Scot Land

Scotland has a lot of land. It's huge - millions of square kilometres of moorland and forest - I'm walking across some of it on the Scottish National Trail. 

Most of the hills and valleys I walk through are empty of humans. Deer, some sheep, wild birds... but no people. This place used to support a population - I pass the ruins of old clachans (wee villages of stone houses) every day here in the North (I'm writing this in Ullapool.) One clachan I passed today had the ruins of six wee houses, and so probably had between 20-40 people living there at one time. 

 

 

We like it, like this; green hills, the emptiness, the 'wilderness'. So we preserve it that way. But why? Why not repopulate the land? Not all of it of course, but Scotland has so much that it could afford to put people onto, say, 10% of its moorland, and you'd barely notice.

The clachan I passed today for example - next to a river that could provide energy with a micro-hydro scheme, with flat, fertile riverside land for a market garden (providing for the hotels in Ullapool), and a high-speed internet link for work and school. It could support - again - five or six families. 

But of course that's just a pipe dream. Because the land owner wants to keep the land free of people, so that wealthy clients can hunt deer and grouse across it. Exploiting the land as a business, not for the community. This is the colonial view of land -where natural resources, which should be the property of all of us, are exploited by the few. 

The land owner has that clachan because his ancestors 'cleared' the villagers out, preferring hunting over the villagers' smallholdings. He had that right, because he had been granted the land by the Crown, or had grabbed it by force. So, a murky past, that now looks like respectable ownership. Huge areas of Scotland's land is held by a very small number of people; 432 people own more than half of Scotland's private land. 

This combination of our 'wilderness' aesthetic, and the colonial exploitation of land, have frozen Scotland's hills and valleys as bare green spaces, empty of the communities that this land could sustain. 

It can't last like this. Climate change will create mass emigration from the new deserts in Southern Europe, and from the water resource wars of North Africa and the Arab-speaking countries, to Scotland, Norway, Sweden and maybe Siberia.

For that future, but also to put right the murky past, and to create a vibrant, community-based future, Scotland should bring communities back into the Highlands. 

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.