The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  Such a breed already existed, and word of it reached the Highlands in the old way, on the lips of a seer who travelled from township to township, calling a warning. No kind thoughts now for Christ's blessed animal. ‘Mo thruaighe ort a thir, tha'n caoraich mhor a' teachd!’ Woe to thee, oh land, the Great Sheep is coming!

  The Great Sheep was the Cheviot. This animal was almost man-made, so well-bred that, according to Mr John Naismyth of Hamilton (who prepared a report on it for the Society for the Improvement of British Wool), ‘a flock of some hundred ewes may be found, almost any two of which might pass for twin-sisters’.

  They came, of course, from the Cheviot Hills, the rolling downs that strike the natural border between England and Scotland. Once known as the Long Hill sheep, a distinct and hardy race of animals had grazed there for six centuries, strengthened now and then by thousands of Merinos brought from the Continent. But by the middle of the eighteenth century they were still lank and gibbety, long-necked and thin at the shoulders. It was a Cheviot farmer called Robson who began to turn them into the great beast that would become the four-footed clansman of the Highlands. He brought three rams from the Wolds of Lincoln and put them to his ewes, by which, said Mr Naismyth ‘the carcase and figure was much reformed’. A Spanish ram bought later, Ryeland rams and ewes, added the strength of their loins to the line, and in twenty years Mr Robson's shepherds had produced a sturdy animal that yielded a third more wool and meat, and showed remarkable stamina in the harsh winters that blow on the Cheviots. It had also, Mr Naismyth thought it delicate to add, a ‘countenance mild and pleasant… the head and ears long, neat and slender; the neck high and full; the back broad, straight and strong-coupled; the shoulders and buttocks broad, and in due proportion to each other; the legs small, clean-boned, and of a very moderate length; a long leg like an inverted lever being thought to render the animal less vigorous in travelling through deep ground, or working for its food among snow’.

  In producing this promising animal Mr Robson's shepherds had also created a mythology which, if it did not equal in subtlety that of the human race it was shortly to supplant, had much in common with its superstitions.

  ‘Careful shepherds,’ Mr Naismyth informed the gentlemen of the Wool Society, ‘think it is a matter deserving attention at the time of copulation to keep the ewes as much as possible from beholding improper objects, that unfortunate resemblances may not be impressed on the young. Remarkable instances of this plastic sympathy felt by sheep at the time of conception, are mentioned, such as lambs brought forth with the manner and gesture of a hare or a cat, which probably had accidently crossed the field of love. But the following was a more unlucky instance: A number of black-faced hairy sheep, part of a drove which had been carried southward, straying back to their native home, passed, at the critical period, through the pastures of the fine-woolled sheep. The breeding ewes gazed with admiration at the savage-looking strangers, and, at yeaning time a good many lambs, exactly resembling them, were brought forth.’

  Some years before Mr Naismyth entertained the Society with this fact and fiction, the Cheviots had gone north. Encouraged by the success of two Northumbrians who had brought the animal as far as East Lothian, other men had taken them on over the Highland line. In 1790 they were across the Cromarty Firth into Ross, and two years later they reached Caithness in the far north.

  The man who took them there was Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, a ruddy-faced, hawk-nosed Highland gentleman who had many remarkable ideas, not the least of which, according to some of his countrymen, was the claim that trews, not the kilt, were the ancient dress of the Highlands (as indeed they probably were, for gentlemen). The Sinclairs of Ulbster had bought much of their land from the Earldom of Caithness, after that house exhausted itself fighting Glenorchy Campbells for the possession of it, firstly in the field and secondly in the Courts. In the time of ‘Agricultural Sir John’, Caithness no longer had a noble chief, but a number of prosperous landowners of whom he was the most intelligent and progressive.

