"O hearts to the hills of old memory true !

In the land of your love there are mourners for you ;

As they wander by peopleless lochside and glen,

Where the red-deer are feeding o'er homesteads of men.

For the stillness they feel o'er the wilderness spread

Is not nature's own silence but that of the dead ;

E'en the lone piping plover and small corrie burn

Seem sighing for those that will never return."

---J.C.Shairp.

The Clearances

'The year in which the Friends of the People formed their first society [1792] was remembered in the Highlands as Bliadhna nan Caorach, the Year of the Sheep….

'….The end of the warrior society in 1746, and the loss of their hereditary powers, had placed many of the chiefs below the economic level of a Lowland laird or an English squire, and their pride alone could not pay the debts of their poverty.  Nor could they be paid by a barren land and an abundant people.  Over-population had been a problem before the Rebellion, when blackmail and cattle-lifting could fill empty bellies once in a season, but now it was an embarrassment, and if men could no longer be counted in broadswords they must be valued in shillings and pence, and dispensed with when the reckoning was unprofitable.  Since his people were his tenents-at-will, cotter or tack-holding kinsman, the chief solved part of his financial difficulties by demanding money instead of rents in kind, by redistributing tacks at increasingly higher rates. The resentment this caused, the first serious break between father and children, began the wide Diaspora that was to fill the emigrant ships for the next hundred years.  The first to go were the tacksmen who could no longer stomach the rack-renting of their cousinly chief, and who took their own tenants away to the Americas. Those who remained grew poorer on a black cattle economy that barely supported them, and rarely paid for their chief's ambitions.  The dispossessed became vagrants, wandering southward to Lowland factories. 'Look around you,' John MacCodrum said, 'and see the gentry with no pity for the poor creatures, with no kindness to their kin'

'The Great Cheviot Sheep……was a simple and infallible answer to the laird's problems.  Nor need he trouble himself with the tedious business of herding and shearing, for Lowland and Northumbrian graziers were ready to lease his land.  Before they would bring their sheep, however, their shepherds and dogs, men must go, their townships from the glen and their cattle from the brae.  The increasing demand for meat during the French wars made mutton more economic than beef, and profit supplanted the paternalism of Keppoch, Glengarry and Clanranald, Breadalbane, Strathglass and Locheil.  'Our fathers,' said a Lochinver man, 'were called out to fight our master's battles, and this is our reward.'………..The ease with which a glen could be emptied, a lease sold and debts paid, encouraged the chiefs to think of immediate rewards not future obligations, and in valleys where a hundred young swordsmen had once been raised there was soon no more than a Border shepherd and his dog.

'The Highlanders called the Cheviot their chief's 'four-footed clansman', and they went sadly to their exile in the Lowlands and the colonies.  Whatever the laird may have become, they were still for the most part the creatures of a tribal and patriarchal society, and having no rights in law to challenge his decision to remove them, they had even less by tradition.  Yet they went with bitterness, and with a sorrow that a father should so cruelly ababdon his children.  'Our chief,' said a bard of Clan Chisholm, 'has lost his feeling of kinship, he prefers sheep in the glen and his young men in Highland Regiments.'  He had not, however, lost his arrogant pride, and money now enabled him to indulge his pretentious conceits.

'……..But the men who cleared Strathglass were the chiefs of Clan Chisholm, and the evictors of Knoydart were MacDonnel lairds of Glengarry.  Lochaber was emptied by the guardians of the young heir of Locheil, and the MacDonalds were soon gone from Glencoe.  The great dispersal lasted until the middle of the [19th] century, and the sheep empire endured until it was destroyed by the wool and mutton of Australia, where many of the exiles had gone.'

Prebble pp.320-323