Scottish Clearances

[BBNC]

I'm confused. Was it highlanders, lowlanders, or both who were sent packing in the "clearances?" I seem to have read somewhere it was lowland Scots, and then somewhere else it was highland Scots. What's the straight scoop?

[Grizzly]

This excerpt below gives a basic understanding but if you google highland clearances there is a plethora of information. -

In the late 18th century well into the 19th century, Highland estates moved from arable and mixed farming, which supported a large tenant population, to the more profitable sheep-farming. Surplus tenants were ‘cleared’ off the estates from about 1780; and the Clearances were ongoing nearly 70 years later at the time of the potato famine in 1846.

Not all clearances were brutal, but some were. Nor were they confined to the Highlands. But the Highland experience was the most traumatic. The Highland Clearances devastated Gaelic culture and clan society, driving people from the land their families had called home for centuries.

Planned towns sprang up and took some of the cleared populations: places like Dufftown, Fochabers, Grantown-on-Spey, Hopeman, Inveraray, Kingussie, Kyleakin, Plockton, Tomintoul and Ullapool, but the vast majority of Highlanders were forced to emigrate to the cities or overseas.

The first mass emigration was in 1792; known as the ‘Year of the Sheep’, when most of the cleared clansmen went to Canada and the Carolinas. Scots left their native soil to live out their lives in America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

[bdkilted]

Many lowlanders moved to America for opportunities, but I am not award of large group of lowlanders cleared from the land by their lords.

[Chas]

It turned out to be a two edged sword. The vast profits from sheep rearing just did not materialise. The imported Sussex Downs sheep were not hardy enough and died in their hundreds.

[Dale Seago]

BBNC, you might find this video overview interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7aXt...F02C0B53D5CC01

[Peter Crowe]

This excerpt below gives a basic understanding but if you google highland clearances there is a plethora of information. -

In the late 18th century well into the 19th century, Highland estates moved from arable and mixed farming, which supported a large tenant population, to the more profitable sheep-farming. Surplus tenants were ‘cleared’ off the estates from about 1780; and the Clearances were ongoing nearly 70 years later at the time of the potato famine in 1846.

Not all clearances were brutal, but some were. Nor were they confined to the Highlands. But the Highland experience was the most traumatic. The Highland Clearances devastated Gaelic culture and clan society, driving people from the land their families had called home for centuries.

Planned towns sprang up and took some of the cleared populations: places like Dufftown, Fochabers, Grantown-on-Spey, Hopeman, Inveraray, Kingussie, Kyleakin, Plockton, Tomintoul and Ullapool, but the vast majority of Highlanders were forced to emigrate to the cities or overseas.

The first mass emigration was in 1792; known as the ‘Year of the Sheep’, when most of the cleared clansmen went to Canada and the Carolinas. Scots left their native soil to live out their lives in America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The above from Simon is a good brief synopsis on the 'Highland Clearances.' The 'Lowland Clearances' is a name recently given by Academic Historians and cultural commentators for the uniquely Scottish experience of a wider phenomena in Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland that took place from the middle of the eighteenth century and was called the Agrarian or Agricultural Revolution, when enclosure took over from older forms of land tenure and land use. There was a push-pull from living on the land to urbanisation which was a necessary precursor to the first Industrial Revolution which started around circa 1760 in England (particularly the Midland counties, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland), Central and Southern Scotland, South Wales, and Belfast and the Lagan valley in Northern Ireland.

[guardsman]

Personally I think sheep and profits an excuse , to stop any revival of the highland bogeyman .

[BBNC]

BBNC, you might find this video overview interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7aXt...F02C0B53D5CC01

Wonderful program. Thanks for the link Dale. I'm trying to find out where my mother's paternal ancestors (Muirheads from the region of Lanarkshire) fit in the overall picture, and try to determine when and why they went to Ireland, before coming to the US in the 1870's. While our tartan was registered quite recently, it was taken from a complete formal kilt outfit brought here in 1858, which is now on display at the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, NC. My avatar, and my kilt is in the hunting version, woven and made by DC Dalgiesh.

[McClef]

An excellent and full coverage can be found in the book The Highland Clearance by John Prebble.

[Dale-of-Cedars]

An excellent and full coverage can be found in the book The Highland Clearance by John Prebble.

I went looking for that title "The Highland Clearances (1963)" online and stumbled across this analysis of John Prebble's works:

The flawed legacy of Scottish popular historian John Prebble
By Steve James
21 March 2001
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/03/preb-m21.html

In a nutshell the reviewer explains that Prebble's writings were coloured by his own experiences and political views (few writings aren't), and that he glossed over some of the more complex details behind historical events (the article enumerates several) to create emotional impact. Not that this makes his books historically incorrect, just incomplete:

" Later scholars have tended not to view Prebble's works as serious history, but in the words of historian TM Devine, as "a sort of faction "—a mixture of fact and fiction.
Prebble's biography suggests he was rather perplexed by the ferocity of the attacks on him, since he never claimed to be an historian and was happy to acknowledge that his methods were "idiosyncratic." "

I am still looking for Mr. Prebble's books, as he seems to have captured the tragedy of those times from a moving first-person perspective.