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Highland Clearances Quotes

Browse 9 quotes about Highland Clearances.

Highland Clearances Quotes

“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.”

Highland ClearancesLairdBadenochEvictions1876Belleville EstateGlen BanchorTenant Farmers
Book:Glen Banchor: A Highland Glen and its People
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“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.”

Land EconomicsPotato FamineHighland ClearancesLandownersAgricultural ImprovementLismore
Book:How an Island Lost its People: Improvement, Clearance and Resettlement on Lismore, 1830 - 1914
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“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.”

MelancholyGaelicHighland ClearancesCattle DrovingGlensArgyllRiver Clyde
Book:The Clyde, River and Firth
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“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.”

CommerceScotlandBritish EmpireClearancePastoralIndustrialisationAgrarianHighland ClearancesUrbanisation
Book:Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland
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“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.”

LandscapeSheepHighland ClearancesBusinessmenAssyntCroftersRed DeerBracken
Book:Between Mountain and Sea: Poems from Assynt
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