The Clearances

On the rough path between Comrie and Loch Freuchie, there is a point (it's at NN 794 309, if you are using the OS maps), where the valley flattens out, giving a broad south- facing flood plain on the Invergeldie burn, sheltered from the west and east by ridges that rise to 700 metres. 

Today there are a few blackface sheep and a couple of grouse here. But if you look closely, you can see the outlines of at least six old black houses, the typical homes of the Highlands.

 

Remains of a Clachan in the Oykel valley

This was a clachan, a home for maybe six families. For a moment I imagine the children running and playing between the wee thatched cottages, the dark, squat Highland cattle grazing in the fields up slope, with tatties (potatoes) or neeps (turnip) growing in "lazy beds" in the in-by fields, and someone singing in Gaelic as they hang out the washing up from the burn. A tough life - there is no point in romanticising it - but a community. 

And then, probably around 1740-1850, the land on which these people had lived for generations was handed out, as an estate, to a man of wealth and power. He would win this privilege from the English conquerors or from their lackeystocracy, the Scottish dukes and lords.

The new landlord wanted the estate for hunting, and the clachan and its farming was in the way. So one night his 'factor' (estate manager) went up the valley with a few men and drove the cottagers out, "clearing" them from the estate. 

Some went to Glasgow, to work in the satanic mills, and maybe someone got a passage to America or Canada; she might be your ancestor. But the community was destroyed, as the colonial masters wished. 

I stopped in the clachan, trying to hear the old voices. And felt anger at the injustice done to these poor farming folk, the injustice of an English Empire determined to crush the Scots.

But later, calmer, I channel the anger into learning, and buy Sir Tom Devine's 'The Scottish Clearances - a History of the Dispossessed ". And learn - of course - that the story is more complex. Devine's history cures the anger, but leaves a sadness for that Gaelic clachan and its lost community.