The Highland Clearances

by John Prebble

  Wherever the Staffords lived in London their home became a centre for politics, society, and the Marchioness's marriage-broking. In his nightly Memoranda Richard Rush, Envoy Extraordinary from the United States, recorded a visit to them in language as plain as the good, plain republican clothes he wore to their assembly: ‘The rooms were full. The Prince Regent, Royal Family, many of the nobility and others thronged them. It was past eleven when we arrived, yet fresh names were every moment announced…. The rooms abounded in ornamental articles which wealth had amassed and taste arranged. The paintings commanded admiration. Under light judiciously disposed, they made a magnificent appearance. There is said to be no such private collection in Europe. It comprehends the production of the finest masters of the different schools. These works of genius glowing from every part of the walls formed a high attraction.’ Like everybody else, Mr Rush found it difficult to say more about the Marquess than could be put into a single sentence, one had to write about what the man owned rather than what he was, but it was easy to be fulsome about Lady Stafford. ‘The Marquess is known to the country by the public character of his peerage and the posts he has filled. The Marchioness is not less known by her rank, for she is of the oldest of the realm. But this is not adventitious. She is also known by her cultivated mind, her taste in the arts, her benevolence to her tenantry; by virtues unostentatious and refined, that commend her to the love of domestic and social circles, and endear her name to strangers.’

  When this was written, the Staffords were no longer the young and adventurous couple who had gone to Revolutionary Paris determined, as he wrote to his father, to ‘brave la tempête’. She had changed from a full-lipped, brown-eyed girl to a fat matron who amused Creevey by the way she moved ‘her huge derrière by slow and dignified degrees about in her chair so as to come into action if necessary’. He was myopic, gouty, careless about his clothes, and desperately anxious for a dukedom (the only rank he could acquire, having inherited all others). He played politics with circumspection, approving of reform without haste, progress without a disturbance in the order of his society. He might have slipped into his grave and The Dictionary of National Biography without being remembered for anything more spectacular than his wealth and his art collection had it not been for his marriage and its consequences.

  The dowry which the Countess Elizabeth brought to her English husband consisted of two-thirds of the shire of Sutherland, a corrugated land-mass of seventeen hundred and thirty-five square miles extending from Cape Wrath to the Dornoch Firth. For its size, the rental value of the property was paltry, little more than £15,000 a year, which Lord Stafford would have had no difficulty in spending in one morning at Christie's. The true worth of the estate lay in its potential.

  In the eighteenth century the few visitors who came to Sutherland usually recoiled from it in horror, and decided that it was either the gates of Hell or the edge of the world. It was a wild country, a waste-heap of the glacial age, open to the wind and at war with a sea on three sides. Wherever one looked there were lonely, brooding mountains that seemed to be awaiting the resumption of Creation. In its occasional beauty there was an unutterable melancholy, a quiet sadness where tiny lochans held still fragments of the sky. To the north high cliffs scowled over the bend of the globe toward the Arctic. In the west long arms of land embraced the restless Atlantic. Arable land was limited to a coastal fringe varying in width from a hundred yards to a mile, the interior was a torment of rock and water, of narrow straths and lost streams. Few trees grew there, and those that did were crippled by winter frosts and by boisterous winds that blew with all seasons. It was a land that seemed to offer little to the Improvers, and for twenty years Stafford ignored it, and saw little of it except that which was visible from the ramparts of his lady's castle at Dunrobin on the southern coast of the county. Yet the mountain flanks were cloaked in abundant pasture for one of man's creatures. Cotton grass began its first rich growth with the spring thaws, followed by deer hair and by the alpine plants that had fattened Mr Robson's Great Sheep on the Cheviot Hills two hundred warmer miles to the south.