  He was probably the only Scot of his age who used the word ‘Improvement’ objectively. Had he been listened to, had his example been copied, the half-century of evictions, burnings, riots and exile that followed might have been avoided. It was the kindly old man's tragedy that he brought the Great Sheep north for the benefit of his people, but was unable to prevent others from using it to oust theirs. He wrote copiously on the improvements that could and should be made on Highland estates to give work to the people and fulfilment to the land, illustrating his precepts with practical examples. He became, in time, Chairman of the British Wool Society, but before he advised Highland lairds to turn their attention to sheep be brought the animal to his own lands, ‘thinking that any recommendation from a person who had tried no experiment himself, and who had scarcely what could be called a flock of his own, would not be much attended to’.

  Five hundred breeding ewes and a proportionate number of rams were put upon one of his farms at Langwell (an estate which he had bought for £9,000). ‘To the astonishment of the Shepherds, who were strangers to the country, and of the natives who thought that sheep were so debilitated an animal that they ought to be housed in the winter season, not one of the flock died from cold, disease, or hunger; and as they throve equally well in the year 1792, I resolved to carry on the plan with all the vigour and attention that was possible for a man immersed in so many other avocations.’

  The Langwell experiment was so successful, in fact, drawing back a curtain suddenly on a dazzling future, that the British Wool Society offered flocks of fifty Cheviot rams and a hundred and fifty ewes at 36s. the ram and 20s. the ewe (with no other expense) to all Highland lairds who ‘aspire to the character of being active and intelligent improvers’. There were many who were bankrupt enough to see in this the perfect description of themselves, and Sinclair's warm hopes for his country became bitter.

  ‘Nothing can be more detrimental…. The first thing that is done is to drive away all the present inhabitants. The next is to introduce a shepherd and a few dogs; and then to cover the mountains with flocks of wild, coarse-woolled, and savage animals which seldom see their shepherd or are benefited by his care.’

  He pleaded for slow and considerate change, for the encouragement of native shepherds among the Highlanders. He said that small tenants should be continued in possession, persuaded to join their holdings and capital, to hire a common herdsman and purchase a small flock of 300 sheep. Part of their rents should be taken in kind, in wool and mutton. It was an admirable proposal, but like most such proposals in economics and politics it argued that all men were as benevolent as the proposer. Lowland graziers were hungry for the land and its profits. Highland lairds had creditors at their doors and the rewards of sheep-farming were too tempting to share among their ignorant and inconvenient tenantry. Sinclair had himself given them cogent reasons to feel this way.

  ‘The Highlands of Scotland may sell, at present, perhaps from £200,000 to £300,000 worth of lean cattle per annum. The same ground will produce twice as much mutton, and there is wool into the bargain. If covered with the coarse-woolled breed of sheep, the wool might be worth about £300,000, the value of which can only be doubled by the art of the manufacturer; whereas the same ground under the Cheviot or True Mountain breed will produce at least £900,000 of fine wool.’

  So began the invasion of the Cheviot or True Mountain breed. They came up the old cattle roads into Argyll, Inverness, and Ross. They climbed where the deer died, they throve where black cattle starved. Land which had produced 2d. an acre under cattle now yielded 2s. under sheep. Four shepherds, their dogs and three thousand sheep now occupied land that had once supported five townships. Small gentry, lawyers, merchants, half-pay officers with a little prize-money took up leases on land they rarely, if ever, saw, and became Highland gentlemen with imaginary pipers and gillies at their tail. Thus did Donald Macleod of Geanies become a landowner in Ross, crossing Cheviot sheep with Merinos and writing to his
friends about the rewarding results.

  The presses were busy with pamphlets, books, advice and instruction on sheep-farming. Few of the men who read them, or wrote them, showed the public responsibility of Sinclair. Sir George Mackenzie of Coul (who advised Highlanders to be happy as servants of servants) burgeoned with advice on the future of the Highlands, which he saw as resting squarely on the broad shoulders of a Cheviot ewe. He had a great ambition to be accepted as a scientist and an economist. He was more frequently an ass. His passion for scientific research led him to sacrifice his mother's diamonds to prove ‘by means of the concentrated solar rays that after all they were but a form of carbon’. This was undoubtedly of importance, though it may not have reconciled his mother to their loss.

