With his carefully prepared statement concluded, Charles MacLeod then answered precise questions from Francis, Lord Napier, which confirmed that he personally had two cows and their calves, eight sheep, no horse, and a few ‘spots here and there’ of potatoes and oats. Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, the MP who at a general election two years later would resign his comfortable urban seat of Inverness Burghs and, as a ‘Crofters’ Candidate’ in the constituency of rural Inverness-shire, defeat his fellow tribune on the Napier Commission, Cameron of Lochiel, took up the questioning.
‘With regard to the depopulation of the island in former times,’ asked Fraser-Mackintosh, ‘was not Raasay at one time full of people?’
‘Yes,’ said Charles MacLeod.
‘When did the people first begin to be put out of the island?’
‘It is forty years since the first removings.’
‘You complain you have not enough land to work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where could you or your co-crofters get land?’
‘On the property of the island.’
‘Where?’
‘In the townships which are waste.’
‘In whose possession are they?’
‘Under sheep belonging to the proprietor.’
‘Is there any big tenant [sheep-farmer]?’
‘There was a farmer named Mackenzie there a few years ago.’
‘Who has got that farm now?’
‘The proprietor has got it.’
‘Has he a great deal in his own hands under sheep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has he all that Mackenzie had?’
‘Yes.’
Charles Fraser-Mackintosh and Charles MacLeod had, within an hour of the hearing’s commencement, reached the nub of the matter. The first clearances of the southern bulk of Raasay had indeed, as we have seen from the census statistics, begun about ‘forty years since’, in the late 1830s and early 1840s. They were carried out during the supremacy of the last hereditary clan chief, John MacLeod of Raasay.
An officer in the 78th Highlanders, John MacLeod was largely absent from his island domain. He was the grandson of the John MacLeod who had entertained Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and he inherited the substantial debts which had been incurred by his grandfather’s extravagant investments in such amenities as the large mansion house in which – while the wind howled outside – Johnson had found ‘plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety’.
In a desperate attempt to fend off his creditors, young John MacLeod instructed his factor to evict their people from such places as Eyre, Suisnish and Upper Hallaig and to let the cleared land as profitable sheep farms to ‘tacksmen’, or tenant farmers. It was to no avail. The creditors foreclosed in the early 1840s, and in 1843 John MacLeod of Raasay abdicated and emigrated. Three years later his family estate was sold, by trustees acting on behalf of the creditors, to a wealthy merchant trader named George Rainy.
Rainy pursued his predecessor’s domestic policies. He was also anxious to prevent those who managed to remain even on the outer edges of his new estate from multiplying by natural means. As Donald MacLeod of Kyle Rona would tell the Napier Commission at Torran Schoolhouse in 1883, ‘Mr Rainy enacted a rule that no-one should marry on the island. There was one man there who married in spite of him, and because he did he [Rainy] put him out of his father’s house and that man went to a bothy, to a sheep cot. Mr Rainy then came and demolished the sheep cot upon him and extinguished his fire and neither friend nor anyone else dared to give him a night’s shelter. He was not allowed entrance into any house.’
This particular persecution occurred in 1850. Before torching it, Rainy’s evictors had carried a baby in a cradle out of the building. The surname of the baby was MacLeod, and the scene of the outrage was North Arnish.
In that same year, the fourth of his ascendancy, George Rainy amalgamated the privatised tacks, or farmland, of Suisnish and Eyre with those of Glen and Glame and Brae and let them as one big lot to a sheep-farmer from Assynt in the mainland Highlands named Royston MacKenzie. This ‘farmer named Mackenzie’ of Charles MacLeod’s testimony was an ambitious man. Within two years his sheep were running across almost all of the denuded west side of Raasay. By 1854 MacKenzie had the east side too. Within four or five years of Mr Royston and Mrs Hughina MacKenzie arriving from Assynt to set up house in an otherwise empty Suisnish, Royston’s sheep grazed across the whole of Raasay south of Loch Arnish, excepting the Home Farm, some other small estate properties and a handful of residual crofts.
