At the time the soreness was intense. Almost the only magistrates in the county were those large stranger tenants, oppressors as they seemed, who would take care to do themselves justice. The Established Church ministers were also on the landlord’s side, as a rule, accused by the opposite party as having been bribed through the favour of the class to which they inclined to be subservient, and especially by advantages given to their glebes in the redistribution of land. This character of Erastian worldliness fastened upon the Old Kirk largely accounted for the success of the Free Church in the Highlands, the latter’s sympathy having commonly gone with the people, who found an eloquent champion in Hugh Miller, ex-mason and Editor of the Witness. The best-known contemporary account of the Sutherland evictions is Donald Macleod’s Gloomy Memories, letters written to an Edinburgh paper by another mason lad, who, like fellow-sympathisers, was practically expelled from the district for denouncing the landlords’ agents. His book, reprinted at home and in Canada, and included in Mr. Alexander Mackenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances, is very angry in its tone; but impartial judgment can hardly be expected from one who has witnessed such a sight as this:
Strong parties for each district, furnished with faggots and other combustibles, rushed on the dwellings of this devoted people, and immediately commenced setting fire to them, proceeding in their work with the greatest rapidity till about three hundred houses were in flames! The consternation and confusion were extreme; little or no time was given for removal of persons or property—the people striving to remove the sick or 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 on the 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 lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore; but at night she was enabled to reach a landing-place by the light of the flames!
The clearances carried out, the people had a fresh tale of sufferings to bear in addition to the want and sickness engendered by their removal. The bewildered tenants had hastily to build houses on their new allotments, often on unsuitable or unhealthy sites; and it was some time before, on the whole, they began to find themselves unwillingly more comfortable than in their moorland hovels. They might have to shake down among new neighbours, all cramped for room on thin soil. On a rough and stormy coast, most of them had to be apprenticed to the trade of fishing, on which for the future they must partly depend; and at first shell-fish picked from the rocks might be their best diet. Even after they had learned to be bold and skilful fishermen, the herring and the harvest might fail together, as they did in one black season, bringing the bulk of the population to starvation but for charitable aid. It was small comfort to them to see the prosperity of the large Lowland sheep-farmers who had supplanted them. The Duchess of Sutherland made some generous attempts at clarifying the misery she had shaken up; but her occasional visits could not instruct her fully as to the state of things, and she is said to have been hoodwinked and misled by the factors whom the people, rightly or wrongly, looked on as their real tyrants.
‘Tis not the distant Emperor they fear,
But the proud viceroy who is ever near!
These “doers,” indeed, were often to be pitied rather, who, perhaps against their own sympathies, had to set hand to what seemed the dirty work of absentee proprietors. The clansmen appear never to have quite lost their hereditary feeling for their superior, even during these few years when three thousand families were driven from 800,000 acres of land to make room for sheep, which in turn have largely been displaced by deer.[5]
[5]It ought to be remembered that in a later generation the Sutherland family sank at least a quarter of a million pounds in trying to reclaim thousands of acres that to a great extent ran back to their native wildness.
REDDIN’ THE LINE
Forty years ago the Economist stated that the same change had been worked on two millions of acres in Scotland, where fertile as well as unfertile land has been artificially made a wilderness, as the New Forest was by William the Conqueror. From Glentilt, from Lochaber, from Strathglass, from Glenorchy, from Glenelg, from Rannoch, and from many another beloved glen and strath, the people were pressed or driven forth by the pastoral invasion of strangers. Lairds who held out against the movement would often be impoverished, had perhaps themselves to emigrate; then their properties passed into the hands of new men, not so scrupulous in ridding the land of unprofitable human stock. In the course of last century owners grew willing to promote the emigration which they had formerly tried to check, and found it a cheap charity to ship off to America at their own expense the inconvenient dependants who now showed more reluctance to seek sunnier climes, stiffly sticking in their mud under a rainfall that on the coast is sometimes over 100 inches per annum. Visitors to Strathpeffer may see how the crofter has a fairer chance on the east side of the Grampians, that fence him against Atlantic clouds.