[1] Mackenzie’s Pamphlet, 1881.
To give a proper account of the Sutherland Clearances would take a
bulky volume. Indeed, a large tome of 354 pages has been written and
published in their defence by him who was mainly responsible for them,
called “An Account of the Sutherland Improvements,” by James Loch, at
that time Commissioner for the Marchioness of Stafford and heiress of
Sutherland. This was the first account I ever read of these so-called
improvements; and it was quite enough to convince me, and it will be
sufficient to convince anyone who knows anything of the country, that
the improvement of the people, by driving them in the most merciless
and cruel manner from the homes of their fathers, was carried out on a
huge scale and in the most inconsiderate and heartless manner by those
in charge of the Sutherland estates. But when one reads the other side,
Macleod’s “Gloomy Memories,” General Stewart of Garth’s “Sketches of
the Highlanders,” and other contemporary publications, one wonders
that such iniquities could ever have been permitted in any Christian
country, much more so in Great Britain, which has done so much for the
amelioration of subject races and the oppressed in every part of the
world, while her own brave sons have been persecuted, oppressed and
banished without compensation by greedy and cold-blooded proprietors,
who owed their position and their lands to the ancestors of the very
men they were now treating so cruelly.
The motives of the landlords, generally led by southern factors
worse than themselves, were, in most cases, pure self-interest,
and they pursued their policy of extermination with a recklessness
and remorselessness unparalleled anywhere else where the Gospel of
peace and charity was preached--except, perhaps, unhappy Ireland.
Generally, law and justice, religion and humanity, were either totally
disregarded, or, what was worse, in many cases converted into and
applied as instruments of oppression. Every conceivable means, short
of the musket and the sword, were used to drive the natives from
the land they loved, and to force them to exchange their crofts and
homes--brought originally into cultivation and built by themselves,
or by their forefathers--for wretched patches among the barren rocks
on the sea shore, and to depend, after losing their cattle and their
sheep, and after having their houses burnt about their ears or razed to
the ground, on the uncertain produce of the sea for subsistence, and
that in the case of a people, who, in many instances, and especially in
Sutherlandshire, were totally unacquainted with a seafaring life, and
quite unfitted to contend with its perils.
What was true generally of the Highlands, was in the county of
Sutherland carried to the greatest extreme. That unfortunate county,
according to an eye-witness, was made another Moscow. The inhabitants
were literally burnt out, and every contrivance and ingenious and
unrelenting cruelty was eagerly adopted for extirpating the race. Many
lives were sacrificed by famine and other hardships and privations;
hundreds, stripped of their all, emigrated to the Canadas and other
parts of America; great numbers, especially of the young and athletic,
sought employment in the Lowlands and in England, where, few of them
being skilled workmen, they were obliged--even farmers who had lived
in comparative affluence in their own country--to compete with common
labourers, in communities where their language and simple manners
rendered them objects of derision and ridicule. The aged and infirm,
the widows and orphans, with those of their families who could not
think of leaving them alone in their helplessness, and a number, whose
attachment to the soil which contained the ashes of their ancestors,
were induced to accept of the wretched allotments offered them on the
wild moors and barren rocks. The mild nature and religious training of
the Highlanders prevented a resort to that determined resistance and
revenge which has repeatedly set bounds to the rapacity of landlords
in Ireland. Their ignorance of the English language, and the want of
natural leaders, made it impossible for them to make their grievances
known to the outside world. They were, therefore, maltreated with
impunity. The ministers generally sided with the oppressing lairds, who
had the Church patronage at their disposal for themselves and for their
sons. The professed ministers of religion sanctioned the iniquity,
“the foulest deeds were glossed over, and all the evil which could
not be attributed to the natives themselves, such as severe seasons,
famines, and consequent disease, was by these pious gentlemen ascribed
to Providence, as a punishment for sin.”