The new regime therefore consisted of two elements. George Rainy had a Georgian mansion house and walled garden, a Home Farm, an elegant harbour in Clachan Bay and a fishing and shooting estate stocked with trout, deer, rabbits and pheasant, as well as, fortuitously, seals, otters and golden eagles, all of which were bagged with merriment – inedible seals and otters were regarded as useful target practice; equally inedible eagles were stuffed and preserved in glass boxes. The deer and rabbits shared most of the island with Royston MacKenzie’s thousands of sheep, which – unlike the unfortunate eagles, seals and otters – were not considered fair game.
Almost everybody who was not directly employed by either of those two interests was obliged to live, preferably without reproducing, north of Loch Arnish. This arrangement was formalised by the creation during the Rainy supremacy of a ‘deer fence’ – actually a forbidding six-foot-high dry-stone wall – which was erected across the narrowest point of Raasay, halfway between Castle and Arnish, through a mile-long glen from the east coast to the west, where it ran down to the waters of south Loch Arnish. Its incidental prevention of access to a traditional anchorage named Port an Altainn was like the sort of arbitrary insult which might be thrown after an extremely serious injury. Local men were hired to build the wall. They were paid in kind, receiving a stone of meal in return for each week’s labour. Their foreman was given £8 sterling to oversee the whole project.*
In the limited landscape north of this barrier men and women could live and graze their animals and attempt to grow crops, in return for an annual rental whose default would result in swift eviction. In the fat forearm of Raasay to its south were sheep, deer, rabbits and more sheep. The crofters’ stock was not, of course, permitted to graze south of the fence. But, in contrast to the proprietor’s tenantry, the proprietor’s game was encouraged to proliferate in the groves, heather and scrubland north of it. Tenants were never, ever allowed to kill pheasant or deer. The question was moot as to whether crofters were permitted to shoot the few rabbits they were able to catch in the act of eating the vegetables growing on their rented lots. Most thought that they were not so permitted, some thought that they were. When asked in 1883 by the Napier Commission, ‘So far as a man killed rabbits on his own croft, would he be scolded or molested?’ the estate factor said, ‘That is a hard question. He might get scolded.’
In 1863 George Rainy died, leaving the estate to his son, George Haygarth Rainy. In 1872 George Haygarth Rainy died and the estate was bought by George G. MacKay. MacKay only had the place for two years, during which time he managed to strip the six remaining crofters at Balachuirn in central Raasay of their land and increase the annual rentals of crofters in, for instance, Arnish, by as much as 73 per cent, and in Fladda from a total of £22 to £30 per annum.
In 1874 William James Armitage of Southgate in London bought out George G. MacKay. Armitage spent one summer in his Hebridean fiefdom, and then sold it in 1876 to the 25-year-old Edward Herbert Wood, the heir to a Staffordshire Five Towns’ pottery fortune. Edward Herbert Wood was more interested in shooting than sheep, and was not short of money. Luckily for Wood, Royston MacKenzie had died in 1873. He reclaimed the sheep farm, reduced the stock by half, from 3,200 to about 1,600, and replaced them on the hills and grazings with deer.
‘Would you be satisfied if you got more hill pasture?’ Charles Fraser-Mackintosh asked Charles MacLeod in 1883.
‘We would try to put up with it,’ sa
id Charles MacLeod, meaning that it would be better than nothing. ‘Our lots are spoiled with game, pheasants and rabbits, so much so that it is not worth our while sowing our ground at all.’
‘Have you remonstrated against that to Mr Wood?’
‘Yes.’
‘What relief has he given you?’
‘We got no relief, and the feeding boxes for the pheasants are placed at the end of our arable ground.’
‘Have you liberty to kill rabbits or to trap them?’
‘No.’
‘You mentioned something about a deer fence,’ said Sir Kenneth MacKenzie to Charles MacLeod shortly afterwards. ‘Is there a deer fence cutting you off from the proprietor’s lands?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it a matter of complaint that that fence should be there?’
