The Highland Clearances Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES

  John Prebble was born in Middlesex in 1915 but spent his boyhood in Saskatchewan, Canada. He became a journalist in 1934 and is now a historian, novelist, film-writer and the author of several highly praised plays and dramatized documentaries for BBC television and radio. During the war he served for six years in the ranks with the Royal Artillery and later wrote a war novel, The Edge of Darkness, based on his experiences. He is the author of Age Without Pity, The Mather Story, The High Girders, an account of the Tay Bridge Disaster, The Buffalo Soldiers, which won an award in the United States for the best historical novel of the American West, and Culloden, a subject he became interested in when he was a boy in a predominantly Scottish township in Canada. Culloden was subsequently made into a successful television film. His other books include The Highland Clearances (1963), Glencoe (1966), The Darien Disaster (1968), The Lion in the North (1971), Mutiny: Highland Regiments in Revolt (1975), John Prebble's Scotland (1983), The King's Jaunt (1988) and Landscapes and Memories: an intermittent autobiography, for which he was awarded the McVitie Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, 1993. Many of his books are published by Penguin.

  JOHN PREBBLE

  THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES

  ‘Since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you!’

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  in association with Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1963

  Published in Penguin Books 1969

  34

  Copyright © John Prebble, 1963

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193316-0

  FOR SARAH

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  1 THE YEAR OF THE SHEEP

  2 THE YEAR OF THE BURNINGS

  3 THE GENTRY WITH NO PITY

  4 THE WHITE-SAILED SHIPS

  5 THE MASSACRE OF THE ROSSES

  6 WHERE ARE THE HIGHLANDERS?

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  MAPS

  SUTHERLAND

  THE HIGHLANDS

  THE decision to write this book was made for me when I wrote the last sentences of my account of the battle of Culloden and its aftermath in the Scottish Highlands. I quote them here as an introduction and an explanation:

  ‘Once the chiefs lost their powers many of them lost also any parental interest in their clansmen. During the next hundred years they continued the work of Cumberland's battalions. So that they might lease their glens and braes to sheep-farmers from the Lowlands and England, they cleared the crofts of men, women and children, using police and soldiers where necessary.’

  This book, then, 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. It has been said that the Clearances are now far enough away from us to be decently forgotten. But the hills are still empty. In all of Britain only among them can one find real solitude, and if their history is known there is no satisfaction to be got from the experience. It is worth remembering, too, that while the rest of Scotland was permitting the expulsion of its Highland people it was also forming that romantic attachment to kilt and tartan that scarcely compensates for the disappearance of a race to whom such things were once a commonplace reality. The chiefs remain, in Edinburgh and London, but the people are gone.

  Finally, we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lesson for us.

  February, 1963

  JOHN PREBBLE

  1

  THE YEAR OF THE SHEEP

  ‘2,000 Men would not suppress the Insurrection’

  MR MACLEOD of Geanies was ‘much fatigued’ this Sunday morning. He asked the Lord Advocate to excuse any omissions or inaccuracies in his dispatch, he was already half asleep. The paper on which he was writing was coarse and unsuitable, but he hoped that his lordship would excuse this also, it being the best that the butler could find while the family was at church. Mr Macleod could have waited until his host returned to Novar House, but that would have meant a delay in the Post, and great events demanded that Edinburgh should have early news from the North. And the news which Donald Macleod had to send was such that could give the Lord Advocate nothing but satisfaction, and do Mr Macleod nothing but good. So he was writing immediately, in his riding-boots and coat, his obstinate pen spitting blots over the paper in its haste. His body ached from two days in the saddle, during which he had led the Gentlemen of Ross (together with their ‘servants and dependants armed’) in an exciting man-hunt across the mountains beyond Cromarty Firth. ‘It does much honour to the Gentlemen of the County,’ wrote Mr Macleod, ‘with what alacrity the greatest part of those within reach hurried out.’

  Some of the Gentlemen, those who had not gone to church with Sir Hector Munro to give thanks for the preservation of their property, were resting now in Novar House, as pleased with their efforts as Sheriff Macleod. In the park outside, where the land fell in a green slope to the sea, were three companies of the 42nd Regiment, red coats and dark tartan lying in exhaustion on the grass. After a forced march from Fort George to Dingwall, and then on through the night to Strath Rusdale with cartridge and ball, they had been too tired to accompany the gentry on the last phase of the operation. Mr Macleod was naturally pleased that the civil power, by rallying the gentility, had been able to do something in this distressing affair without using the muskets of the military. Not that he wished the Black Watch to be anywhere but at his back today, and he asked his lordship to regularize this. ‘Major Dalrymple has not at this moment received any official orders to put himself under my orders or to move from Fort George; and I can with truth assert that if this business was allowed to proceed one week more, 2,000 Men would not suppress the Insurrection which would ensue not only in this but in the Counties which surround us.’

