The Highland Clearances Read online

  The insecurity of the people, their dependence on the goodwill of factor, tacksman and laird, made them frequently subservient, scheming or dissimulating. The laird could punish them by driving them landless from the glen, the laird could reward them with a corner of his land. Such a people to whom the past was a present reality, a monoglot minority accustomed to making no decisions for itself, not only feared change but was a prepared victim of it. Beyond the mountains the Highlander was despised and hated. Mi-run mor nan Gall, he called it, the Lowlander's great hatred. And this hatred was to persist until Walter Scott and his imitators took the Highlander out of his environment, disinfected him, dressed him in romance, and made him respectable enough to be a gun-bearer for an English sportsman, a servant to a Queen, or a bayonet-carrier for imperialism.

  The old structure began to crumble rapidly after 1770. The chiefs, said Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, ‘were reduced to the situation of any other proprietors, but they were not long in discovering that to subsist a numerous train of dependants was not the only way in which their estates could be rendered of value’.

  The economy and the manners, the demands and vanities of the south, the need for money and more money, swept away the lairds' picture of themselves as fathers of their people, custodians of the clan. The old chiefs who had gone out in the Rebellion, or had stayed at home testing the political wind with their fingers, died one by one. Their sons developed into a class that forgot the Gaelic and agreed with the English that it was a barbarous tongue. They took wives from England and the Lowlands, and these women asked for more than homespun on their backs and stones for walls. They coveted town-houses in Edinburgh, carriages, horses, southern educations for their children. A chief's daughters, too, were no longer content with husbands picked from the cadets of neighbouring glens, but desired softer men from the south who expected more substantial dowries than an infusion of warrior blood.

  There was no satisfaction to be got from living on the land of their forefathers, and towards the end of the eighteenth century three-fifths of the Hebridean lairds, for example, were already absentee landlords. With the blunt edge of the fancy dirks they wore at balls the chiefs cut the ties that had held them to the people. They were rich in land yet their wives were ashamed of their poverty when they went to an Edinburgh rout among merchants, lawyers, and Lowland lairds. Their sons were competing for majorities in English regiments, and needed money to buy their commissions or pay their gambling debts. They sank into debt with a self-indulgence that characterized the age. Dice-cup and wine-cup began their long drain on the Highland purse.

  Money would be had from the land. Not from turning its stony soil, but from the cattle that could graze upon it. As Britain's wars and population increased, so did the need for meat. In thirty years the demand for black Highland cattle grew so great that prices doubled. Southern cattlemen began to lease grazing land in the hills, using the old drove-roads or cutting new ones from the far north and west to the great trysting-place at Falkirk. The administrators of estates forfeited to the Crown after the '45 had shown what could be done by larger farms, higher rents and the abolition of run-rig. Speculators who had taken leases on these estates (Donald Macleod of Geanies was one) had grown rich from their ruthless and energetic improvements. While the growing destruction of ridge-farming was undoubtedly economic and profitable, the merging of small holdings into large single units under one tenant increased the numbers of landless men. For them Improvement had little sympathy. Compassion makes expensive calls on the conscience, and it is a comfort to find it undeserved.

  ‘They live in the midst of smoke and filth,’ said Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, himself a great Improver. ‘That is their choice.’ And for all his Highland name he might have been a Sussex landowner when he added: ‘They will yet find themselves happier and more comfortable in the capacity of servants to substantial tenants than in their present situation.’

  To exploit the land that must pay his debts, carry his mortgages and support his family's ambitions, the chief had first to remove his tacksmen or bring them to heel as reasonable tenants, for they, not he, held most of his property. He removed them by refusing to grant them written leases when the old ones expired, preferring southern graziers who would pay to kinsmen who might not. Where tacksmen remained they competed among themselves for the land that fell vacant, passing on the rent increases (often as high as 300 per cent) to their sub-tenants. To tacksmen who were reluctant to put pressure on people who were, after all, their clansmen, the chief might send a peremptory order in which the past sounded like a clash of cymbals.

  ‘You are to intimate to the whole tenants in your district,’ wrote The Seaforth's factor to a tacksman in the Isle of Lewis, ‘that they must sell no cattle this year until the rents are paid, to anyone who has not the factor's orders to buy; and if anyone attempt to buy with ready money, you are to arrest their cattle and not allow them to be carried out of the country until the whole rents are paid up. This on your peril.’

  The tacksmen lagged behind the chief in the race to the future. Few of them had the means, opportunity or desire for southern education and southern dalliance, and thus were closer to the old ways, the old traditions and the old idea of their importance. They resented the rack-renting of their cousin or uncle the chief, though this resentment did not prevent them from transferring the burden to their sub-tenants. An English traveller, returning from an exhausting visit to the Highlands in 1785, wrote with smug indignation of what he had seen: ‘The chieftain lets out his land in large lots to the inferior branches of his family, all of whom must support the dignity of lairds. The renters let the land out in small parcels from year to year to the lower class of people, and to support their dignity squeeze everything out of them they can possibly get, leaving them only a bare subsistence. Until this evil is obviated Scotland can never improve.’