‘It is a cause of complaint, for our cattle cannot get to our own pasturage, owing to the roughness of the ground leading to it, and the fence is in the way. They are shut in in their own hill pasture by this fence.’
Forgivably, Sir Kenneth did not quite understand the minutiae of this concern about access. ‘Have they their own hill pasture behind this fence?’
‘No.’
‘You would like to cross part of the proprietor’s land to get to a remote part of your own pasture?’
‘The fence was fixed so close to rocky ground that our cows cannot get between these rocks and their own ground to their pasturage.’
‘If the line of fence was altered, would that satisfy you?’
‘That is what we were wishing to be done,’ said Calum MacLeod’s great-grandfather. ‘To have it put back for a few yards. We were wanting this when the fence was put up.’
Then, perhaps hurriedly, possibly aware of so much remaining to be said, so many greater issues still undeclared, so much left to be understood, he added, as if suddenly reminded of it, ‘There is no port for hauling up our boats on our ground.’
Charles MacLeod was thanked by Lord Napier, and sat down.
Murdo Nicolson, a 48-year-old crofter and fisherman of Torran itself – one of the tenants of those ‘little patches of cultivated ground on the face of rocks’ observed by the Scotsman’s correspondent – followed Charles MacLeod to the witness stand.
Murdo Nicolson had moved to Torran ten years earlier from Fladda, where his father had a croft and where Murdo had been raised. He travelled seasonally to work on the east-coast herring fleets, and fished locally out of a fifteen-foot boat for herring and lobster. He wished simply, he said, ‘for a better place’. Asked by Lord Napier if he and his neighbours supported themselves chiefly by fishing, he said, ‘They do their utmost at the fishing, but it will give them enough to do to support themselves by fishing.’
And the land was little easier. ‘There is such an amount of scrub bush growing on our crofts,’ Murdo Nicolson told Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, ‘and we are not allowed to cut it, and we are prevented by it from cultivating our crofts.’
‘Would you like to see all this pretty wood here about cut down?’
‘The wood is not so pretty as that.’
‘Is it not useful sometimes for different purposes to have a little bit of wood?’
‘No, it is a source of loss to us every day of the year. The game shelter in the wood and spoil our crop, and we get nothing for it.’
‘Is your land good enough to grow heavy crops if there were no game?’ asked Cameron of Lochiel.
‘There is no doubt it would be considerably better were it not for the game,’ said Murdo Nicolson. ‘It is only bad ground at all events. I believe it is as bad as is to be found between the two ends of Raasay.’
‘I suppose’, said Cameron of Lochiel, ‘the game don’t do any harm to the potatoes?’
‘The pheasants and rabbits spoil the potatoes on us.’
‘Do rabbits eat potatoes?’
‘Yes, they do that indeed.’
Once Cameron of Lochiel’s lesson in the diet of rabbits was concluded, the commission heard from John Gillies, a fifty-year-old crofter and fisherman who had been elected to represent the fifty-four people of Fladda. He and his neigh-bours, he said, ‘are complaining, as others are, about the hardness of the land, and the dearness of it. It is dear, it is bad, and there is little of it.’
There was another grievance, unique to the tidal island of Fladda. ‘They are also wanting to speak about the channel between them and the island,’ said John Gillies. ‘They come from the island to the school here [in Torran], and the channel is not wider than thirty yards at high tide. Sometimes the children are starving waiting for the tide, when they cannot get over – when the men are away from home [and their boats unavailable].’
‘You mean coming back from school?’ asked Lord Napier.
‘Yes; but many days they cannot go to school at all.’
‘How wide is the channel at high water?’
‘Thirty yards, and it is dry at half tide.’
‘What remedy do you suggest for this?’
‘Either to bridge the channel, or to give us another place to live in, from which our children could go to school in safety.’
‘Would it be easy to bridge the channel?’
‘It would not be difficult at all. There are plenty of materials – plenty of stones thereabout.’
