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In 1814 Sir Walter Scott published Waverley, Or, ’tis Sixty Years Since, a novel which opened at the time of the last Jacobite rising in 1745–6. The
In similar vein, the Scottish novelist Neil Gunn wrote of the deserted lands of Sutherland from where his own kinfolk, the MacKeamish Gunns, had long disappeared:
A selection of the creative output on the subject could include: Neil Gunn, Butcher’s Broom (1934) and The Silver Darlings (1945); Fionn MacColla, And the Cock Crew (1945); Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies (1968) and Collected Poems (1992); Kathleen Fidler, The Desperate Journey (1964) – a widely read story for primary schoolchildren; John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974), a hugely popular stage play which has been reprised several times over the years; and the television film Yet Still the Blood is Strong (1984).
Malcolm Gray’s pathbreaking The Highland Economy 1750–1850, published in 1957, was an exception, but even in that book clearances appeared only incidentally in the text.
Not until 1982 did a professional historian attempt to tackle the subject in a comprehensive fashion, with the appearance of Eric Richards’s A History of the Highland Clearances.
1880s
Indeed, at the time clearances came to epitomize the abuse of landed power and the vital need for land reform, which from that point on was rarely off the political agenda in the years before the Great War.
events in the Highlands also stirred much interest and condemnation outside Scotland. Most famously, Karl Marx, in Chapter 27 of Das Kapital (1867), railed against the clearances as a primary exemplar of peasant expropriation and the ‘reckless terrorism’ which had usurped communal rights in the name of private property.
As Highlandism became more influential, Highland symbolism came to be even more significant as an important marker of Scottish identity, so ensuring that the saga of the clearances could now be incorporated into the heritage of all Scots whatever their ancestral local and regional background.
The endemic poverty of the western Highlands was one reason why the Scottish state took so long to impose its authority throughout the territory. If the resource base of the region had been richer and more productive, governments would probably have been tempted at a much earlier time to establish a more effective dominion over the north-west and insular districts.
In fact adaptation and change were integral features of the townships in the old Highlands.
The most striking change was an increase in the region’s capacity to rear cattle and with that the great expansion of the droving trade to the Lowlands and England.
In the 1680s, for instance, herds of 1,000 head of cattle making their way south were not an unusual sight. Indeed, clan society provided an effective business structure for the droving trade. The contract covering the whole of the land settled by a clan and its satellites was negotiated by leading families with drovers from the Lowlands. Gathering in of stock would then be organized from individual townships by the clan gentry, and the market value of the tenants’ cattle was settled and recorded as payments against their book rentals.
Yet, in reality, clans in the Highlands had not evolved from the very remote past but rather as a response to political turbulence and social dislocation in northern Scotland during the early Middle Ages. At that time, people sought protection from danger and threat by gathering in loyalty to great men of influence, power and prestige as the crown itself could not guarantee law and order throughout the entire realm of Scotland. In particular, the hill country of the north and west mainland, the Western Isles and the Scottish Borders were semi-autonomous entities, mainly beyond royal control,
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Until the seventeenth century other parts of Scotland had also been based on kin-based societies where the power and influence of great men and family networks commanded ultimate authority.
The Borders, another region of recalcitrance in the face of royal authority, was in this sense entirely comparable to the western Highlands.
For nearly 150 years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Lordship of the Isles ruled by ClanDonald, a Gaelic kingdom within a Scottish kingdom, provided a degree of order and authority to a sea empire which stretched from the island of Islay in the south to the Butt of Lewis in the far north-west.
The collapse of the Lordship after 1496, as a consequence of fratricidal conflict within the ruling MacDonald family, triggered decades of violence in the sixteenth century as the clans of the west warred for dominance.
demise of clan society was much more protracted than that. Indeed, the roots of decay can be traced back to the early decades of the seventeenth century and the more effective imposition of crown authority throughout the Highlands during the reign of James VI and I (1567–1625).
The Scottish government and, after the Regal Union of 1603, the British monarchy, began to enforce its writ in Gaeldom with more determination and success then than at any time in the past.
The Statutes were indeed a comprehensive programme designed to impose Lowland values on the fine, promote their assimilation with the mores of the ‘civilized’ Lowlands and eliminate what was seen as the chronic excesses of clanship.
The bloodiest fighting took place during the Wars of the Covenanters in the central and south-western Highlands, especially after the incursions of Alasdair MacColla with his Irish-Catholic troops from Ulster in 1644.
authorities for the conduct of their clansmen. The fifty years after the Statutes of Iona saw a massive increase in the indebtedness of the Highland élites as a result of the combined forces of state action, absenteeism and conspicuous consumption.
The needs of a massively expanded Royal Navy for salt beef during the Wars of the Spanish Succession, growing demand in the urban areas of Scotland, northern England and, especially, in London, the impact of the new common market between the two countries after 1707, and late-seventeenth-century prohibitions on cattle imports from Ireland were all significant factors in this golden age of the Highland cattle trade. By the 1720s it was reckoned that as many as 30,000 beasts were being driven south annually to the Lowlands.
Military capability remained across the Highlands because many clan gentry and their rank and file often served as mercenaries in Dutch and French armies at the time.
