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The Highland Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadaich nan Gàidheal, the expulsion of the Gael) is a name given to the forced displacement of the population of the Scottish Highlands from their ancient ways of warrior clan subsistence farming, leading to mass emigration. This was part of a process of agricultural change throughout the United Kingdom, but the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scottish law, the abruptness of the change from the clan system and the brutality of many of the evictions gave the Highland Clearances particular notoriety.

The enclosures that depopulated rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started much earlier, and similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances, but in the Highlands the impact on a Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic)-speaking semi-feudal culture that still expected obligations from a chieftain to his clan led to vocal campaigning and a lingering bitterness among the descendants of the large numbers forced to emigrate, or to remain and subsist in crofting townships on very small areas of often marginal land. Crofters became a source of virtually free labour to their landlords, forced to work long hours, for example, in the harvesting and processing of kelp.

Contents 1 Clan Chiefs 2 "Improvements" 3 Potato Famine 4 An account by Donald McLeod 5 Modern condemnation of the Clearances 6 See also 7 References 8 External links 9 Further reading (with bibliography)

From the late 16th century the Scottish Privy Council required clan leaders to regularly attend at Edinburgh to provide bonds for the conduct of anyone on their territory, bringing a tendency among Chiefs to see themselves as landlords. The lesser clan-gentry increasingly took up droving, taking cattle along the old unpaved drove roads to sell in the Lowlands. This brought them wealth and land-ownership within the clan, though the Highlands continued to have problems of overpopulation and poverty. The various Jacobite Risings 1715—1745 brought repeated British government efforts to curb the clans culminating after the 1745 Battle of Culloden with brutal repression including even prohibitions against the wearing of traditional highland dress, the pipes, and other related legislation from 1746 on leading to the destruction of the traditional clan system and of the supportive social structures of small agricultural townships.

From around 1725, in the aftermath of the First Jacobite Rising known as the 'Fifteen, clansmen had begun emigrating to the Americas in increasing numbers. The earlier Disarming Act and the Clan Act made ineffectual attempts to subdue the Scottish Highlands, so eventually troops were sent in. Government garrisons were built or extended in the Great Glen at Fort William, Kiliwhimin (later renamed Fort Augustus) and Fort George, Inverness, as well as barracks at Ruthven, Bernera and Inversnaid, linked to the south by the Wade roads constructed for Major-General George Wade. These had the effect of limiting organizational travel and choking off news and so further isolated the clans and limited the unrest to local outbreaks. Nonetheless, things remained unsettled over the whole decade.

In 1725 Wade raised the independent companies of the Black Watch as a militia to keep peace in the unruly Highlands, which increased the droves of clansmen now emigrating to the Americas. Increasing demand in Britain for cattle and sheep and the creation of new breeds of sheep, such as the black faced which could be reared in the mountainous country gave the landowners and Chiefs the opportunity of higher rents to meet the burden of costs of an aristocratic lifestyle. As a result, many families living on a subsistence level were displaced exacerbating the unsettled social climate.

What the landlords thought of as necessary "improvements" but became known as the Clearances are thought to have been begun by Admiral John Ross of Balnagowan Castle in Scotland in 1762, although MacLeod of Dunvegan had done some experimental work on Skye in 1732. Many chiefs engaged Lowland, or sometimes English, factors with expertise in more profitable sheep farming, and they 'encouraged', sometimes forcibly, the population to move off suitable land. In 1792, infamously known as the Year of the Sheep, also signalled another wave of mass emigration of Scottish Highlanders. The people were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where farming could not sustain the communities and they were expected to take up fishing, or they were put directly onto emigration ships. The destinations for these emigrants were Nova Scotia (Antigonish and Pictou counties and later Cape Breton), the Kingston area of Ontario and the Carolinas of the American colonies. There may have been a religious element in these forced removals since the majority of Highlanders were Roman Catholic. Most all of the very large movement of Highland settlers to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina, however, were Presbyterian. (This is evidenced even today in the presence and extent of Presbyterian congregations and adherents in the region. Roman Catholic congregations and adherents have been a minority in this region since at least the influx of Highland settlers, only recently experiencing significant gains in adherents recently due to large increases in the hispanic (migrant worker) population as well as immigrants from urban northeastern areas of the United States).

In 1807 Elizabeth Gordon, 19th Countess of Sutherland, touring her inheritance with her husband Lord Stafford (later made Duke of Sutherland), wrote that "he is seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements, and we both turn our attention with the greatest of energy to turnips". As well as turning land over to sheep farming, Stafford planned to invest in creating a coal-pit, salt pans, brick and tile works and herring fisheries. That year his agents began the evictions, with ninety families forced to leave their crops in the ground and to move their cattle, furniture and timbers from their former houses to the land they were offered some 20 miles (30 km) away on the coast, living in the open until they had built themselves new houses. Stafford's first Commissioner, William Young, arrived in 1809, and soon engaged Patrick Sellar as his factor who pressed ahead with the process while acquiring sheep farming estates for himself.^[1]

Elsewhere, the flamboyant Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry portrayed himself as the last genuine specimen of the true Highland Chief while his tenants were subjected to a process of relentless eviction.^[1]

To landlords, 'improvement' and 'clearance' did not necessarily mean depopulation. At least until the 1820s, when there were steep falls in the price of kelp, landlords wanted to create pools of cheap or virtually free labour, supplied by families subsisting in new crofting townships. Kelp collection and processing was a very profitable way of using this labour, and landlords petitioned successfully for legislation designed to stop emigration. This took the form of the Passenger Vessels Act passed in 1803. Attitudes changed during the 1820s and, for many landlords, the potato famine which began in 1846 became another reason for encouraging or forcing emigration and depopulation.