  Mr Macleod was in the forty-eighth year of his life, and his twentieth as Sheriff-Depute of the County of Ross. That he was to hold the office for another thirty-nine may be largely attributable to his behaviour this warm August weekend. Excitable and vain, proud of the Highland quality indicated by the words ‘of Geanies’ (though he had merely bought the acres that gave him the use of the designation), he was also hard headed and shrewd. He had boyish dreams of generalship, and would later raise a regiment of militia as ‘Colonel Macleod of G
eanies’. But when reality, as now, demanded proof of his military ardour, he did very well indeed. Most men who are responsible for the preservation of Law and Good Order like to feel that they have at least once saved both from disaster. Mr Macleod had no doubt of it today. The times were persuasive. His thoughts, like those of the Gentlemen now snoring in Sir Hector's drawing-room, had been much concerned of late with affairs beyond the borders of the kingdom. In France the Commonality had risen against the lawful and divine authority of Government, inviting the rest of Europe to follow its example of insurrection and murder.

  It seemed to Mr Macleod and others that faint tremors of Jacobinism were being felt beyond Dingwall, and that the Mob in the hills to the north might well be wearing red caps. So far Life had not been taken, but Property had most certainly been abused. The Lord Advocate was assured that Mr Macleod, however, did not value his possessions before his honour and duty. ‘It may appear a little extraordinary, but I learned from some of the prisoners that they have not touched my farms, nor did intend to do it unless I opposed them by force, a threat which I very much despise.’

  These prisoners were now guarded by a file of Highlanders outside Novar House. ‘We discovered eight of the scoundrels either lying in the barley-corn or in the woods, and after a good deal of galloping over very bad ground we apprehended every one of them and delivered them over to the care of the Military.’

  When the Gentlemen and their riding-servants then galloped on to Strath Rusdale they found it empty except for four frightened men, and these were also taken in arrest to answer for the seditious absence of their neighbours. In the dark glens below Ben Wyvis, the heather above Loch Morie, many more were undoubtedly hiding, but they would not be safe. ‘We mean to refresh the men and officers till 6 at night when we return to Dingwall, and shall be ready tomorrow to proceed against the others if they are hardy enough to stick together, and have no doubt of bringing in all the ringleaders of this most unaccountable commotion.’

  He had the names of eight ringleaders and he wrote them into his dispatch, adding the names of the twelve scoundrels who had been flushed from the barley or taken at their doors. He asked for Justiciary Warrants to be sent quickly. His lordship would understand that while he was engaged in ‘this species of actual and fatiguing service’ the work of gathering precognitions from witnesses was scarcely possible.

  Of the twenty men he named more than half were called Ross. Among them were ‘William Ross a Piper in Achlaich, William Ross at Gladfield, Donald Ross in Dounie, Walter Ross in Croick, George Ross in Easter Greenyard, William Ross Bain in Wester Greenyard’. All these were thus from one narrow valley, from Strathcarron in the north, and this should be remembered later.

  The hills over which Mr Macleod's irregular horse had coursed for human quarry were the home of Clann Aindrea, the race of Andrew, the Rosses. Their roots were deep in the pleated land. They had all sprung from the fertile loins of Gilleon na h-àirde, father of the Celtic Earls of Ross. They spoke the Gaelic only for the most part, and except for those who went to soldier in the King's Highland regiments they knew little of the world beyond their hills (certainly nothing of the principles of Jacobinism). Their way of life had already undergone great changes, and against the latest threat to it they had gathered like their ancestors. But this time the invader was not Clan Mackay fording the Kyle of Sutherland on a foray. To drive it from Ross they needed nothing but sticks, the high crying of their voices on the hills.

  But at a place called Boath, Mr Macleod had found them. ‘What effect this check may have,’ he told the Lord Advocate, ‘I cannot determine, it may make them more desperate, but a day or two will determine, and I shall not fail to acquaint your Lordship.’

  The year was 1792. The prisoners whom the Sheriff took to Dingwall that Sunday evening, other men he was to pursue on Monday and Tuesday, and many more who had taken no part in this ‘most unaccountable commotion’ would remember the year and be inspired by it thirty, fifty, even sixty years later. They called it Bliadhna nan Caorach.

  The Year of the Sheep.

  ‘Servant of the servant, worse than the devil’

  ALEXANDER MACDONELL of Keppoch, Mac-'ic-Raonuill, the matriculated student of Glasgow University, was killed by the musketry of Pulteney's Regiment on Culloden Moor. He and old Lachlan MacLachlan were the only chiefs to die that day, but in their deaths the finger of the future touched their class. Keppoch was in most respects typical, and he had once described Highland society by a single phrase. His rent-roll, he said, consisted of five hundred fighting-men. When dying he added some depth to the description, calling upon his clansmen as his children. The men who carried him from the field in his red plaid wept for more than they knew.

  Although a fraction only of the clans had taken part in the last Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, all felt the results of its defeat. Bayonet and noose, the proscription of arms, of tartan and kilt, the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs, the sequestration of their estates, began the destruction of the clan system. A memory survived, cocooned in the silk of songs, awaiting mutation in romance.

