Highland Clearances Quotes

“I anticipate with joy the approaching period when the stigmas of poverty and pride so liberally bestowed on the highlanders by our southern gentry will be as inapplicable to the inhabitants of that country as of any in the island.”
― James Hogg, Highland Journeys

“This high-souled gentry and this noble and far-descended peasantry, 'their country's pride,' were set at naught and ultimately obliterated for a set of greedy, secular adventurers, by the then representatives of the Ancient Earls of Sutherland.”
― Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica: or, Parish Life in the North of Scotland

“She didn't think that she was superior to her visitor because she could speak in two languages, though not so well in English as in Gaelic, whereas he knew only one. After all, rich people and rich people's servants didn't know Gaelic: that was the way it was.”
― Iain Crichton Smith

“This book attempts to evaluate the roles of the traditional landowners (whose reckless lifestyles led to bankruptcy and the acquisition of their lands by commercially-minded entrepreneurs); the new breed of accountant trustees (for whom financial probity was paramount); the Highland Potato Famine; James Cheyne, the clearing landlord; events elsewhere on Lismore, particularly on the Baleveolan estate, factored by Allan MacDougall; the influence of the Lismore Agricultural Society; investment in infrastructure on the Airds estate; the differing fates of farmers and cottars; the lack of alternative employment for the young; and opportunites elsewhere, particularly in the Central Belt of Scotland.”
― Robert Hay, How an Island Lost its People: Improvement, Clearance and Resettlement on Lismore, 1830 - 1914

“In Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn

“While the estate team's defence may have been relevant to some of the Belleville properties, when applied specifically the the farms of Easterton and Westerton of Glenbanchor it was at best a gross distortion of reality, at worst duplicitous and even dishonest. Their houses were not unsafe; their farms were not too small; their land was not unsuitable for cultivation; the people did not leave of their own volition. The laird was not acting in their best interest but in the estate's, while the claim that no-one was evicted who wished to remain was a downright lie. And, as Fraser-Mackintosh laid bare, the Colonel could have stopped the evictions, but chose not to.”
― Mary Mackenzie, Glen Banchor: A Highland Glen and its People

“Seek in Glen Massan no emotions of terror and the wild sublime, but a softer sentiment, roused by the forgotten Gaelic bard who sung the sorrows of the sons of Usnach; and in Tarsuinn, Garrachra and Glen Lean, I would restore, in fancy, shepherds and hunters on the grass-grown drove-road and the abandoned hill. The Clyde has drained those glens, not of their waters only, but of men, and melancholy broods among the shadows of Benmore as if it, too, remembered lonefully the unreturning generations.”
― Neil Munro, The Clyde, River and Firth

“that this dying landscape belongs
to the dead, the crofters and fighters
and fishermen whose larochs
sink into the bracken
by Loch Assynt and Loch Crochach? -
to men trampled under the hoofs of sheep
and driven by deer to the ends of the earth
- to men whose loyalty
was so great it accepted their own betrayal
by their own chiefs and whose
descendants now
are kept in their place
by English businessmen and the
indifference
of a remote and ignorant government.”
― Norman MacCaig, Between Mountain and Sea: Poems from Assynt

“Scotland's passage from a mainly pastoral and agrarian society to a commercial and industrial one was brutal, rapid and relentless. In that transition, an entire peasant class, the cottars - perhaps as much as half of the rural population - was lost forever. They and tens of thousands of even poorer people were forced off the land across the Lowlands, Highlands and islands. They ended up in towns, cities and planned villages, they worked in mills, mines, quarries and iron works, or they emigrated to other parts of the world, or became soldiers, sailors, engineers, administrators and merchants in the service of the British Empire or the companies that thrived under its bellicose protection. Many prospered, many did not.”
― James Robertson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland