Son of the Gaël, how many a wierie change
The wing of time has brought across thy hills!
How many a deed uncouth, and custom strange,
The lofty spirit of thy fathers chills!
The usage of thy foes thy region fills,
And low thy head is bowed their hand beneath,
And driven by innumerable ills,
Thy olden race is gone from hill and heath,
To live a homeless life, and die a stranger’s death.
The preceding stanza is the first in the poem entitled “The Last Deer of
Beann Doran.” On the last two lines its author Mr. James Hay Allan,
appends a note as follows:--
In consequence of the enormous advance of rents, and the system of
throwing the small crofts into extensive sheep-farms, the Highlands
have been so depopulated in the last seventy-seven years,[351] that the
inhabitants do not now amount to above one-third of their number at the
commencement of that period. An instance of this melancholy fact is very
striking in Glen Urcha: in 1745 the east half only of the straith from
Dalmallie to Strone sent out a hundred fighting men: at the present day
there are not in the same space above thirty. This proportion of
decrease is general. During the last twenty years fifteen hundred
persons have gone from Argyleshire; three thousand from Inverness; the
same number from Ross and Caithness; and five thousand from Sutherland.
The desertions have been equal in the isles. Pennant, speaking of the
inhabitants of Skie, says: “Migrations and depression of spirit, the
last a common cause of depopulation, have since the year 1750 reduced
the number from fifteen thousand to between twelve and thirteen: one
thousand having crossed the Atlantic; others, sunk beneath poverty, or
in despair, ceased to obey the first great command, Increase and
multiply.” These observations were written in 1774; so that the
depopulation which is mentioned, took place in twenty-four years.
It is impossible to paint the first departings of a people who held the
memory of their ancestors, and the love of their soil, a part of their
soul. Unacquainted with any mechanical art, and unable to obtain for
their overflowing numbers an agricultural or pastoral employment in
their own country, they were obliged to abandon their native land, and
seek an asylum in the unpeopled deserts of the western world. The
departing inhabitants of each straith and hamlet gathered into bands,
and marched out of their glens with the piper playing before them the
death lament, “Cha pill! cha pill! cha pill me tulle!”--“Never! never!
never shall I return!” Upon the spot where they were to lose sight of
their native place, and part from those who were to remain behind, they
threw themselves upon the ground in an agony of despair, embracing the
earth, moistening the heather with their tears, and clinging with
hopeless anguish to the necks and plaids of the friends whom they were
to see no more. When the hour of separation was past, they went forth
upon the world a lonely, sad, expatriated race, rent from all which
bound them to the earth, and lost amid the tide of mankind: none mixed
with them in character, none blended with them in sympathy. They were
left in their simplicity to struggle with fraud, ignorance, and
distress, a divided people set apart to misfortune.
* * * * *
In the third stanza of the poem on “Beann Doran,” its author says,
There was a time--alas! full long ago,
Wide forests waved upon thy mountains’ side.