access to some land still remained in possession by the time this social and economic revolution had come to an end.

This is the first book to examine this historic transformation of Highland and Lowland Scotland in a single study which also tries to draw comparisons and contrasts between the two regions as well as showing awareness of the mosaic of differences within them. As such it does not claim to be a definitive study. The objective has rather been to mark out the parameters for what happened, engage with some of the more salient questions and attempt to provide interim answers to them. The themes of the book range across traditional society, clanship, the origins and impact of rural change, protest and stability, emigration, landlordism, peasant mentalities and migration. At its core, however, is the central issue of dispossession from land, how it came about and how such loss affected the peoples of rural Scotland wherever they lived. Predictably, most of the sources for the period record the perspective of landowners, managers, clerics, accountants, trustees and middle-class travellers rather than those directly affected by the momentous changes experienced by innumerable tenants, crofters, cottars and labourers. But, as the book will try to demonstrate, much invaluable information can be gleaned from these records about society at all levels, as long as the limitations of such sources are acknowledged and taken into account. Nevertheless, the people are not always mute and silent. Every effort has been made to allow them to speak, either through the evidence they gave to several government enquiries, the memories of observers sympathetic to their interest and, most crucially of all, their own repository of ballad, poetry, song and story.

What follows is organized in three parts. Part One considers the nature of traditional societies before widespread dispossession began. Part Two analyses the roots of fundamental social change and focuses on the loss of land in the Border and Lowland regions. Finally, Part Three concentrates on clearances, their origins and effects, in the Highlands. Throughout, comparative comment alerts the reader to similarities and differences between these areas of the country as well as within them.

The annexes that follow the main text are primarily for the interest of scholars and those who may wish to explore the more detailed evidence supporting some of the arguments in the book.