The Highland Clearances (John Prebble, 1963)

 

All that is left of the settlement of Ceannabeinne, cleared in 1842

Few non-fiction books have as much narrative power as this one. Prebble’s account of the expulsion of tenants from the Highlands in the 18th- and 19th-centuries reads like a novel where you race to find out what happens next. His achievement is all the greater when you realise that what happens next is no different from what happened before: the law wins, and the people lose. Yet you cannot stop reading.

It’s only after you have finished the book, after getting your breath back, as it were, that you start to question the book. Prebble has chosen to focus on one story only, and one explanation. For him, the Clearances took place in the Highlands, where traditional relationships between tenant and chief were forcibly terminated, the people removed (and encouraged to emigrate) and replaced by sheep farms. For him, the story is the maltreatment of humans by humans, using the law as an agent of oppression. As he states, the law was frequently ignored even in the 18th century when the people were oppressed, as with the American Revolution.

But while the oppression of the poor is horrific, it’s not the whole story. Prebble focuses so much on the horror that he doesn’t really explain how the story ended, with the 1886 Crofters Holdings Act, granting security from eviction to tenants (too late to matter, he would say). For him, the story ends with yet another eviction. But why did the population of the Highlands increase over the time period described in the book? Is there any possible sustainable life that could exist in the Highlands then or now, apart from the meanest form of subsistence farming that left every family at risk from famine or disease? Or, as Tom Devine would point out, in his book pointedly entitled The Scottish Clearances (2018), do we ignore the Lowland Clearances, or even consider the unforced movement of people away from the land and to the towns, to a different kind of employment? it’s certainly true that Prebble makes blatant use of the Highland myth to reinforce his case. Each episode of clearance he describes is preceded by local details: names of places in Gaelic, a little description of the geography, not for you to identify the location, but for you to be more moved by the horrific tale of eviction following. It’s not wrong, but it’s a piece of powerful propaganda. Worryingly, Prebble rather unquestioningly posits the idea of a traditional golden age before the clearances, and before Culloden, when society lived in harmony, tenants with their chiefs.

It’s probably best to take the book as Prebble would want it: as one long howl of anger. He begins, as he ends, with a defiant statement of the injustice of the Clearances:

It is said that the Clearances are now far enough away from us to be decently forgotten. But the hills are still empty. In all of Britain only among them can one find real solitude, and if their history is known there is no satisfaction to be got from the experience [page 8, Penguin edition]

A week in the Scottish Highlands

 

The former village of Ceannabeinne, forcibly cleared in 1842.

After a week-long field trip in the NW Highlands, covering much of the area of Sutherland, I’m still mulling over what I saw. Ostensibly, the trip was to look at rocks, and indeed this is one of the most famous centres of geological controversy. What any visitor sees, however, is not just rocks. There was a lack of population, and yet the roads were busy with camper vans (much less the permanent population). The weather was dramatically different to the East Anglia where I live, so much so that it felt like a different country when I returned. On the plane from Inverness to Gatwick, the cabin crew told us the local time as we were landing, so clearly, this was a different country.

As we clambered over the rocks, we saw the remains of traditional stone-built houses, many of them derelict or simply repurposed into dry stone walling. The number of permanent inhabitants in the NW Highlands area that comprises the Geopark is around 2,500, which is close to one person per square kilometre. Plenty of room, you might think, for people to live from the land – but much of that land is barren, Lewisian gneiss, a very hard rock, on which grass does not grow. Indeed, it was very visible where there were patches of limestone, and a corresponding greenery on the surface, compared to the older rocks.

Why so depopulated? Like many before me, I started reading John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances (1963). This book is written with a passion and drive that can only leave you indignant. It is a tale of grasping landowners forcibly removing the local population to make room for sheep. Melodramatic, yes, exaggerated, probably not, but certainly selective in its evidence. Nonetheless, the work of Prebble created a whole generation of academic historians, as James Hunter admitted. The best-known of these is Tom Devine, whose revisionist book The Scottish Clearances (2019) acknowledges the achievement of Prebble, but points out there were Lowland clearances as well. In fact, they weren’t all clearances at all; many people left simply seeking more opportunity elsewhere. Devine gives a whole range of causes for what he describes as the “dispossession” of land (a considerably more neutral term). Scotland, he says, was one of the most industrialized nations in the world by 1850, so some at least of that movement was to the cities. Here, as elsewhere in the world, we see the seemingly inexorable move towards industrialisation, urbanisation, and agricultural revolution. For a region like the Highlands, there was (and is) no industry to speak of, so next to no opportunities for work. Instead, a handful of local initiatives, such as the Geopark, a flourishing pottery factory that even makes mugs labelled “Torremolinos”, or the recent redevelopment of the island of Tanera Mor by one very wealthy philanthropist.  But these are like drops in the ocean.

We saw one very poignant former village, near Durness. A few information boards stated there had been a handful of cottages, but the inhabitants were all removed in a single clearance. Were the clearances, as the infamous Peter Sellars stated, for the good of the inhabitants and their children? Would it have happened anyway, as in other areas, like Lowland Scotland, perhaps only in a less brutal form? Is emigration always tragic? Queuing to visit the Red Star Line museum in Antwerp gave the impression that it was. Like Karl Marx, I read about the triple hammer of urbanization, agricultural revolution, and industrialization, and I see the impact very starkly today in deindustrialized Britan in places such as Dundee or Glasgow. Initiatives to live in the Highlands, like Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years (1940), an account of his living on an island for a few months, are at best quixotic, and certainly not sustainable. Studying the bird life is great fun but does not, for the most part, generate an income.

The questions I am left with are:

• Could the transition have been managed in a more humane way? (Of course it could).
• Is there a sustainability option for the NW Highlands today, or can it survive only on second houses and camper-van tourism?
• Was there ever a golden age in the Highlands when the clans lived in harmony, with the tenants working the land and relying on the chief for support and protection (very unlikely, but often this is the hidden assumption in many texts)?

In the meantime, I keep looking at that deserted village, and imagining what live must have been like when it was inhabited.