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The GlenCalvie Clearances (Page 2 of 2)

Highland Clearance - showing a family being removed from their home

But over the years they had witnessed the rape of the lands around them, heard of the homes burning and the people cast destitute from them. When word came in 1845 that their valley was to be cleared too they met their fate with quiet dignity. With the new Scottish Poor Law in prospect, other cottages were refused to them so eighteen families of around 92 individuals had nowhere to go and so they marched out of the glen in a body, with two or three carts filled with children, many of them mere infants; and other carts containing their bedding and other requisites. The whole country side was up on the hills watching them. They found shelter in the grounds of Croick church. It was a wet and cold Saturday afternoon but they would not shelter in the church itself for fear of breaking it’s sanctity but rather made a shelter of sorts in the grounds. Around a small fire mothers and small children huddled.

Times Article by reporter who witnessed the clearances

This wretched spectacle was witnessed by a correspondent for the times and you can read his full account here >>.

 

Some of those broken individuals scratched their names and brief messages into the glass of the church, perhaps realising that they would soon vanish forever they attempted some small monument to mark their existence, others needed to share their thoughts and these are particularly poignant. 'This House is Needing Repair' seems to be a comment on the spiritual erosion of the community and 'Glen Calvie People the Wicked Generation' is also very telling as it suggests that these people who trusted their church and their chief for generations could not believe that those who had always protected them were now turning them out of their homes. to them their misfortune was the result of their own sinful behaviour! Another telling point is that these were native Gaelic speakers and yet their comments were written in English, almost as if they realised their highland culture would leave the valley with them.

After several days this sad chapter came to a close and the people left, few records exist of where they went and how many survived. The fact that so few monuments exist to such a terrible time in our history is a national disgrace. One statue to the exiled Scots stands in Helmsdale, paid for by a wealthy American while the towering monument to the first Duke of Sutherland still looms over the landscape at Ben Bhraggie. 

statue to the exiled Scots in Helmsdale

Some refer to the clearances as 'ethnic cleansing'. This is not entirely accurate. Such atrocities have been perpetrated by one people on another; Nazi on Jew, Serb on Croat, Croat on Serb. What makes the 'Clearances' unique is that these atrocities were perpetrated by those responsible for the protection of the very people they were evicting. As for the Sutherlands, later generations did seem to acknowledge their dreadful past; the wife of the 4th Duke Duchess Millicent was great philanthropist who invented Highland Home Industries, arranged for the trademark of Harris Tweed, built technical schools and fought industrial diseases

Many tourists wind their way up the A9 and visit the magnificent Dunrobin Castle, not realising that the roots of this great wealth are buried under the stone and ashes of lost livelihoods, fewer may spot a monument on a lonely hillside on their way back towards Inverness and realise the dark shadow it casts, and fewer still make their way up 10 miles of single track road to a small white church to see the real monument to the lost people of the highlands etched in a few panes of glass.

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