  On the subject of sheep he was listened to more thoroughly, perhaps, than John Sinclair, for he did not confuse his readers with philanthropy or concern for the Highlander. His book, A General View of the Agriculture of Ross and Cromarty, would have been more accurately described as A Landlord's View (‘I am about to introduce a considerable flock of Cheviots, and I hope my example will soon be followed’). It was dedicated to his friend, Sheriff Macleod of Ross, ‘whose life has been devoted to the service of the county, and whose exertions for its improvement have been unremitted’.

  Among long descriptions of flora, fauna, geology, geography, domestic and agricultural economy, landlordism and peasantry, the book contained a stern dismissal of those who were protesting against wholesale evictions of tenants. ‘We have heard but a few voices against the necessity of removing the former possessors to make way for shepherds…. The necessity for reducing the population in order to introduce valuable improvements, and the advantages of committing the cultivation of the soil to the hands of a few have been discussed by men much more capable of doing justice to these subjects than myself.’

  This was an unusually modest acknowledgement from Sir George, but on the material advantages of replacing the many by the few he was quite positive. ‘I have often set before my guests mutton of the Leicester, Cheviot and Forest and country breeds, taking care that none of it should be particularly remarkable for fatness, and they have mistaken one for the other.’

  Sir George was a disciple of Improvement, and within the context of his age this made him progressive in thought and action. The responsibilities of land in a growing economy brought both profit and prestige to those who exploited it. A man who spent his time on his estates, increasing their yield, was giving greater service to his country than one who spent his at a gaming-table or, for that matter, at a writing-desk asking whether Men were not more important than Sheep.

  From this noble premise it was logical to conclude that the Men of Ross were a seditious Mob.

  ‘They have got a good many arms among them’

  ROBERT DUNDAS, Lord Advocate of Scotland, was nephew to Henry Dundas, Home Secretary. The Dundases of Arniston had been providing great lawyers for more than a century and now, with Henry, they had moved into the jobbery of politics under the wing of William Pitt. Uncle and nephew were among the most hated men in Scotland. They ruled the country as Sultan and Grand Vizier, or as if, some men complained, it were ‘a lodge at a great man's gate’. Although there was no family cordiality in the formal letters that passed between them in the summer of 1792 on the subject of Ross, Henry must have been concerned with the personal trials of Robert. There was rioting and mobbing in Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee and Edinburgh. The burning of the effigies of both Lord Advocate and Home Secretary was a popular entertainment. An Edinburgh crowd, interrupted in this by the reading of the Riot Act and by salutary volleys from redcoats, moved on to throw stones through Robert's windows. Driven from that, they went to St Andrew's Square, and threw more stones at the Lord Provost's house. Being a good Scot, he blamed the English for his townsfolk's lack of respect to his person.

  ‘An evil spirit seems to have reached us,’ he told Robert Dundas, ‘which I was in hopes John Bull would have kept to himself.’

  The evil spirit was Liberty. Notwithstanding the Lord Provost's complaint, Scotland was more active in its cause than England (where the people, in the name of ‘Church and King’, were more inclined to burn effigies of such liberty-lovers as Tom Paine and Joseph Priestley). There was, Henry Dundas was told by the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, ‘an almost universal spirit of reform and opposition to the established government and legal administration, which has wonderfully diffused through the manufacturing towns of this country’. Earlier in the year a Society of Friends of the People had been formed in Edinburgh, taking oaths in the French style to ‘live free or die’. Governments naturally qualify the word freedom, and when they suspect that it means that people wish to be free of them they exercise their lawful freedom to defend themselves. Thus young Thomas Muir, the articulate advocate who led the Society, was later arrested and transported.

  But the evil spirit and the rioting continued, encouraged by the development of events in France. Though they were confined to the Lowlands, there was always the fear that in the mountains, the seat of Scotland's Mars, riot might too easily become rebellion. It was undoubtedly with this fear in mind that the Lord Advocate wrote to his uncle on 6 August. About the middle of July, he said, he had received reports of assault and riot in the County of Ross, whereby the property and person of a Mr Cameron had been much abused. He had not thought it necessary at the time to inform His Majesty's Ministers, believing that the trouble could be settled by the Civil Magistrates, with or without the help of three companies of the Black Watch which had been sent from Stirling to Fort George. ‘But I am sorry to state that in this expectation I have been disappointed, and that the Inhabitants of that district are at present in a situation most disorderly.’

