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]