Clan Sutherland · 1814
The clearance of Strathnaver
Through the spring and early summer of 1814 Patrick Sellar, factor and lessee of the Sutherland estate to the Countess-Duchess Elizabeth Sutherland and her husband the Marquess of Stafford, supervised the eviction of about three hundred families from the inland strath of Strathnaver in the north-west of the county. The tenants were given notice to quit between the second of April and the fifteenth of May; the timber of their houses was burnt to prevent re-occupation. By the testimony of Donald Macleod the stonemason, who would write the indictment in *Gloomy Memories* twenty years later, an old woman called Margaret MacKay refused to come out of her house at Badinloskin and the thatch was set alight with her inside; she was carried out by a neighbour and died five days afterwards in a barn at the coast. Sellar was tried for arson and culpable homicide at the Inverness Circuit Court on the twenty-third of April 1816 and acquitted on every count. The Strathnaver clearance is one episode of the wider Sutherland Clearances of 1814–1820, in which between six and ten thousand Sutherland tenants were moved off the inland straths onto coastal crofts or onto emigration berths to Canada, Australia and the Cape; the central historical fact of the modern Sutherland surname.
It is a quarter past nine on the morning of the thirteenth of June 1814, on the upper bank of the river Naver above the small township of Badinloskin, in the long strath, in summer light. He is thirty-four years old. He is Patrick Sellar of Westfield, born at Elgin, factor and lessee of the Sutherland estate, on the salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year and the rent-free tack of the southern half of Strathnaver, which is to be cleared by the Whitsun term and laid down to a Cheviot flock of fifty thousand within the next four years. He is in a black riding-coat over a white shirt, on a roan horse, with a clerk on a second horse and a party of seven estate ground-officers and the Strathy minister Mr Sage's curate behind him at twenty yards.
He has the eviction summonses in a leather wallet across the saddle. He has, in his head, the schedule, which is that the houses of Badinloskin are to be cleared this morning and the timbers fired by midday, and that the houses of Achnagolish are to be cleared in the afternoon, and that the operation is to move down-strath at the rate of two townships a day until the Whitsun term, which is the eighth of August, the new style.
The houses of Badinloskin are turf-and-stone with thatched roofs and small windows. There are eleven of them in a clachan along the south side of the burn. The men of the township are out at the sheilings; the women, the children and the very old are at home. The party from the estate has been at Achadh an Eas the previous afternoon and at Truderscaig the day before that, and the people of those two townships are presently moving their gear down the strath toward Bettyhill at the coast, with the cattle on a long road in front of them.
He thinks: the road to the coast is sixteen miles by Skail. The Bettyhill lots are not yet ready. The road will not see them all there before the storms in the autumn. The estate has been told this. The estate has accepted it.
He thinks: the Marchioness has the sheep order. The sheep order is the deciding fact of the next year. The country was not paying back its rents on the tenancies. The country will pay back the rents on the Cheviot.
He thinks: I am being watched by Mr Sage's curate. The curate has written letters to Lord Stafford complaining of the methods. The curate is not on the establishment. The curate cannot do anything beyond write the letters.
He goes through the eleven houses with the two ground-officers, reads the summons, gives the people fifteen minutes to gather their gear. The first eight are emptied without incident. At the ninth house, Badinloskin proper, the woman of the house is named Margaret MacKay. She is, by the testimony of her neighbour Robert MacGregor at the trial in Inverness two years later, between ninety and one hundred years old, blind, deaf in one ear, lying on a heather mattress at the back of the house, and entirely unable to walk. Her grand-daughter Christy comes to the door and tells the ground-officer that the old woman cannot be moved. The ground-officer is John Dryden of the estate office. Dryden goes back to Sellar.
Sellar, by Dryden's deposition at the trial, says: damn her, the old witch, she has lived too long. Let her burn.
Sellar, by his own evidence at the trial, says: get the woman out of the house and burn the timbers. Carry her if you have to. He says no other words.
The ground-officers do not carry her out. They go around the house and they fire the thatch from the gable end. The thatch in old Strathnaver houses is dense, packed with moss; the fire takes about two minutes to come through to the roof-timbers and another six to take the rafters down. Christy MacKay and her cousin run in through the front door, lift the old woman by the heather mattress like a stretcher, and bring her out as the rafters are coming in behind them. The mattress is on fire. They put it out in the burn.
Margaret MacKay is laid in a barn at Badinloskin that has been left standing for the night by the order. She does not recover. She dies on the eighteenth of June, by the parish register at Strathy, of the effects of fire and removal. She is one named woman of about three hundred families turned out of the strath in the May and June and July of 1814.
Patrick Sellar was indicted at Inverness on five counts including arson and culpable homicide arising from the events of June 1814. The Strathy curate, the Reverend David Mackenzie, gave evidence; Donald Macleod the stonemason gave evidence; Christy MacKay gave evidence. The defence, brilliantly conducted by Henry Cockburn, future Lord Cockburn of the Court of Session, argued that the evictions had been lawful and the burnings authorised. The jury, twelve gentlemen of the county under the judge Lord Pitmilly, returned not guilty on every count. Sellar resigned the Sutherland factorship within two years of the acquittal but kept his Strathnaver tack and the sheep on it; he died at Elgin in 1851 a wealthy and ungrieved man.
Donald Macleod the stonemason published Gloomy Memories of the Highlands and Islands in 1841 and reissued it in expanded form in Toronto in 1857. The book is the foundational source of the Sutherland Clearance literature. It and the Selkirk emigrations and the long letters of John Prebble in the 1960s have made the Sutherland surname, in the modern Highland imagination, an ambivalent name carried by both the perpetrators (the noble Sutherland house and the factor Sellar) and the dispossessed (the some thousands of Sutherland tenants who came out of the straths in the years 1814–1820). The Strathnaver Trail today is a gravel road off the A836 with stone markers at the township sites. The marker at Badinloskin is in the long meadow above the burn, three feet high, in granite, with the date 1814 cut into the face. There is no name on the marker. The townships of Strathnaver, by the usage of the descendants now in Cape Breton and Vancouver Island and Otago and Adelaide, are called the cleared townships. The phrase has carried.