The Breadalbane estate papers confirm that some ‘warnings off’ or evictions were taking place on the Braes of Lorn and Netherlorn in the 1720s and 1730s, a generation or more before major clearances began elsewhere in the Highlands. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the 1730s, there came the first significant emigrations in response to these new ways. Small parties left from Argyll, Sutherland and the central Highlands to Georgia and the Carolinas across the Atlantic.
Around the same time Norman MacLeod of Dunvegan and Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, the two most powerful chiefs in Skye, devised an extraordinary but ultimately unsuccessful scheme to deport some of their clansmen, wives and children to the American colonies, there to be sold as indentured labour for the plantations.
In the resulting scandal both MacLeod and MacDonald were threatened with judicial prosecution. The notorious case seemed to confirm as no other could that for some chiefs at least the ethic of clanship w...
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Not all clans were Jacobite in sympathy, especially in those areas where Presbyterianism had made a deep impact by the eighteenth century, as in the counties of Argyll, Sutherland and Caithness, and in Wester Ross.
Over time militant Jacobitism in the Highlands came to focus mainly on the Grampian region and parts of western Inverness-shire; the clans of the inner and outer Hebrides played little part in the ’45 on either side.
Scotland. It is possible to trace the identification of some clans with the House of Stuart back to the 1640s, when they had fought under Alasdair MacColla and the Marquess of Montrose on the King’s side against the Presbyterian Covenanters during the civil wars.
The monarchy generally, and James and the Stuarts in particular, therefore came to be seen as the most effective checks on the rampant expansionism of ClanCampbell.
had more impact on the government clans than on the Jacobites. Around the same time, General George Wade came north to supervise an ambitious programme of road, bridge and fort construction to reduce the inaccessibility of the clans and assist the movement of crown forces in the event of another rising. Between 1725 and his departure from Scotland in 1740 he claimed to have built 250 miles of road to facilitate the marches of government troops throughout the disaffected districts.
These were also designed to link Fort William, Fort Augustus and small garrisons at Bernera and Ruthven which were to act as the government’s eyes and ears in the Jacobite districts. The whole basis of Wade’s strategy, however, was undermined from the later 1730s, when the government stripped the forts of adequate forces in order to increase the supply of troops for European service. Wade’s roads did eventually prove to be useful, but only in expediting the march south of the Young Pretender’s army in 1745.
In due course, the military road system was considerably extended until by 1767 over a thousand miles had been built. Between 1748 and 1769 one of the greatest bastion artillery fortresses in Europe was constructed at Ardersier, east of Inverness, and named Fort George.
Through the passage of a series of Acts of Parliament, a comprehensive attack was also launched on the culture of the Gael and the system of clanship: tartans and kilts were proscribed as the sartorial symbols of rebel militarism; heritable jurisdictions, the private courts of landowners, were abolished; the carrying of weapons was forbidden; and rebel estates were declared forfeit to the crown.
But Gaeldom unquestionably did change profoundly in the decades after Culloden. Samuel Johnson, during his tour of the Western Isles in 1773, famously proclaimed the last rites of clanship: ‘the clans retain little now of their original character.
government subdued, and their reverence for their chiefs abated’.11 But whether all this was due, as Johnson asserted, to ‘the late conquest and subsequent laws’ is unclear. Highland society had been in the throes of a long transition from clanship to commercialism many decades before the ’45.
long before the age of improvement from the 1760s,
Current estimates suggest that the population of Scotland may have fallen by some 13 per cent due to a combination of famine-related diseases and extensive emigration in the 1690s.
by the 1660s it was the normal thing for the Lowlands not only to have an organized parish structure but a school and a functioning system of poor relief as well.
Dependence on armed followings became a thing of the past at a much earlier stage than in the Highlands.
Even on those estates where such especially long leases were uncommon, as in the Earl of Panmure’s Angus lands, the mean tack length in the first two decades of the eighteenth century had already reached fifteen years. This development was by no means universal throughout Scottish rural society. In pastoral areas, such as the Border counties and the Highlands, the granting of longer tacks to the lower peasantry was much less common, even if it was de rigueur among the gentlemen of the clans.
Therefore the provision of longer leases became more likely because landlords needed to attract and retain capable and enterprising tenants by offering them more secure conditions. The dichotomy was therefore not so much a Highland/Lowland social division, but rather one between pastoral and arable districts wherever they existed in Scotland.
For, contrary to popular belief, the removal and abandonment of traditional rural communities in eighteenth-century Scotland did not start in the Highlands. Two generations or more before clearances began north of the Highland line, the dispossession of many tenants and cottars was already under way in the hill country of the Borders, many miles to the south, in a social revolution which has long been mainly ignored.
Indeed, it was Border-reared and -improved Cheviot breeds which from the last quarter of the eighteenth century began to stock numerous farms across the north-west and the islands in a seemingly inexorable white tide which led to the uprooting of many peasant communities.
The First or ‘Old’ Statistical Account of Scotland (OSA), published in the 1790s, contains much detail on this social transformation.
The 160 questions ranged over geography, population, antiquities, religion, agriculture and industry.
unique historical compendium of contemporary life of the period unmatched for any other country in eighteenth-century Europe.
Indeed, several ministers asserted that, far from causing immiseration, depopulation had led to sharp increases in money wages. Poverty, therefore, could have been exported through the emigration and migration of the dispossessed.