Main article: Highland Potato Famine (1846 - 1857)

As in Ireland, the potato crop failed in the mid 19th century, and a widespread outbreak of cholera further weakened the Highland population. The ongoing clearance policy resulted in starvation, deaths, and a secondary clearance, when families either migrated voluntarily or were forcibly evicted. There were many deaths of children and old people. As there were few alternatives, many emigrated, joined the British army, or moved to the growing urban cities, like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee in Lowland Scotland and Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Liverpool in the north of England. In many areas people were given economic incentives to move, but few historians dispute that there were also many instances where violent methods were used by the landlords to clear the highland population.

Elizabeth Gordon, 19th Countess of Sutherland and her factor, Patrick Sellar, were especially cruel and their names are reviled in Sutherland to this day. Donald McLeod, a Sutherland crofter, later wrote about the events he witnessed:

Accounts like those of McLeod and General David Stewart of Garth brought widespread condemnation and The Highland Land League eventually achieved land reform in the enactment of Crofting Acts, but these could not bring economic viability and came too late at a time when the land was already suffering from depopulation.

Ross Noble claims some writers are coruscating in their condemnation of the Clearances, seeing the process as an early version of "ethnic cleansing".^[2] However, Noble believes this approach over-simplifies the issues involved. Under the economic and social ideas of the several centuries involved, landowners and employers were generally callous (like the 1846 depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge in literature) about the 'lower orders', and these modern terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' reflect new sensitivities and social perspectives, which in this case wouldn't apply, as most of the landlords were fellow Scotsmen.

It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that the second, more brutal phase of the Clearances began; this was well after the 1822 visit by the king, when lowlanders set aside their previous distrust and hatred of the Highlanders and identified with them as national symbols. However, the cumulative effect was particularly devastating to the cultural landscape of Scotland in a way that did not happen in other areas of Britain.

While the collapse of the clan system can be attributed more to economic factors and the repression that followed the Battle of Culloden, the widespread evictions resulting from the Clearances severely affected the viability of the Highland population and culture. To this day, the population in the Scottish Highlands is sparse and the culture is diluted, and there are many more sheep than people. However, the Clearances did result in significant emigration of Highlanders to North America and Australasia — where today are found considerably more descendants of Highlanders than in Scotland itself.

One estimate for Cape Breton, Nova Scotia has 25,000 Gaelic-speaking Scots arriving as immigrants between 1775 and 1850. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Gaelic was spoken by an estmated 100,000 people, but because of economic migration to English-speaking areas and the lack of Gaelic education in the Nova Scotian school system, the numbers of Gaelic speakers fell dramatically. In many Cape Breton homes, though by the beginning of the 21st century the number of native Gaelic speakers fell well below one thousand.^[3]

Appalachia, principally in a mountainous region similar to the highlands extending southward in an arc from central Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and westerly all along Tennessee also served as a destination for displaced non-gentry Gaels, including many Irish, and bears the cultural marks of the immigrant peoples.

• Scottish clan
• Lowland Clearances
• Clan MacDonnell of Glengarry
• Highland Land League

1. ^ ^{a b} The Highland Clearances, John Prebble, Penguin Books, 1963, ISBN 0-14-002837-4
2. ^ The Cultural Impact of the Highland Clearances By Ross Noble
3. ^ Hector MacNeil, Gaelic Director, the Gaelic College, St. Ann's, Nova Scotia

• Narratives in a Landscape: Monuments and Memories of the Sutherland Clearances dissertation on the landscape of the Clearances
• Highlanderweb - Highland clearances
• Abandoned communities - the clearance of Strathnaver 1814-1819

• An overview of the Clearances, Alexander McKenzie, 1881.
• Gloomy Memories, Donald Macleod, 1857 (first-hand account of Sutherland clearances).
• The Highland Clearances, Eric Richards, Birlinn Books, 2000.
• The Strathnaver Trilogy, Ian Grimble. 3vols: Chief of MacKay, The Trial of Patrick Sellar, and The World of Rob Donn.
• The People of Glengarry. Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820, Marianne McLean, McGill-Queen's University Press; 1993.
• Die Schottischen Clans im 18. Jahrhundert, Vom Wandel und Ende einer Hochlandgesellschaft am Rande Europas, A Personal Passion PLay in Scottish History and Bibliography, Hubert Gebele, Regensburg 2003.

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