  ‘Oh, how bitter the changes,’ sang John Roy Stewart who had led a regiment in the charge at Culloden, ‘that have left us to range in the storm!’ But greater changes were to come, and what was yet to be lost was not always as regrettable as the singers were to claim. What was to replace it was not always as worthy as men like Sheriff Macleod of Geanies sincerely believed.

  Until the middle of the eighteenth century a Highland chief with little silver in his purse could count himself rich if, like Keppoch, he had five hundred fighting-men to answer his call. The land was his, its ownership long since settled by the swing of a broadsword, and although most chiefs had realized that paper now carried more weight in Law than steel, their tribal or feudal levies still protected their title deeds. The land produced little, but it was enough for a people inured to famine, and money was needed only to buy the chief the luxuries that were his right. He lived in the twilight of his glens with his children, and sowed his earth with dragon's-teeth as much as with corn.

  Since the basis of land-tenure in the Highlands before the Rebellion was this value of the tenant as a warrior, military requirements determined the manner in which a chief granted tacks, or leases, on his property. Save that which he held directly himself, all land was leased to his principal supporters, frequently blood-kin who officered the clan regiment and recruited companies among their sub-tenants. These tacksmen took titles from the land they leased, were Mac-This of That or The Other, and were as sensitive as sea-anemones in matters that touched their honour. Their rents were paid in kind or services, or were quitrents that scarcely equalled the value of what they possessed. In many cases they may have held written leases, although after Culloden, when a black-cattle economy replaced a military order and the clan needed no majors and captains, the chief began to show an understandable reluctance to put his name to anything that gave something for nothing. Having ceased to be a king in his own glens, having lost by Act of Parliament the power of ‘pit and gallows’ over the clan, he slowly realized that he was now a landlord not a warlord, and that he needed paying tenants not officers.

  For some years after Colonel Belford's cannon blew away the clans at Culloden chiefs and gentry continued to respect the beliefs of the clan, and encouraged the view that they were its custodian. This was not only because it enabled them to parade tartan and title in Edinburgh drawing-rooms. Their rights and powers under Scots law were becoming increasingly important to them, and the docile obedience of their people would make the hard necessities of the future easier to impose.

  They began, willingly or unwillingly, the great betrayal of their children.

  Highland society had been a pyramid. Below the chief, at its apex, the tacksmen leased their land to sub-tenants who paid for it in kind and service. They had no written leases and held their meagre patches of soil from year to year on the sufferance and goodwill of the tacksmen.
Their insecurity of tenure was the greatest guarantee that they or their sons could be brought into the clan regiment when needed. Below them was a bottom stratum of landless men, the cotters, who screamed into battle in the wake of the charge.

  The sub-tenants formed small communities or townships. Six or eight men might hold a farm in common, and whereas in the beginning, beyond their memory, each man might have had an equal share, now one had a third and another a sixth with the obligation to divide even that fraction among their sons at their death. The township held a portion of the glen and a tract of mountain pasture for thirty or forty black cattle, a small herd of thin and fleshless sheep. The best of the arable land was farmed in runrig, strips for which the sub-tenants periodically drew lots. Payment in kind or service for this land could and frequently did turn a sub-tenant into the servant of his tacksmen and hold him in perpetual debt.

  The cotter was from birth a servant. Tradition and customary right gave him a little grazing for a cow on the township pasture, a kail-yard and potato-patch by his round-stone hut, and for these he paid a lifetime of service to the sub-tenant. He was what other men were not, herdsman, blacksmith, weaver, tailor, shoemaker, armourer, axeman and bowman in the last rank of clan. ‘Gille ghille is measa na'n diobhal!’ he cried bitterly after Culloden. The servant of the servant is worse than the devil. Bad is the tenancy, but the evil of the Evil One is in the sub-tenancy. His escape could come in his dreams, or in the sharing of glory with the chief when the Bard sang or the Piper played. He could escape further into the King's red coat, and die at Ticonderoga or Havana with the slogan of his clan on his lips.

  Yet the life was something which he and the sub-tenants were themselves unwilling to change. Their attachment to the land was deep and strong. They had peopled it with talking stones, snow-giants, and mythical warriors of mountain granite. Their culture was virile and immediate, their verse flowered on the rich mulching of their history. They held to the spirit of the clan when the chief was bartering it for a house in Belgravia. They retained their respect for him long after he had lost his for them. They acknowledged his right to dispose of them as he thought fit, and their inability to throw up leaders from their own ranks made their destruction inevitable. De their na daoine? What will the people say? they asked, and did nothing. The land they jealously regarded as their own, though they had no title to it, wasted beneath them for lack of knowledge and lack of opportunity. The shared sub-tenancies fed upon themselves and grew smaller each year, it being the custom, for example, to dig great pits in arable land to make compost heaps. On one township in Easter Ross, five of its eighty good acres were scooped out and lost in this manner.