  Though the lordship of Sutherland held most of the county, the remainder was divided among three or four great landowners only, Dempsters, Gordons, Macleods and Mackays, and of the last the greatest was the chief of the Mackays himself, Lord Reay. His estate was thirty-two miles wide and twenty deep, the far north-western corner of Scotland where the Atlantic rolls in impotent rage against a black cliff wall. Here the Mackays had lived for centuries, losing some of the land with each, and the six hundred square miles which Lord Reay now possessed were worth no more than £3,500 to him in rents. Two thousand red deer grazed upon them, walking among the sweet grass of the hills with the long-legged grace of ballet-dancers. The Northumbrian sheepmen who prospected in Lord Reay's country at the beginning of the nineteenth century argued that where one deer grazed ten sheep might profitably pasture, and that Lord Reay was robbing himself of another £3,000 by turning his back on wool, mutton and the future.

  The people of Sutherland were a hardy and insular race, an amalgam of Norse and Gael, cut off from the outside world by its indifference to them and by the absence of a single road. They raised goats and black cattle, potatoes and inferior oats, brewed a rough beer and distilled a raw whisky for their dreams. They broke the earth with wooden ploughs, lived in crude huts of sod and stone and, in the opinion of one Lowlander called James Loch (whom they were shortly to hate as few men have been hated), they ‘added little to the wealth of the empire’.

  In 1801 there were about twenty-five thousand of them, and of these, by their proud and archaic reckoning, two thousand were fighting-men. They were scattered across the county in tiny clachans, in huddled townships, content with little, with their poor food, clothing and housing. Englishmen and Lowlanders who came to Sutherland on behalf of this scientific society or that, making uncomfortable journeys over moor and moss and bitterly lamenting the absence of a single decent inn, described the condition of the people with the same impatient contempt their grandsons were later to feel toward African and Indian. Even Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, who could stretch tolerance and understanding further than most men of his class and time, accused them of congenital idleness. James Loch, soon to become Lord Stafford's Commissioner with as much power as that ever enjoyed by a Highland chief, wrote of how they had seemed to him before he set about turning them into industrious servants of the empire: ‘Contented with the poorest and most simple fare and, like all mountaineers, accustomed to a roaming, unfettered life which attached them in the strongest manner to the habits and homes of their fathers, they deemed no new comfort worth the possessing which was to be acquired at the price of industry; no improvement worthy of adoption if it was to be obtained at the expense of sacrificing the customs or leaving the hovels of their ancestors.’ In no country of Europe known to him, and at no period in its history, ‘did there ever exist more formidable obstacles to the improvement of a people’. He blamed this distressing state of affairs on the potato which, he thought, ‘enabled them with less labour than before to raise what was sufficient for the maintenance of their families, their pigs and their poultry’.

  In an age when gentlemen beat children regularly to their lessons with a zealous belief in the righteousness of every blow, James Loch naturally thought it proper that the people of Sutherland should be pulled out of the past by the scruff of their necks. Those who resisted such treatment deserved just chastisement from a constable's truncheon or an infantryman's bayonet. By the logic of the Improvers' reasoning it was indeed criminal to oppose (for whatever cause) any reform of the tortuous system of land tenure in the Highlands. ‘Few of the lower orders,’ wrote Loch after he had swept away the anachronism, ‘held immediately of their landlord. A numerous race of middlemen possessed the land, and along with the farms they occupied the in-habitants were abandoned to their control and management; services of the most oppressive nature were demanded. The whole economy of his hous
e, his farm, securing his fuel, and gathering in his harvest, was exacted by the intermediate occupier from the dependants on his possession. It was a bad bargain indeed if the middleman could not contrive to hold that part of his farm which he had retained in his own hand, rent free.’

  No one, of course, asked what the people wanted. Improvement was a moral obligation and scarcely a matter for debate. But suspicious of improvements that announced themselves in writs of eviction, the Highlanders of Sutherland may have desired to live as they had always lived, to do without roads, bridges, wheeled vehicles and the religions of their lairds; to wear the bonnet or cotton cap, neckcloth and coarse plaid, to operate illicit stills, to sing the Psalms in Gaelic and to believe in the Evil Eye. Their way of life, their apparent indifference to the stimulating rewards of industry, were the despair of the Improvers. ‘It is a melancholy fact,’ lamented Sinclair of Ulbster, ‘that a poor tenant who rents land only to the value of 20s. or 30s., and whose labour could well be spared from his little farm many days in the year, will rather saunter or sit idle at home than work for 6d. a day, which would be a considerable addition to his own and his family's scanty meal.’