  The trouble was in fact over, but with the delay in the Post from Dingwall he could not know this, and he told the Home Secretary that he had given orders for the remaining companies of the 42nd to march for Fort George immediately, ‘which I trust will be sufficient for quelling these seditious disturbances’.

  Of all the counties in the north, Ross had been most affected by the new sheep-walks. In Easter Ross the change had been sudden and sweeping. This peninsula of mountains between the Dornoch and Cromarty firths had become practical ground for the experiments pioneered by Sir John Lockhart-Ross, Thomas Geddes and Sir John Sinclair. An Ayrshire sheepman called Mitchell had rented land from Davidson of Tulloch, Donald Macleod of Geanies had taken a long lease on land belonging to Balnagowan, and now two Cameron brothers from Lochaber, having put sheep on the lands of Munro of Culcairn, were moving further southward. They took a long lease on Kildermorie in the wild heart of Easter Ross.

  The property belonged to Sir Hector Munro of Novar, a Colonel of the Black Watch, an indifferent major-general after some doubtful service in India, and the inactive Member of Parliament for Inverness Burghs for twenty-four years. His estates stretched northward from his yellow house on the Cromarty Firth to the green valley of the Oykel, where his cousin Culcairn's land began. He had been improving his property for some years. In Kildermorie he had reduced the number of tenants first to six, and then to none at all, renting it free of human occupants to the Camerons from Lochaber.

  The men of Ross retreated sullenly before this bleating invasion. Part of their livelihood, and the increased rents they were paying, had come from the summer grazing of cattle belonging to farmers on the coastal lowlands of the country. For this they charged the owners is. a head, and to get the barest of livings they were forced to overstock the brown hills. When sheep ate into their pastures, and the roof-trees of their township were pulled down, they raised the grazing-price to half a crown a head, and then to a crown. Though they were in sympathy with the Highlanders, the farmers could not pay the money, and in 1792 they were already sending their cattle northward to Sutherland for the summer.

  It was through Kildermorie and Strath Rusdale that the old seer had gone crying his warning against the coming of the Great Sheep. There were no
Rosses now on Kildermorie, but they still held sub-tenancies in the strath, and when they drove their cattle up to the long moor at the head of the valley they could look to the west and see Glen Morie white with sheep belonging to Captain Alan Cameron and his brother Alexander. It was an old custom of the hills that men should not be too particular about the marches between grazings, and if the black cattle of Strath Rusdale strayed on to the sheep-walk the Rosses let them go, thinking no more of it. But the Camerons sent a warning phrased in words suitable to a communication between Highland gentry and Highland commons. When next the cattle came upon Kildermorie they would be impounded against a fine.

  They did stray, and the Cameron shepherds drove them into a fank at the western end of Loch Morie below the high heads of Meall nam Bo and Cam Beag. They were kept in the pen until the Rosses paid the fine. It happened again, and again, until the Rosses asked themselves who they were to take such treatment from Lowland shepherds. They decided to release their cattle by force, and a call was sent down the glen from Braentra to Ardross. All men were invited to the foray. The word was out against the foreigners from Lochaber. The word was out against sheep.

  At Ardross the men of the township were cutting peat when the invitation came. They threw down their tools with enthusiasm. Led by a legendary giant called Alisdair Mor Wallace, they marched northwards up the banks of Alness Water, and from all sides of the strath men came bounding to join them. They climbed over the long moor, where the wind blows in a ceaseless tide over the grass, and they came down the shoulder of Carn Beag to the meadow at the head of Loch Morie. They came shouting and singing, crying taunts, and news of their approach reached Kildermorie long before they arrived. At the gate of the cattle-pen waited the Captain and his brother, their Lowland shepherds, and some of their people from Lochaber.