The clearance of Strathnaver

A country is rarely emptied by armies. More often it is emptied by a clerk on a good horse, with a leather wallet of summonses and a printed schedule on his knee, working at the pace of an estate office. The men who do this work are not cruel by temperament. They are punctual. They balance the rent-roll, they ride out at the appointed hour, and at the end of the day they write the work up in a book. The country goes out from under the people in the time it takes to fire a roof.

THE FACTOR AND THE FLOCK

Patrick Sellar of Westfield was thirty-four years old in the summer of 1814. He had been born at Elgin, schooled at the university there, called to the bar in Edinburgh, and brought north into the service of Elizabeth, Countess-Duchess of Sutherland, and her husband George Granville Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford, the richest commoner in Britain. His salary was two hundred and fifty pounds a year. His tack, rent-free, was the southern half of Strathnaver, sixty thousand acres of inland glen running north to the sea at Bettyhill. The condition of the tack was that the strath be cleared by the Whitsun term and laid down within four years to a Cheviot flock of fifty thousand. The country had not been paying its rents on the tenancies. The country would pay its rents on the Cheviot. The Countess-Duchess held a paper in Dunrobin signed by her commissioner James Loch and called, in the office, the sheep order. The order was the deciding fact of the year.

Behind the order lay a longer fact. The strath above Bettyhill had been the heartland of the Mackays of Strathnaver since the fifteenth century, and the tenants on its turf-and-stone townships had paid rent or military service to that house, and after 1829 to the Sutherland house, in unbroken hereditary tenure for ten generations. The Highland tenancies were not freeholds. They were verbal tacks renewed at Whitsun by usage. The Improvers in Edinburgh had decided in the 1790s that the system was a drag on the rent-roll of the north, and that a Cheviot sheep grazed on the bare hill paid four times what a Highland family paid for the same ground. The country had been told this. The country had accepted it.

THE MORNING AT BADINLOSKIN

It is a quarter past nine on the thirteenth of June 1814, on the upper bank of the river Naver, in summer light. He is in a black riding-coat over a white shirt, on a roan horse. A clerk rides at his shoulder. Seven estate ground-officers and the Strathy curate, the Reverend David Mackenzie, ride twenty yards behind. The summonses are in the leather wallet across the saddle. The schedule is in his head: Badinloskin to be cleared this morning and the timbers fired by midday; Achnagolish to be cleared in the afternoon; the operation to move down-strath at two townships a day until the Whitsun term, which is the eighth of August, the new style.

The houses of Badinloskin are eleven, turf-and-stone, thatched, ranged along the south side of the burn. The men are out at the sheilings. The women, the children and the very old are at home. The parties from Achadh an Eas and Truderscaig have already gone, the day before and the day before that, and their cattle are on the long road to Bettyhill in front of them. The road is sixteen miles by Skail. The lots at the coast are not yet built. He knows this. The estate knows it. The autumn storms will come down on the people before the lots are ready. The estate has been told. The estate has accepted it. He rides through the burn at the ford and dismounts at the first door.

THE NINTH HOUSE

The first eight are emptied without incident. The summons is read at each threshold; the people are given fifteen minutes to gather their gear; the ground-officers, John Dryden of the estate office at their head, go around to the gable and fire the thatch from outside. The thatch in old Strathnaver houses is dense, packed with moss, and the fire takes about two minutes to come through to the roof-timbers and another six to bring the rafters down. By the ninth house the air above the clachan is already brown. The ninth house is Badinloskin proper. Dryden goes to the door, comes back to the horse, and reports that the woman of the house cannot be moved. She is named Margaret MacKay. She is somewhere between ninety and one hundred years old, blind, deaf in one ear, lying on a heather mattress at the back of the house. Her grand-daughter Christy is at the door, says the old woman has not walked in two years, asks for the burning to be deferred until they can find a cart.