  For all their exasperating sloth, their winter dreaming about their peat fires, their scandalous habit of living cheek by jowl with their livestock, the Highlanders of Sutherland had one virtue on which the nation greedily fastened. This was their courage and their belief that nowhere in the world was there a fighting-man to equal the Gael with a broadsword in his hand. The Countess Elizabeth was among the last of the Scottish chiefs who raised their people for service in the Napoleonic Wars, but she surpassed them all in her methods of recruitment. She made no appeal for volunteers. She did not go among her clan with six pipers, like the Duchess of Gordon, giving a kiss and a guinea to every recruit. She imposed a form of conscription that would have won Bonaparte's approval. She called for a census of her tenants and sub-tenants, and when this was done five hundred able-bodied young men among them were told that service in the Sutherland Highlanders would be a test of their duty to the Ban mhorair Chataibh and their loyalty to King George III. Though parents may have grumbled bitterly about the choice they were forced to make between the loss of a son and the loss of their tenancy the young men went willingly enough.

  They made an incredible regiment. ‘They are all brave!’ said David Stewart of Garth. In nineteen years not one man of the light company, for example, was punished for misconduct. And many of those who survived the heat of South Africa, the fevers of the West Indies, or American musketry at New Orleans came home at last to find their glens empty, their homes pulled stone from stone, and their families dispersed.

  For Mr Sellar and Mr Young and Mr Loch had been busy, improving Lord Stafford's estates.

  ‘If I had you in the field, and men binding you…’

  IN May, 1809, Patrick Sellar and William Young boarded a sailing-packet at Burghead on the Morayshire coast and took passage northward to Sutherland. They were distant kinsmen, still young, and in high spirits. They felt, Sellar recalled later, as if they were travelling to a land of unknown but exciting promise. The little packet, now on its first regular voyage, and the harbour at Burghead were themselves an adventurous gamble. Sellar's father, William Young, and six other Morayshire men had bought the one and built the other with a view to opening up trade with the northern counties. Until then no one in Moray, Nairn and Inverness had given much thought to Sutherland or Caithness. ‘The honest folk,’ said Sellar, ‘used to call the whole ridge of country which they saw on the opposite side of the firth “The Ross-shire Hills”, and there was no communication betwixt the countries except when an occasional passenger would cross by boat, or a deer was brought to Burghead or Findhorn for General Grant of Ballindalloch.’

  With the enthusiastic encouragement of Lord Stafford, the eight Morayshire speculators hoped that their little packet would soon carry more profitable cargo than a General's venison, but of all the voyages it was to make none would have more effect on the country of Sutherland than its first. And this because it carried William Young and Patrick Sellar.

  Sellar was making the journey for pleasure and from curiosity. He was about thirty, a plausible and industrious advocate who had studied law in Edinburgh and whose ‘conduct of business and character for humanity’ was attested to by the Sheriff-Depute and by all whose briefs he had successfully handled. He was already the Procurator-Fiscal of Moray, and probably bored and ready for change and advancement. His intelligence was sharp and incisive, his ambitions in tune with his times. Yet in his convictions he was still one step behind his contemporaries. ‘I came to Sutherland,’ he was to remember, as a man tolerantly acknowledges a youthful folly, ‘full of the belief that the growth of wool and sheep in the Highlands was one of the most abominable and detestable things possible to be imagined.’