The system of turning out the ancient inhabitants from their native
soil throughout the Highlands during the first half of the nineteenth
century has been carried into effect in the county of Sutherland
with greater severity and revolting cruelty than in any other part
of the Highlands, and that though the Countess-Marchioness and her
husband, the Marquis of Stafford, were by no means devoid of humanity,
however atrocious and devoid of human feeling were the acts carried
out in their name by heartless underlings, who represented the
ancient tenantry to their superiors as lazy and rebellious, though,
they maintained, everything was being done for their advantage and
improvement. How this was done will be seen in the sequel. South
countrymen were introduced and the land given to them for sheep farms
over the heads of the native tenantry. These strangers were made
justices of the peace and armed with all sorts of authority in the
county, and thus enabled to act in the most harsh and tyrannical
fashion, none making them afraid; while the oppressed natives were
placed completely at their mercy. They dare not even complain, for were
not their oppressors also the administrators of the law? The seventeen
parish ministers, with the single exception of the Rev. Mr. Sage, took
the side of the powers that were, exhorting the people to submit and to
stifle their cries of distress, telling them that all their sufferings
came from the hand of their Heavenly Father as a punishment for their
past transgressions. Most of these ministers have since rendered their
account, and let us hope they have been forgiven for such cruel and
blasphemous conduct. But one cannot help noting, to what horrid uses
these men in Sutherlandshire and elsewhere prostituted their sacred
office and high calling.
The Sutherland clearances were commenced in a comparatively mild way
in 1807, by the ejection of ninety families from Farr and Lairg.
These were provided for some fifteen or seventeen miles distant with
smaller lots, to which they were permitted to remove their cattle and
plenishing, leaving their crops unprotected, however, in the ground
from which they were evicted. They had to pull down their old houses,
remove the timber, and build new ones, during which period they had
in many cases to sleep under the open canopy of heaven. In the autumn
they carried away, with great difficulty, what remained of their crops,
but the fatigue incurred cost a few of them their lives, while others
contracted diseases which stuck to them during the remainder of their
lives, and shortened their days.
In 1809 several hundred were evicted from the parishes of Dornoch,
Rogart, Loth, Clyne, and Golspie, under circumstances of much greater
severity than those already described. Several were driven by various
means to leave the country altogether, and to those who could not be
induced to do so, patches of moor and bog were offered on Dornoch
Moor and Brora Links--quite unfit for cultivation. This process was
carried on annually until, in 1811, the land from which the people were
ejected was divided into large farms, and advertised as huge sheep
runs. The country was overrun with strangers who came to look at these
extensive tracts. Some of these gentlemen got up a cry that they were
afraid of their lives among the evicted tenantry. A trumped-up story
was manufactured that one of the interlopers was pursued by some of
the natives of Kildonan, and put in bodily fear. The military were
sent for from Fort George. The 21st Regiment was marched to Dunrobin
Castle, with artillery and cartloads of ammunition. A great farce was
performed; the people were sent for by the factors to the Castle at a
certain hour. They came peaceably, but the farce must be gone through,
the Riot Act was read; a few sheepish, innocent Highlanders were made
prisoners, but nothing could be laid to their charge, and they were
almost immediately set at liberty, while the soldiers were ordered back
to Fort George. The demonstration, however, had the desired effect in
cowing and frightening the people into the most absolute submission.
They became dismayed and broken-hearted, and quietly submitted to their
fate. The clergy all this time were assiduous in preaching that all the
misfortunes of the people were “fore-ordained of God, and denouncing
the vengeance of Heaven and eternal damnation on all those who would
presume to make the slightest resistance.” At the May term of 1812
large districts of these parishes were cleared in the most peaceable
manner, the poor creatures foolishly believing the false teaching
of their selfish and dishonest spiritual guides--save the mark! The
Earl of Selkirk, who went personally to the district, allured many
of the evicted people to emigrate to his estates on the Red River
in British North America, whither a whole ship-cargo of them went.
After a long and otherwise disastrous passage they found themselves
deceived and deserted by the Earl, left to their unhappy fate in an
inclement wilderness, without any protection from the hordes of Red
Indian savages by whom the district was infested, and who plundered
them of their all on their arrival and finally massacred them, save a
small remnant who managed to escape, and travelled, through immense
difficulties, across trackless forests to Upper Canada.
The notorious Mr. Sellar was at this time sub-factor, and in the
spring of 1814 he took a large portion of the parishes of Farr and
Kildonan into his own hands. In the month of March the old tenantry
received notices to quit at the ensuing May term, and a few days after
the summonses were served the greater portion of the heath pasture
was, by his orders, set on fire. By this cruel proceeding the cattle
belonging to the old tenantry were left without food during the spring,
and it was impossible to dispose of them at a fair price, the price
having fallen after the war; for Napoleon was now a prisoner in Elba,
and the demand for cattle became temporarily dull, and prices very
much reduced. To make matters worse, fodder was unusually scarce this
spring, and the poor people’s cattle depended for subsistence solely on
the spring grass which sprouts out among the heather, but which this
year had been burnt by the factor who would himself reap the benefit
when he came into possession later on.
