The Lowland Clearances

[JS Sanders]

A few weeks back, I posted a blurb on the Highland Clearances – and what a civil discussion it was. Here’s a similar subject regarding the ‘Lowland Clearances’, which are seemingly even less known about, myself included. I’ve summed it up rather quickly. Hopefully those who are more knowledgeable can supplement information.

The Lowland Clearances were one of the results of the agricultural & industrial revolutions, which abruptly altered a traditional agricultural system existing in Lowland Scotland for 100’s of years. Hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers from the southern counties of Scotland were removed from the farms & small holdings they had occupied, often for generations. Long established communities were flattened and an entire class of society was exterminated in just a few decades.

The absence of a clan system made a bit of a difference. Although the eradication of the population in the Lowlands was not nearly as brutal as in the Highlands, it was just as effective in de-populating the area. It was this practice-run in the Lowlands from 1760-1830 that laid the basis for the subsequent clearing of the glens. Some of the same players were involved in both.

As a result, many tens of thousands of Lowland Scots emigrated, taking advantage of opportunities in Canada and the United States to own their own land. Others chose to remain, either by choice, out of an inability to secure transatlantic passage, or because of obligations in Scotland.

Slainte yall,
steve

[Highland Logan]

Did you write the Wikipedia artical?

Frank

[Glen C]

This is exactly what happened to my family. In 1817 my family left Uplaw outside Galashields for Canada and then upstate New York. My G-G-G-Grandfather was a hynd (skilled farm worker, farm manager), when new farming techechinques and sheep were brought in. He was lucky in that he had enough money to take his wife and five children with him and purchase a small farm in Chazy on the Canadian U.S. border by Lake Champlain. His eldest son eventully was one of the first settlers of Calhoun Co. Michigan, with thousands of acres of farm land and a prosperous life. In the long run the immagration was probably the best thing that could have happend for the family. It's been almost 200 years now and the stories are being lost and forgotten, but that's what makes tracing ones family interesting. Its not the names and dates but the history that goes along with them.

[JS Sanders]

<< Did you write the Wikipedia article? >>

Negatory pard. I tend to be wary of them.

[McClef]

I'm not an expert on these - perhaps because John Prebble didn't write a book about them...

But it was an age of emigration with many leaving from all parts of the UK for the New World or the Colonies. The Industrial revolution had made many move to the towns and cities which had occurred as a more gradual process so there had not been the more traumatic change that had occurred in Scotland.

[Phil]

I think the experience of Robert Burns' family in trying to eke out a subsistence living as tenant farmers in the latter half of the 18th century possibly gives an insight into the demographic shift away from agriculture at the time. Industry and the growth of cities was drawing people away from the land for the certainty of a regular wage as farming became a less attractive option. Burns himself said of his time farming at Mossgiel that for many years meat was "a stranger" on their table and with no money to spend on improving land, crop yields were extremely poor. Coupled with this is a lesser known fact - Scotland also suffered from the potato famine just the same as Ireland, and this too would have accelerated the flight from the land. Unable to pay rent, tenants would have been evicted and landowners amalgamated the small fields of the time into larger, more economically viable units. Plus they had access to the finance needed to improve and fertilise the land.
I doubt if there was any forced clearances of the kind experienced in the Highlands, more an economic migration brought on by new opportunities in the cities and in the overseas colonies.

[Rob Wright]

Clearances in the lowlands go even further back. After the Union of Crowns, many of the border reiver families such as the Grahams and Armstrongs were deported en masse to remove the lawless elements from the old border region between Scotland and England.

Rob

[Phil]

Clearances in the lowlands go even further back. After the Union of Crowns, many of the border reiver families such as the Grahams and Armstrongs were deported en masse to remove the lawless elements from the old border region between Scotland and England.

The borders were a different case altogether. The people there had lived a precarious existence for generations as opposing armies from Scotland and England waged war back and forth across their lands, destroying everything as they passed. The result was that they resorted to reiving (that's where bereaved originates) both English on Scots and vice-versa as the only way to support their families. James VI and I put an end to it by deporting many of them to Ireland and the colonies where their reiving skills were put to good account but it was not the type of economic clearance seen in the following two centuries.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

The industrial revolution offered the hope of financial betterment to thousands throughout the United Kingdoms-- and drew the rural populations to the industrial cities. This drop of rural manpower had a severe impact on agricultural production-- fewer farm hands meant fewer acres under tillage, which resulted in lesser crop yields, which pushed up the price of food in the burgeoning industrial cities. The rustic had traded the misery of subsistence farming for the starving misery of Hades in places like Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow.

Once the scales fell from their eyes, these recent immigrants to the industrial cities of Britain left in droves for a better life in the "new worlds" beyond the seas, much to the enrichment of places like Canada and the United States.

[Rob Wright]

The borders were a different case altogether. The people there had lived a precarious existence for generations as opposing armies from Scotland and England waged war back and forth across their lands, destroying everything as they passed. The result was that they resorted to reiving (that's where bereaved originates) both English on Scots and vice-versa as the only way to support their families. James VI and I put an end to it by deporting many of them to Ireland and the colonies where their reiving skills were put to good account but it was not the type of economic clearance seen in the following two centuries.

While not completely similar, economics were a factor in the border clearances, the border clearances can be seen as a precursor of the large scale displacement that came in the centuries after.


Rob