ing for
the purposes of art ; for the ferocity shown by some of the factors
and ground-officers employed by the landlords in evicting their
inoffensive tenantry, can only be matched by the brutal excesses of
victorious troops on a foreign soil. But even in those cases where
no actual violence was resorted to, the uprooting and
transplantation of whole communities of Crofters from the straths
and glens which they had tilled for so
many
generations must be regarded in the light of a national crime.
No traveller can have failed
to be struck by the solitude and desolation which
now constitute
the prevalent character of the Scottish Highlands. "Mile after
mile," says Macaulay, speaking of Glencoe, "Taveller looks in vain
for the smoke of one hut,or for one
human form
wrapped in a plaid, and listens in vain for the bark of a shepherd's
dog, or the bleat of a lamb. Mile after mile, the only sound that
indicates life is the faint cry of a bird of prey from some
storm-beaten pinnacle of rock." His words might appropriately stand
for a description of a great part of the north of Scotland. But it
was not always so. The
moors and valleys, whose blank silence is only
broken by the rush of tumbling streams or the cry of some solitary
bird, were once enlivened by the manifold sounds of human industry
and made musical with children's voices.
The crumbling
walls and decaying roof-trees of ruined villages still bear witness
to the former populousness of
many a deserted glen. Perhaps these humble
remains touch our feelings more deeply than the imposing fragments
of Greek temples and Roman amphitheatres. For it was but yesterday
that they were inhabited by a brave, moral, and industrious
peasantry, full of poetic instincts and ardent patriotism,
ruthlessly expelled their native land to make way for sporting
grounds rented by merchant princes and American millionaires.
During a visit I paid to the Isle of Arran in the
summer of 1884, I stood on the site of such a ruined village. All
that remained of the once flourishing community was a solitary old
Scotchwoman, who well remembered her banished countrymen. Her simple
story had a thrilling pathos, told as it was on the melancholy
slopes of North Glen Sannox, looking across to the wild broken
mountain ridges called "The Old Wife's Steps." Here, she said, and
as far as one could see, had dwelt the Glen Sannox people, the
largest population then collected in any one spot of the island, and
evicted by the Duke of Hamilton in the year 1832. The lives of these
crofters became an idyll in her mouth. She dwelt proudly on their
patient labour, their simple joys, and the kind, helpful ways of
them; and her brown eyes filled with tears as she recalled the day
of their expulsion, when the people gathered from all parts of the
island to see the last of the Glen Sannox folk ere they went on
board the brig that was bound for New Brunswick, in Canada.
"Ah, it was a sore day that," she sighed, "when the old people cast
themselves down on the sea-shore and wept."
They were gone, these Crofters, and their
dwellings laid low with the hill-side, and their fertile plots of
corn overrun with ling and heather; but the stream went rushing on
as of old, and as of old the cloven mountain peaks cast their shadow
on the valley below whence the once happy people were all gone —
gone, too, their dwelling-places, and, to use the touching words of
a Highland minister, ''There was not a smoke there now." For the
progress of civilisation, which has redeemed many a wilderness, and
gladdened the solitary places of the world, has come with a curse to
these Highland glens, and turned green pastures and golden
harvest-fields once more into a desert.
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