  William Young was burdened by no such prejudices. He had begun his business life as a corn-chandler, saving thereby a modest fortune of £700 with which he purchased a derelict property in Morayshire called Inverugie. It lay along the firth shore, a sanctuary for sea-fowl, covered for the most part with drifting sand and rotting sea-weed. Inventing a special plough, Mr Young (now ‘of Inverugie’) turned the white sand down and the black soil up, and by this and other improvements he soon made the property one of the most productive in the county. Those neighbours who had thought him mad to attempt the transformation were able to comfort their chagrin at his success with the knowledge that the effort had also left him penniless. There was only one man in Britain (so blessed with wealth that he was able to consider money of little importance) who could see that Mr Young's victory over the land was probably more significant than his defeat at the bank. Lord Stafford invited Mr Young to become Commissioner of his Sutherland estates, an invitation which the onetime corn-chandler accepted with understandable alacrity. And he was now travelling northward to take up his duties.

  Stafford had begun the improvement of his wife's dowry two years before the first packet sailed from Burghead, planning the elimination of all middlemen, an end to run-rig, the establishment of large single-unit farms and the renting of them to southern sheep-farmers. An example had been set for him by some of the smaller landowners in the north – Mr Honeyman of Armadale, for example. They had already begun to clear away untidy and uneconomic townships, packing the confused and bewildered inhabitants off to the coast or to the emigrant ships at Greenock, and offering the emptied acres of cotton grass and deer hair to any Lowland grazier ready to meet the increased rental. In November 1807, the newly-formed Northern Association of Gentlemen Farmers and Breeders of Sheep (President: the Honourable Archibald Fraser of Lovat; Vice-Presidents: Sir Charles Ross of Balnagowan and Donald Macleod of Geanies) proposed, seconded and agreed to ask for a Royal Charter to extend their activities northwards to the counties of Ross, Sutherland and Caithness. At Beauly market Cheviot wool was selling at 36s. the stone, lambs at 11s. 6d. and 12s. The future was bright.

  Parliament, its interest in Highland Improvements already committed by the beginning of the Caledonian Canal in 1800, offered to contribute half the cost of those roads and bridges sadly needed if trade and agriculture were to prosper. Landowners were expected to find the other half, and Lord Stafford, believing no doubt that all men should pay for the advantages they enjoy, instructed his agents to impose a poll-tax of 4s. on all his people, whether they possessed half an acre or ten thousand.

  The Marquess and his lady were in Scotland that year to see the beginning of the great experiment. ‘We travelled in wind and snow through the Highlands,’ the Countess Elizabeth wrote to her son's tutor, ‘and met Lord Stafford highly pleased with his journey and the improvements he saw in every part of Scotland; for he is seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements, and we both turn our attention with the greatest of energy to turnips, but cannot settle whether they ought to be broadcast or drilled.’

  For ninety families, tenants-at-will in the parishes of Farr and
Lairg, the problem at Whitsun, 1807, was not the proper cultivation of turnips, but where to sleep the night. What crops they had, potatoes or grain, were left on or in the ground when Lord Stafford's agents came to their doors with writs of eviction. They were offered smaller lots of land, ten, fifteen or twenty miles away on the coast, where, his lordship hoped, some of them might soon harvest the sea with more profit than the earth.

  ‘The people had to remove their cattle and furniture thither,’ remembered one who saw them go, ‘leaving their crops on the ground behind. Watching this crop from the trespass of the cattle of the incoming tenants, and removing it in the autumn was attended with great difficulty and loss. Besides, there was also much personal suffering from their having to pull down their houses and carry away the timber of them to erect houses on their new possessions, which houses they had to inhabit immediately on being covered in, and in the meantime to live and sleep in the open air, except for a few who might be fortunate enough to get an unoccupied barn or a shed from some of their charitable newcome neighbours.’

  These removals from Farr and Lairg were the first major clearances on the Stafford estates. They set a pattern for more and more that followed during the next two decades, except that with each new eviction the harshness and inhumanity of the officers ordered to execute it increased. It was as if the whole population of Sutherland was being shaken in a great cup, thrown out, and allowed to fall where it would on the coast or blow away to the other side of the world. ‘Every means were resorted to to discourage the people, and to persuade them to give up their holdings quietly and quit the country,’ wrote one man who was driven from Strathnaver. ‘And to those who could not be induced to do so, scraps of moor and bogland were offered in Dornoch moor and Brora links, on which it was next to impossible to exist…’