  Those who could not endure the increasing oppression of the chiefs, left Scotland altogether for North America, and thus began what Samuel Johnson saw and called a ‘fever of emigration’. Often the tacksman's people, sub-tenants and cotters, would go with him, and he welcomed them not as fellow-seekers for liberty, but as future tenants on the land he hoped to acquire in Nova Scotia or the Carolinas. Among the people the poets lamented the passing of the tacksman. In Kintail lived John Macrae, whose father had been hanged on an apple-tree by the Duke of Cumberland, and before he left for America he sang a bitter approval of what the tacksmen were doing:

  Better not to dwell under lairds

  who will not suffer their tenantry,

  who will take gold from a crab's claw

  rather than from a good man.

  These early emigrations were not the wretched, helpless exodus that was to come in the next century. The tacksmen took their little wealth and greater arrogance with them. In 1791 the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (seeking godlessness in the Highlands, but finding something more alarming) reported that ‘The secretary was assured upon authority which appeared to him conclusive that since the year 1772 no less than sixteen vessels full of emigrants have sailed from the western parts of the counties of Inverness and Ross alone, containing, it is supposed, 6,400 souls, and carrying with them in specie at least £38,000 sterling.’

  There were tacksmen who took their people away from rack-renting and greedy chiefs because they saw it as an obligation on their honour. They were few, of course, but among them was John Macdonald of Glenalladale, Mac Iain Oig, the son of Young John. His family was a cadet branch of the great Macdonalds of Clanranald, stubbornly Catholic and Jacobite in convictions. He resented the Presbyterianism and the land-grabbing of the Clanranald family. He grieved for the passing of the tacksman's old position and honour. He looked at the situation: ‘I saw many of my friends whom I loved, like to fall into, and which the children could not avoid unless some other path was struck out for them.’

  He struck out the path. He bought land on the island of St John in the Gulf
of St Lawrence, and to it, in 1772, he took an expedition of ‘opprest people’, tacksmen and sub-tenants from South Uist, Moidart and Arisaig. ‘Emigrations,’ he wrote from Greenock before he left, ‘are like to demolish the Highland Lairds, and very deservedly.’

  In the Isles there were harsh memories of 1739 when Macdonald of Sleat and Macleod of Dunvegan had sold some of their people as indentured servants for the Carolinas. And now Sir Alexander Macdonald was squeezing his tacksmen from Uist and provoking from his bard Ian MacCodrum an angry protest. Seallaibh m 'an cuairt duibh is faicibh na h-uaislean…

  Look around you and see the gentry

  with no pity for the poor creatures,

  with no kindness to their kin.

  They do not think that you belong to the land,

  and although they leave you empty

  they do not see it as a loss.

  They have lost their respect

  for every law and promise

  that was among the men

  who took this land from the foe.

  But there was something more in MacCodrum's words than a lament for the passing of the tacksmen. He would not have called them truaghain, ‘poor creatures’. He was thinking of the people, for if the chief had no pity for his kinsmen, none could be expected by the commons. Already the people were becoming vagrants, wandering southward from the hills to the Lowland coast. John Knox, bookseller, book-writer and philanthropist, wrote of those whom he saw when touring the Highlands in the seventeen-eighties. ‘I often met families or bodies of people travelling to the ports. They generally edged off the road or hurried along as if shy of an interview.’ Those whom he persuaded to give such an interview told him that they had been driven from their land by their chiefs, their cattle seized and their furniture taken in lieu of unpaid rents. ‘Our fathers,’ said a Lochinver man, ‘were called out to fight our master's battles, and this is our reward.’

  But the money to pay their masters' debts, dowries and dunning tradesmen had to come from somewhere. In time black cattle alone would not be enough, though they darkened the braes of many glens. As Britain entered the long Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the demand for meat became stronger. And in the Highlands there was a new sound, a placid bleating that was to blot out for ever Keppoch's dying call to his children.

  ‘Woe to thee, oh land, the Great Sheep is coming!’

  IN TIME, WHEN mountain pastures were white with woollen snow, when there were only black droppings in valleys that had once sent a hundred broadswords to a gathering, Highlanders would call the sheep the laird's ‘four-footed clansmen’. Lost in a Glasgow slum, fumbling with scaling-knives in a Sutherland fishery, or swinging an axe in a Canadian clearing, they would forget, if indeed they ever understood, that sheep were one symptom only of the pressures that had driven them from their homes, not the compulsion itself. Yet the choice made by their lairds was real, sheep instead of men, and this was the cause of their exile and of their sorrow.

  Exile to the Highlanders was not a matter of miles. Once expelled from the glen they had occupied for generations it was of small consequence to them whether they travelled ten miles or four thousand. The loss was the same, the pain as great. Unprepared for change, they held to the old ways, of which an acceptance of the chief's authority was among the strongest. He might dispose of them as he thought fit, but he was also their only protector, and when he began to use the power and ignore the obligation they were helpless. Aware of betrayal, they sometimes walked into exile with the meekness of the animals that replaced them.

