The Highland Clearances
Hey, we run this place now.
“‘That the clans will become so effeminate as to flee from their native country before an army of sheep’”
On the top of Benn Bhraggie, above the little holiday town of Golspie, there’s a statue of the Duke of Sutherland proudly posing atop a 70ft (21m) plinth and clearly seen from the road.
“Amazingly, it has not been toppled due to the despair this one man caused.”
A SHEEP IN WOLF’S CLOTHING
George Greville Levenson-Gower was the second Marquis of Stafford and the third Earl Gower as well as the first Duke of Sutherland. A Londoner who came from a coal-mining dynasty, he married into the Sutherlands who owned most of the land in Scotland’s far north. When he inherited his father's estates in England, he became the wealthiest landowner in Great Britain.
CLEARANCE SALE
In 1814, the not-so-grand Duke decided to ‘improve’ his Scottish estates by forcibly removing the locals whose families had been there for centuries to make way for his latest money-making venture, sheep!
Five thousand men, women and children, a third of the population of Sutherland were compelled to emigrate or move to Sutherland’s scant coastal margins to eke out a meagre living there.
Admittedly, things had not been going well for the crofting communities. Overpopulation, deprivation and famine were increasing aspects of Highland life. But the change was swift and mainly for the above monetary reasons.
The ultimate insult came when the remaining tenantry was asked to donate money for the building and erection of the Duke of Sutherland’s statue that still stands above Golspie today.
SPORTING ESTATES
The Duke’s idea of land 'improvement' soon caught on and spread throughout the Highlands where crofters in once well-populated glens were forcibly evicted to make way for the woolly invaders or to create sprawling sporting estates for the English elite who had recently ‘discovered’ Scotland on the back of the Jacobite defeat.
The clan chieftains who had looked towards the welfare of their own clan for centuries began to see themselves on par with the English land-owning gentry and took up the Clearance craze.
Many families moved south to find work in the mills and factories of Scotland's rapidly industrialising Central Belt only to encounter another story of exploitation from the ‘robber barons’ who gave them the meagrest wages and atrocious living conditions to allow them to make vast fortunes on the back of the people’s labours. The rest emigrated!
DUNROBIN CASTLE
As a final mark to this unfortunate episode, a mile or so beyond the town of Golspie stands Dunrobin Castle, the most northerly of Scotland's great houses and an appropriate name perhaps as it was Sutherland’s family seat when they were ‘done robbing’ the poor people of these Highland glens.
THE BRAHAN SEER
As a footnote to this unfortunate phase, the man who predicted the demise of Highland crofting culture was called the Brahan Seer, Scotland’s equivalent of Nostradamus
‘Coinneach Odhar’, ‘Dark Kenneth’ or ‘Kenneth Mackenzie’ is said to have prophesied the Highland Clearances, the Battle of Culloden, the building of the Caledonian Canal, the discovery of North Sea oil and last but not least, the rise of a woman as the country’s leader, Margaret Thatcher.
The Seer was on a roll but he should have learned to temper his predictions. Isabella, wife of the Earl of Seaforth, asked him for news of her husband who was on a visit to Paris. Odhar reassured her that the Earl was in good health but refused to tell her more. This enraged Isabella, who demanded that he tell her everything or she would have him killed. He told her that her husband was with another woman, fairer than herself, and he foretold the end of the Seaforth line, with the last heir being deaf and dumb. (Francis Humberston Mackenzie, deaf and dumb from scarlet fever as a child, inherited the title in 1783. He had four children who died prematurely and the line came to an end.) Isabella was so incensed by this that she had Coinneach seized and thrown head-first into a barrel of boiling tar.
