The Highland Clearances

From clan to estate

Before the eighteenth century, the Highland clan was both a family and a system of land and loyalty: chiefs held land and gave tenants and subtenants a place on it in return for rent, service and, when needed, men to fight. After Culloden that military role vanished. Chiefs and other landowners, many now living expensively in Edinburgh or London, increasingly treated their estates as businesses to be made profitable.^•

Sheep and the burnings

From the later eighteenth century, landlords found that large sheep farms, let to incoming graziers, paid far better than many small tenants. Communities in the inland glens were moved to crowded coastal crofts, where they were expected to fish or gather kelp, or were pushed to emigrate. The most notorious clearances were on the vast Sutherland estates between about 1807 and 1821, where thousands were removed, by some estimates as many as 15,000. In Strathnaver in 1814 the estate factor Patrick Sellar oversaw evictions in which houses were burned; he was tried for culpable homicide in 1816 and acquitted, but his name is still spoken with bitterness.^•

Famine and emigration

When potato blight struck in 1846, as in Ireland, Highland crofting communities faced famine. Relief efforts prevented mass death on the Irish scale, but the crisis drove a second wave of clearances and assisted emigration, sometimes with heavy pressure, to Canada and Australia. Whole communities left from places such as Skye, Lewis and Harris.^•

Resistance

People did not always go quietly. Women often led resistance to eviction officers. In the 1880s crofters on Skye and elsewhere fought the “Crofters’ War”, withholding rents and clashing with police in the Battle of the Braes in 1882. Their campaign, which drew on the example of the Irish Land League, won the Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886, which gave crofters security of tenure and effectively ended the Clearances.^•

Memory and argument

Popular memory of the Clearances was shaped by Gaelic song, by John Prebble’s bestselling 1963 history and by the folk-rock and theatre of the 1970s. Historians such as Eric Richards and Tom Devine have since stressed complexity: much emigration was voluntary, Lowland rural Scotland also saw clearance on a large scale, and some evictions were carried out by Highland-born landlords and factors. But they also confirm the core of the popular story: the people of the Highlands lost their land, and many were treated as an obstacle to profit.^•

Today the empty glens, the ruins of townships and memorials such as the Emigrants statue at Helmsdale are places of pilgrimage for descendants from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Since devolution the Scottish Parliament has passed land reform laws that give communities the right to buy land, and islands such as Eigg and much of South Uist are now community-owned.^•

Why it matters today