  They still saw themselves as the chief's rent-roll, supporters of his military and political prestige. Though they could lament the prodigal expenditure of their lives in quarrels that did not touch them directly, their pride had roots in a warrior history. It was almost their only compensation in famine and poverty. And it was exploited. During the fifty years that followed Culloden the chiefs raised twenty-two splendid regiments for the Crown. These were mustered as the clans had been gathered in the past, as much by threat of eviction as by appeal. The promises made to them were often broken, and it is not surprising that in eight of the regiments there were mutinies serious enough to be punished by drum-head courts-martial and the firing-squad. But no one could complain of the Highlander's courage. The wearing of the Government's black tartan kept old ardours warm. It also bred a new pride that was heard in the voice of the bard when the laird began to replace his clansmen with Lowland shepherds and Lowland sheep.

  When sheep are gathered at the fold

  and the people are gone,

  each landlord, with his crook

  in his cloak, will not sing

  as he once did, counting

  the rents at the table.

  If war comes to the Kingdom

  and the French sail across in their

  thousands, King George's throat

  will not be safe from their blades.

  When the Gael left,

  wanting clothes, money and food,

  the English were poorly protected

  though their bellies were full of meat.

  There had always been sheep in the Highlands. Each township had a few score that grazed with the cattle on the pastures, or wandered wild and unwatched in the bogs. They were thin and white-faced, straight-horned and as small as dogs sometimes. Their fleece looked like hair, though selected parts of it produced a gentle wool when spun. They had no cash value outside the hills, and they were kept for their wool and their milk. Mutton from their starved flanks was the only meat eaten by the poorer families. The people gave each animal a name at lambing, and every night after milking it was brought to shelter. For they were blessed. Christ had spoken of Himself as a Shepherd, and of His people as sheep.

  In the primitive husbandry of the old tenancies, the limited pastures, there was no room for a sheep economy, for a Lowland animal that would require six acres of mountain grazing in the summer, and sheltered valley floors for wintering. In the beginning southern sheepmen did not believe that their flocks could survive a Highland winter, yet by 1760 they were already leasing the grass hills of Perthshire and Argyll. North of the Great Glen, northward to the Atlantic, there was wide land awaiting sheep that could live upon it, and men who would develop it. The first of these men was a sailor, a vice-admiral home from the sea, Sir John Lockhart-Ross of Balnagowan who had started life and walked a quarter-deck for twenty-five years as plain John Lockhart. The name was changed when he inherited the disputed title of chief of Clann Aindrea and the more tangible property of Balnagowan, a broad swathe of mountain, loch and glen from the Dornoch Firth to the western coast.

  In 1762, his forty-second year, he settled down at Balnagowan Castle, and took a long hard look at what he owned. It was not encouraging. Land and people were much as they had been for centuries, except that many of his tenants were absentee Lowlanders, sub-letting to the Highlanders. A methodical, patient man, a man used to waiting for wind and tide, he slowly began to change both earth and tenants. He enclosed barren hillsides, and paid southern labourers a shilling a day to plant them. He drained and reclaimed marshy valleys. He refused to renew the leases of the absent Lowlanders, and he raised the rents of the sub-tenants. He also brought sheep to the county of Ross.

  On his journey northward he had passed through Perthshire, and he had seen the flocks of black-faced Lintons which graziers were now pasturing there. He was told that they not only survived the white winters and black frosts, but also produced three times as much meat as cattle on the same area. When he had gathered to himself all the troublesome leases on his property, Lockhart-Ross took one large farm under his immediate control and put a flock of Lintons upon it. The experiment was successful and having proved a point and being anxious to turn his attention now to other Improvements, he granted the lease of the farm to a southern grazier, Thomas Geddes, on condition that he continued with Lintons. Thus Mr Geddes acquired the distinction of being the first Lowland sheep-farmer to come north of the Gr
eat Glen. The prosperity that followed for him, and for the son who took the lease after him, showed that his journey had not been as suicidal as his Lowland friends had forecast. They were sending two hundred thousand sheep across the Border to England every year, and were anxious to send more. Armstrongs, Elliots, and Scotts, a ‘fine stalwart race of men’, they turned their eyes northward with quickening interest.

  The county of Ross was admirably suited to a great sheep economy. It endured less snow and enjoyed warmer summers than some more southern counties. Through its immobile ocean of mountain waves ran valley troughs that followed the course of the sun. There were good pastures for summer and safe shelter for winter. The rock walls ran with sweet water. There were, of course, people as well, but men were already saying that since there were too many of them, anyway, they would be far better off elsewhere.

  Mr Geddes received no welcome from the men of Ross whom Sir John had removed from the upland pastures. They shot his sheep at night, drove them into the lochs, and terrorized his shepherds. They faced him on the brae and spoke words that were gibberish to him. ‘The strongest deer,’ they said, ‘will not live here in the winter.’ But the black-faced Lintons did. Even so, a stronger, hardier breed was desirable, one that was less subject to disease and would give a greater yield of mutton and wool in proportion to the high acreage of pasture needed.