In May the work of ejectment was again commenced, accompanied by
cruelties hitherto unknown even in the Highlands. Atrocities were
perpetrated which I cannot trust myself to describe in my own words. I
shall give what is much more valuable--a description by an eye-witness
in his own language. He says:--In former removals the tenants had been
allowed to carry away the timber of their old dwellings to erect houses
on their new allotments, but now a more summary mode was adopted by
setting fire to them. The able-bodied men were by this time away after
their cattle or otherwise engaged at a distance, so that the immediate
sufferers by the general house-burning that now commenced were the
aged and infirm, the women and children. As the lands were now in the
hands of the factor himself, and were to be occupied as sheep farms,
and as the people made no resistance, they expected, at least, some
indulgence in the way of permission to occupy their houses and other
buildings till they could gradually remove, and meanwhile look after
their growing crops. Their consternation was therefore greater, when
immediately after the May term-day, a commencement was made to pull
down and set fire to the houses over their heads. The old people, women
and others, then began to preserve the timber which was their own; but
the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all
before them, and when they had overthrown all the houses in a large
tract of country they set fire to the wreck. Timber, furniture, and
every other article that could not be instantly removed was consumed
by fire or otherwise utterly destroyed. The proceedings were carried
on with the greatest rapidity and the most reckless cruelty. The cries
of the victims, the confusion, the despair and horror painted on the
countenances of the one party, and the exulting ferocity of the other,
beggar all description. At these scenes Mr. Sellar was present, and
apparently, as sworn by several witnesses at his subsequent trial,
ordering and directing the whole. Many deaths ensued from alarm,
from fatigue, and cold, the people having been instantly deprived of
shelter, and left to the mercies of the elements. Some old men took
to the woods and to the rocks, wandering about in a state approaching
to, or of absolute, insanity; and several of them in this situation
lived only a few days. Pregnant women were taken in premature labour,
and several children did not long survive their sufferings. “To these
scenes,” says Donald Macleod[2], “I was an eye-witness, and am ready to
substantiate the truth of my statements, not only by my own testimony,
but by that of many others who were present at the time. In such a
scene of general devastation, it is almost useless to particularise the
cases of individuals; the suffering was great and universal. I shall,
however, notice a very few of the extreme cases of which I was myself
an eye-witness. John Mackay’s wife, Ravigill, in attempting to pull
down her house, in the absence of her husband, to preserve the timber,
fell through the roof. She was in consequence taken in premature
labour, and in that state was exposed to the open air and to the view
of all the by-standers. Donald Munro, Garvott, lying in a fever, was
turned out of his house and exposed to the elements. Donald Macbeath,
an infirm and bed-ridden old man, had the house unroofed over him, and
was in that state exposed to the wind and rain until death put a period
to his sufferings. I was present at the pulling down and burning of the
house of William Chisholm, Badinloskin, in which was lying his wife’s
mother, an old bed-ridden woman of nearly 100 years of age, none of the
family being present. I informed the persons about to set fire to the
house of this circumstance, and prevailed on them to wait until Mr.
Sellar came. On his arrival, I told him of the poor old woman being
in a condition unfit for removal, when he replied, ‘Damn her, the old
witch, she has lived too long--let her burn.’ Fire was immediately set
to the house, and the blankets in which she was carried out were in
flames before she could be got out. She was placed in a little shed,
and it was with great difficulty they were prevented from firing it
also. The old woman’s daughter arrived while the house was on fire, and
assisted the neighbours in removing her mother out of the flames and
smoke, presenting a picture of horror which I shall never forget, but
cannot attempt to describe.” Within five days she was a corpse.
[2] Author of “Gloomy Memories,” etc.