He looks at the curate, twenty yards back on his pony, who is making no move and saying nothing, and whose letters to Lord Stafford complaining of the methods have made no difference to the schedule, because the curate is not on the establishment and the establishment is what is doing the work. He looks at Dryden. He looks at the schedule, which is Achnagolish in the afternoon and Skail tomorrow, and the country to be off by Whitsun and the flock on by Martinmas, and the rent-roll back in credit by the year after that, and the Countess-Duchess in Dunrobin holding the paper signed by Loch. A cart from Bettyhill is six hours each way over bad ground. To wait for the cart is to lose the day, and to lose the day is to lose the schedule, and the schedule is the order, and the order is the country. He thinks of the timbers and the moss and the rate at which the fire takes, and of the two-minute interval before the roof comes through. Two minutes is enough to carry an old woman out of a house, if anyone carries her. He has the schedule. He has the order. He has, for one second of time on a horse above the Naver, the choice of saying the words that defer the burning of this one roof. By Dryden's deposition at Inverness two years later, what he says is, damn her, the old witch, she has lived too long. Let her burn. By his own evidence at the trial, what he says is, get the woman out of the house and burn the timbers. Carry her if you have to. No one carries her.

THE FIRING

The ground-officers go around the house and fire the thatch from the gable end. Christy MacKay and her cousin run in through the front door, lift the old woman by the corners of the heather mattress, and carry her out as the rafters are coming in behind them. The mattress is on fire. They put it out in the burn. She is laid in a barn at Badinloskin that has been left standing by order for one night. The party rides on to Achnagolish in the afternoon. The schedule holds. By the end of June about three hundred families are out of the strath, the timber of their houses burnt to prevent re-occupation, their gear on the road to the coastal lots or the emigrant berths at Cromarty and Thurso. The Cheviot flock arrives in the autumn.

THE BARN AT THE COAST

Margaret MacKay does not recover. She lies in the barn for five days. The Strathy parish register, in the hand of the Reverend David Mackenzie, records her death on the eighteenth of June 1814, of the effects of fire and removal. Her grand-daughter Christy walks the sixteen miles to Bettyhill that afternoon with a bundle on her back. The cattle are ahead of her on the road. There is no lot ready for her at the coast. She sleeps that night under the overturned keel of a herring-boat on the strand below the manse, with the other women out of the upper strath, while the rain comes off the Pentland Firth. She is twenty-two years old. She will give evidence at Inverness in April 1816, in Gaelic, through the interpreter, and the jury of twelve gentlemen of the county will not believe her.

THE COURT AT INVERNESS

Patrick Sellar was indicted at the Inverness Circuit Court on the twenty-third of April 1816, on five counts including arson and culpable homicide arising from the events at Badinloskin and the wider strath. The Reverend David Mackenzie gave evidence. Donald Macleod the stonemason gave evidence. Christy MacKay gave evidence. The defence was conducted, brilliantly, by Henry Cockburn, advocate, future Lord Cockburn of the Court of Session, who argued that the evictions had been lawful under the law of Scotland, the summonses regular, the burnings authorised by the proprietor, and the death of Margaret MacKay neither caused by nor foreseeable to the factor. The judge, Lord Pitmilly, in his charge to the jury, observed that the prosecution of a gentleman of Mr Sellar's character and standing on the testimony of his own evicted tenantry was a matter requiring the most particular caution. The jury returned not guilty on every count. The court rose at a quarter past one in the afternoon. Sellar walked out into Castle Street a free man and an exonerated one, and rode north that evening to Strathnaver, where the flock was on the hill.

THE NAME ON BOTH SIDES

He resigned the Sutherland factorship within two years of the acquittal but kept the Strathnaver tack and the sheep on it. He died at Elgin in 1851, a wealthy man and an ungrieved one, with a long obituary in the Inverness Courier praising his contributions to scientific agriculture. Donald Macleod the stonemason published Gloomy Memories of the Highlands and Islands in 1841 and reissued it, expanded, in Toronto in 1857, from the Canadian exile to which his testimony at Inverness had finally driven him. The Selkirk emigrations carried the cleared families to the Red River. Later ships carried them to Cape Breton, to Vancouver Island, to Otago, to Adelaide. The Sutherland surname in the modern Highland imagination is an ambivalent name, carried on both sides of the burning: by the noble house at Dunrobin and the factor at Westfield, and by the some thousands of tenants who came out of the straths in the years 1814 to 1820 and took the name of the county with them into the new countries.

The clearance is rarely closed by those who oppose it. It is closed by the factor on the good horse, on the schedule, by the hour. What survives the schedule is what the schedule did not foresee: the testimony of the grand-daughter, the book of the stonemason, the granite marker three feet high in the long meadow above the burn at Badinloskin, with the date 1814 cut into the face and no name on the stone, which the descendants in Cape Breton and Otago and Adelaide call, in the usage that has carried, the cleared townships.