Alexander Mackenzie
Buy this book here - 0901824968
£10.99
DESCRIPTION:
In the nineteenth century many of the inhabitants
of the Highland glens were cleared out, often by forcible evictions, to
make way for a more profitable tenant—the Great Cheviot sheep.
Families had to leave the homes where they had lived for generations.
Thousands emigrated over the ocean in the hope of a better life. The
tragedy of the Clearances, brought about by cynical, often absentee
landowners, is a black page in Scotland’s history. The effects of it
are still being felt in Scotland—and in the countries where the
unwilling migrants settled. Written while the events it describes were
still unfolding, Mackenzie’s impassioned History brings the distress
of the age unforgettably before the reader.
In his Introduction, John Prebble says: ‘This
book… has been and will remain a book to be read, an essential part of
any study of the Clearances.’
EXCERPT:
GLENCALVIE
Great cruelties were perpetrated at Glencalvie,
Ross-shire, where the evicted had to retire into the parish churchyard,
where for more than a week they found the only shelter obtainable in
their native land, no one daring to succour them, under a threat of
receiving similar treatment to those whose hard fate had driven them
thus among the tombs. Many of them, indeed, wished that their lot had
landed them under the sod with their ancestors and friends, rather than
be treated and driven out of house and home in such a ruthless manner. A
special Commissioner sent down by the London Times describes the
circumstances as follows:
ARDGAY, NEAR TAIN, Ross-shire, 15th May, 1845.
Those who remember the misery and destitution to
which large masses of the population were thrown by the systematic
"Clearances" (as they are here called) carried on in
Sutherlandshire some 20 years ago, under the direction and on the estate
of the late Marchioness of Stafford—those who have not forgotten to
what an extent the ancient ties which bound clansmen to their chiefs
were then torn asunder—will regret to learn the heartless source with
all its sequences of misery, of destitution, and of crime, is again
being resorted to in Ross-shire. Amongst an imaginative people like the
Highlanders, who, poetic from dwelling amongst wild and romantic
scenery, shut out from the world and clinging to the traditions of the
past, it requires little, with fair treatment, to make them almost
idolise their heritor. They would spend the last drop of their blood in
his service. But this feeling of respectful attachment to the
landowners, which money cannot buy, is fast passing away… If the
almost inconceivable misery and hopeless destitution in which, for the
expected acquisition of a few pounds, hundreds of peaceable and
generally industrious and contented peasants are driven out from the
means of self-support to become wanderers and starving beggars, and in
which a brave and valuable population is destroyed—are exposed to the
gaze of the world, general indignation and disgust may effect what moral
obligations and humanity cannot. One of these clearances is about to
take place in the parish of Kincardine, from which I now write; and
throughout the whole district it has created the strongest feeling of
indignation. This parish is divided into two districts each of great
extent; one is called the parliamentary district of Croick. The length
of this district is about 20 miles, with a breadth of from 10 to 15
miles. It extends amongst the most remote and unfrequented parts of the
country, consisting chiefly of hills of heather and rock, peopled only
in a few straths and glens. This district was formerly thickly peopled;
but one of those clearances many years ago nearly swept away the
population, and now the whole number of its inhabitants amounts, I am
told, to only 370 souls.’
REVIEWS:
‘An unparalleled record of the events of the
time given in the words of a wide variety of witnesses and participants,
as well as in the vivid and impassioned narration of MacKenzie himself.
An irreplaceable primary source for the historian and general reader
alike.’—Scottish Book Collector
‘An important book which has had an incalculable
effect on Scottish opinions and attitudes…an indispensable source for
a very black chapter in our history.’—P H Scott, Books in Scotland
‘Few books evoke so pungently the spirit of
those desperate times.’—Scotland on Sunday
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Alexander Mackenzie was forty-five when he
published The History of the Highland Clearances in 1883. Since 1875 he
had edited the Celtic Magazine, which was devoted to Gaelic history,
folk-lore and antiquities. He was born too late to be a witness to the
earlier Clearances, yet he knew and talked with many of the victims, and
this book is his response to the obligations they placed on his
professional conscience. He died in 1898.
