The Clearances in Sutherland

A great many words have been written about the devastating Clearances of Sutherland. There is little I can add which has not already been said. I cannot describe my own feelings when, during my researches, I read that between the years 1809 and 1812 the agents of the Duke of Sutherland almost entirely rooted out the tenants-at-will in the parishes of Dornoch, Rogart, Loth, Clyne, Golspie and Assynt. The homes of my relatives. It is a sickening thing to read and very difficult to understand.

During the year 1809 several hundred families were turned out, but under far greater severity then before. Every means were tried to persuade the people to give up their holdings quietly, and to those who could not be induced to do so, scraps of moor, and bog lands, were offered in Dornoch moor and Brora links, on which it was next to impossible to exist, in order that they might be scared into going entirely away. Thus a large portion of the people of these five parishes, were, in the course of two or three years, almost entirely rooted out, and those few who took the miserable allotments mentioned above.

Not long after this inhumane act of cruelty the whole parish of Kildonan was cleared – with the exception of three families nearly 2,000 people were utterly rooted and burned out. Men, especially the young, left the country, but the aged and those without the means of travelling accepted the wretched allotments allowed them on the sea shore.

It was at this time so many of the Families of Sutherland left their homeland forever – to Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, the lowlands of Scotland, and to England. People desperate to rebuild shattered lives.

Perhaps a modern fiction writer, Christine Marion Fraser, described those terrible times best when she wrote: “It is my belief that certain places retain atmospheres of tragedy. There is little to tell of that time, only one or two croft houses dotted about deserted, roofless, only the sough of the wind keening through empty windows, only the sheep huddling in grassy spaces that had once sheltered men, women and children, laughing and talking by their peat fire blaze, never dreaming that one day they would be herded from their homes like cattle and forced to leave the land of their birth; forced to forsake their roots and their beloved glens!”. (adapted from Murray Families of Sutherland, Christine Stokes 1997)

Many thanks to Eleanor Haggarty, Ontario, for the photograph on this page

The Clearances in Sutherland

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