In 1816 Sellar was charged at Inverness, before the Court of
Justiciary, with culpable homicide and fire-raising in connection
with these proceedings, and, considering all the circumstances, it
is not at all surprising that he was “honourably” acquitted of the
grave charges made against him. Almost immediately after, however, he
ceased to be factor on the Sutherland estates, and Mr. Loch came into
power. Evictions were carried out from 1814 down to 1819 and 1820,
pretty much of the same character as those already described, but the
removal of Mr. Young, the chief factor, and Mr. Sellar from power was
hailed with delight by the whole remaining population. Their very
names had become a terror. Their appearance in any part of the county
caused such alarm as to make women fall into fits. One woman became
so terrified that she became insane, and whenever she saw any one she
did not recognise, she invariably cried out in a state of absolute
terror--“_Oh! sin Sellar_”--“Oh! there’s Sellar.” The people, however,
soon discovered that the new factors were not much better. Several
leases which were current would not expire until 1819 and 1820, so that
the evictions were necessarily only partial from 1814 down to that
period. The people were reduced to such a state of poverty that even
Mr. Loch himself, in his “Sutherland Improvements,” page 76, admits
that--“Their wretchedness was so great that, after pawning everything
they possessed to the fishermen on the coast, such as had no cattle
were reduced to come down from the hills in hundreds for the purpose
of gathering cockles on the shore. Those who lived in the more remote
situations of the county were obliged to subsist upon broth made of
nettles, thickened with a little oatmeal. Those who had cattle had
recourse to the still more wretched expedient of bleeding them, and
mixing the blood with oatmeal, which they afterwards cut into slices
and fried. Those who had a little money came down and slept all night
upon the beach, in order to watch the boats returning from the fishing,
that they might be in time to obtain a part of what had been caught.”
He, however, omitted to mention the share he and his predecessors had
taken in reducing the people to such misery, and the fact that at this
very time he had constables stationed at the Little Ferry to prevent
the starved tenantry from collecting shellfish in the only place where
they could find them.
He prevailed upon the people to sign documents consenting to remove
at the next Whitsunday term, promising at the same time to make good
provision for them elsewhere. In about a month after, the work of
demolition and devastation again commenced, and parts of the parishes
of Golspie, Rogart, Farr, and the whole of Kildonan were in a blaze.
Strong parties with faggots and other combustible material were set
to work; three hundred houses were given ruthlessly to the flames, and
their occupants pushed out in the open air without food or shelter.
Macleod, who was present, describes the horrible scene as follows:--
“The consternation and confusion were extreme; little or no time was
given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to
remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them;
next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries
of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle,
hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the
smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles
description--it required to be seen to be believed. A dense cloud
of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far
out to sea; at night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented
itself--all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once.
I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and
counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of
which were my relations, and all of whom I personally knew, but whose
present condition--whether in or out of the flames--I could not tell.
The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were
reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these days a boat
actually lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore,
but at night was enabled to reach a landing-place by the lurid light of
the flames.”
The whole of the inhabitants of Kildonan, numbering nearly 2000 souls,
except three families, were utterly rooted and burnt out, and the whole
parish converted into a solitary wilderness. The suffering was intense.
Some lost their reason. Over a hundred souls took passage to Caithness
in a small sloop, the master humanely agreeing to take them in the
hold, from which he had just unloaded a cargo of quicklime. A head
storm came on, and they were nine days at sea in the most miserable
condition--men, women, and helpless children huddled up together, with
barely any provisions. Several died in consequence, and others became
invalids for the rest of their days. One man, Donald Mackay, whose
family was suffering from a severe fever, carried two of his children
a distance of twenty-five miles to this vessel. Another old man took
shelter in a meal mill, where he was kept from starvation by licking
the meal refuse scattered among the dust on the floor, and protected
from the rats and other vermin by his faithful collie. George Munro,
the miller at Farr, who had six of his family down with fever, had to
remove them in that state to a damp kiln, while his home was given to
the flames. And all this was done in the name of proprietors who could
not be considered tyrants in the ordinary sense of the term.
