Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances were part of a process of agricultural change throughout the United Kingdom, but the late timing, the abruptness of the change from the Clan System in the Scottish Highlands and the brutality of many of the evictions gave the Highland Clearances particular notoriety. The Inclosures 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.

"Improvements"

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 Chieftains engaged Lowland, or sometimes English, factors with expertise in more profitable sheep farming, and they 'encouraged', sometimes forcibly, the population to move off the land. The people were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where farming or fishing could not sustain the communities, or they were directly put on emigration ships, all of this being seen as a necessary improvement for their own good. A particularly poignant example is that of Clan MacDonell of Glengarry, where the clan chieftain portrayed himself the last genuine specimen of a Highland chief and laid on lavish pageantry while his relative, a Catholic missionary, tried to find his displaced clansmen work in the lowlands, organised the raising of a regiment to get them employment in the British Army and when the regiment was disbanded got the government to grant its members a tract of land in Canada and emigrated with them.

Related Topics:
Improvements - John Ross - Balnagowan Castle - Scotland - 1762 - Skye - 1732 - Lowland - English - Clan MacDonell of Glengarry - British - Canada

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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.

Related Topics:
1820s - Kelp - Croft - Passenger Vessels Act - 1803 - 1846

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