Kyle Rona was the northernmost community in Raasay itself, another mile and a half up the coast from Umachan and eponymously situated on the southern shore of the Kyle of Rona. The ten heads of family in its overburdened community had in 1883 elected a 78-year-old retired fisherman named Donald MacLeod to be their delegate to the Napier Commission.
‘I have only to say’, said Donald MacLeod, ‘what the rest have said, that it is poverty sent me here – that I am situated on bad ground, and little of it, and too dear, and that for a long time. In my own memory it was five families who were in the township numbering twenty-nine individuals, and today there are ten families and eighty.’
‘We want to find out’, said Charles Fraser-Mackintosh to this Raasay man who had been born in around 1805, and who had lived all his days in Kyle Rona, ‘if you know about the evictions in former times. The first one began in the time of MacLeod himself about forty years ago. Do you recollect that?’
‘I don’t remember the first removing, but I remember Mr Rainy about thirty years ago clearing fourteen townships, and he made them into a sheep farm which he had in his own hands.’
‘What became of the people?’
‘They went to other kingdoms – some to America, some to Australia, and to other places that they could think of.’
‘Will you give us a rough estimate of the population of the fourteen townships?’
‘I cannot; there were a great number of people.’
‘Were they hundreds?’
‘Yes, hundreds, young and old. I am sure there were about one hundred in each of two townships.’
‘Will you name the towns?’
‘Castle, Screpidale, two Hallaigs, Ceancnock, Leachd, two Fearns, Eyre, Suisinish, Doirredomhain, Mainish.’
‘Was there a good deal of arable land upon these townships?’
‘They were altogether arable land capable of being ploughed.’
‘Are these now altogether in the proprietor’s hands?’
‘Yes, indeed. The only occupants of that land today are rabbits and deer and sheep.’
‘Did the people out of these fourteen townships that Rainy cleared go of their own accord?’
‘No, not at all. The people were very sorry to leave at that time. They were weeping and wailing and lamenting. They were taking handfuls of grass that was growing over the graves of their families in the churchyard, as remembrances of their kindred.’
Lord Napier himself concluded the questioning of Donald MacLeod. ‘I have seen in an old book’, said the chairman, ‘that there was once a large place in the middle of the island here which was free to anybody to take their cattle to in summer – a kind of wild place, for the summer
sheilings. Did you ever hear of that?’
‘I believe the hill pasture is there yet,’ said Donald MacLeod. ‘That was the case. If the hill pasture was there, it is not there now for the people.’
If Kyle Rona, Umachan, Fladda, Torran and Arnish had it hard, one place had it harder than them all. The four square miles of Rona were bigger both in acreage and – in 1883 – in population than all of northern Raasay. We have heard already of the legendary inhospitality of Rona. When the landowner George Rainy was asked in 1851 to describe his new property to a previous investigative body, the MacNeill Commission, he informed Sir John MacNeill that ‘the island of Rona . . . is almost entirely composed of masses of bare rock’.
In that same year, 1851, there were, thanks largely to the ‘removings’ of Rainy’s predecessor, the last MacLeod of Raasay, 115 people in Rona. This amounted to at least a quadrupling in half a century. In 1871, the last year of the governance of the small insular group by the Rainy family, the population of this ‘mass of bare rock’ had been swollen to 157. Ten years later 176 people were housed in desuetude in the island, which historically had been considered by all observers to be, if not completely uninhabited, then effectively uninhabitable. In contrast to the rest of the archipelago, Donald MacLeod of Kyle Rona told the Napier Commission, nobody had ever been evicted from Rona. This was not an oversight, and it was not mercy. It was because nobody voluntarily lived there. ‘The people were not living in Rona at first at all. They were sent to Rona.’
‘Should I be here from sunrise to sunset’, said 36-year-old John Nicolson of Doire na Guaile in the south of Rona, ‘I could not fully disclose the poverty of Rona. It is a place in which no man need expect to make his living. We are working on sea and land, both summer and winter, and spring – every quarter of the year – and after that we have only poverty.’
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