General Stewart of Garth, about a year after the cruelties perpetrated
in Sutherland, writes with regret of the unnatural proceedings as
“the delusions practised (by his subordinates) on a generous and
public-spirited proprietor, which have been so perseveringly applied,
that it would appear as if all feeling of former kindness towards the
native tenantry had ceased to exist. To them any uncultivated spot of
moorland, however small, was considered sufficient for the support of a
family; while the most lavish encouragement has been given to all the
new tenants, on whom, with the erection of buildings, the improvement
of lands, roads, bridges, &c., upwards of £210,000 had been expended
since 1808 (in fourteen years). With this proof of unprecedented
liberality, it cannot be sufficiently lamented that an estimate of the
character of these poor people was taken from the misrepresentation
of interested persons, instead of judging from the conduct of the
same men when brought into the world, where they obtained a name
and character which have secured the esteem and approbation of men
high in honour and rank, and, from their talents and experience,
perfectly capable of judging with correctness. With such proofs of
capability, and with such materials for carrying on the improvements
and maintaining the permanent prosperity of the county, when occupied
by a hardy, abstemious race, easily led on to a full exertion of their
faculties by a proper management, there cannot be a question but that
if, instead of placing them, as has been done, in situations bearing
too near a resemblance to the potato-gardens of Ireland, they had been
permitted to remain as cultivators of the soil, receiving a moderate
share of the vast sums lavished on their richer successors, such a
humane and considerate regard to the prosperity of a whole people
would undoubtedly have answered every good purpose.” He then goes
on to show that when the valleys and higher grounds were let to the
sheep-farmers, the whole native population was driven to the sea shore,
where they were crowded on small lots of land to earn subsistence
by labour and sea-fishing, the latter so little congenial to their
former habits and experience. “And these _one or two acre lots_ are
represented as _improvements!_” He then asks how in a country, without
regular employment or manufactories, a family is to be supported on one
or two acres? The thing was impossible, and the consequence is that
“over the whole of this district, where the sea-shore is accessible,
the coast is thickly studded with thatched cottages, crowded with
starving inhabitants,” while strangers, with capital, usurp the land
and dispossess the swain. Ancient respectable tenants, who passed the
greater part of their lives in the enjoyment of abundance, and in the
exercise of hospitality and charity, possessing stocks of ten, twenty,
and thirty breeding cows, with the usual proportion of other stock, are
now pining on one or two acres of bad land, with one or two starved
cows; and for this accommodation a calculation is made, that they must
support their families, and pay the rents of their lots, not from the
produce, but from the sea. When the herring fishery succeeds, they
generally satisfy the landlords, whatever privations they may suffer;
but when the fishing fails, they fall in arrears and are sequestrated
and their stocks sold to pay the rents, their lots given to others, and
they and their families turned adrift on the world; but in these trying
circumstances, he concludes, “we cannot sufficiently admire their meek
and patient spirit, supported by the powerful influence of moral and
religious principle.”
The beautiful Strathnaver, containing a population equal to Kildonan,
had been cleared in the same heartless manner.
In 1828, Donald Macleod, after a considerable absence, returned to his
native Kildonan, where he attended divine service in the parish church,
which he found attended by a congregation consisting of eight shepherds
and their dogs--numbering between twenty and thirty--the minister, and
three members of his family. Macleod came in too late for the first
psalm, but at the conclusion of the service the fine old tune Bangor
was given out, “when the four-footed hearers became excited, got up on
the seats, and raised a most infernal chorus of howling. Their masters
attacked them with their crooks, which only made matters worse; the
yelping and howling continued to the end of the service.” And Donald
Macleod retired to contemplate the painful and shameful scene, and
contrast it with what he had previously experienced as a member, for
many years, of the large and devout congregation that worshipped
formerly in the parish church of his native valley.
The Parish Church of Farr was no longer in existence; the fine
population of Strathnaver was rooted and burnt out during the general
conflagration, and presented a similar aspect to his own native parish.
The church, no longer found necessary, was razed to the ground, and its
timbers conveyed to construct one of the Sutherland “improvements”--the
Inn at Altnaharra, while the minister’s house was converted into
a dwelling for a fox-hunter. A woman, well-known in the parish,
travelling through the desolated Strath next year after the evictions,
was asked on her return home for her news, when she replied--“O, chan
eil ach sgiala bronach! sgiala bronach!” “Oh, only sad news, sad news!
I have seen the timber of our well attended kirk covering the inn at
Altnaharra; I have seen the kirk-yard where our friends are mouldering
filled with tarry sheep, and Mr. Sage’s study turned into a kennel for
Robert Gunn’s dogs, and I have seen a crow’s nest in James Gordon’s
chimney head;” after which she fell into a paroxysm of grief.