Subject: Shores of Sutherland
From:
Susanne (skw)
Date: 13 Nov 99 - 05:06 PM
In the thread "Info on Clearence song 'Land Of MacLeod'" Susan A-R mentioned another song about the Clearances. I post it here as I haven't seen it anywhere else so far. I found it on a 1975 LP made from material of the Scottish TV series 'A Better Class of Folk', hosted by Dominic Behan. It is sung by Billy Davidson who seems to have vanished without trace since. The tune is fairly sombre, as befits the subject, and I'm still not able to post tunes. Should anyone want it (Kat?) I'll have to send a cassette, or perhaps someone would take the cassette and turn it into an ABC.
SHORES OF SUTHERLAND
(Jim McLean)
Cold is the wind and wet
As we make our beds down on the sand
Scavenging gulls and clappidoos
Down on the shores of Sutherland
High on the hills our shielings
Are sheltering factors that robber band
Shepherds and sheep are asleep
While we die on the shores of Sutherland
Blood from our cows and meal
A nettle broth laid with barley bran
Banned from the beds of mussels
By dogs and their masters of Sutherland
Big are shellfish they're guarding
For fishers who come from some other land
Cockles are baiting their hooks
While we starve on the shores of Sutherland
Water and brose and milk
Salmon and deer and ptarmigan
Honey and bread and cheese
Was the food of the children of Sutherland
Now we are barred from our clachans
And hunted away from our motherland
Starved at the edge of the sea
By the Duke and the Duchess of Sutherland ^^
Mackie's History of Scotland has a rather starry-eyed view of the reasons behind the Clearances, at least in my 1972 edition:
[1972:] The story of the Clearances is known to all; yet the Sutherland Clearances were part of a policy of improvement undertaken between 1811 and 1820 by the Marquess of Stafford, who had married the Countess of Sutherland in 1785. Aware of the 'improvements' which were being undertaken in Moray and of the hardship and famine which prevailed in his area, he called in experts from the south, and began to move his tenants from the upland glens to the coast in the belief that there they could supplement the crofts which he would supply by fishing. At first he had some success when he moved people from Assynt to the west coast; but later he met with opposition which was repressed by violence, all the more resented when it was found that one of the factors employed, who was acquitted on a charge of homicide, himself entered into one of the sheep farms from which the evictions took place. The burning of wretched houses and the eviction of helpless people - some of them decrepit - aroused great condemnation, and the grievances reached the House of Commons. There and elsewhere it was shown that the Marquis, besides getting nothing from his Sutherland estate between 1811 and 1833, had spent £60,000 of his own money; but the stigma was not removed. [...]
Between 1828 and 1851 some proprietors shipped surplus tenants overseas at their own expense; but in 1853 there occurred in Glengarry perhaps the most ferocious of the violent clearances; this was not a matter of shifting people to the coast; whole families were put into ships and sent across the ocean, and sometimes men who sought refuge in the hills were hunted out like deer. It is hard to ascertain the total number of emigrants, but easy to understand the bitterness that they carried in their hearts. They were driven from the homes where their ancestors had lived for centuries. Life had never been easy in the old days; the tacksman was sometimes hard, but he was of their own kin, and when things were at their worst the chief would surely provide some meal.
They did not realize that with the coming of better order, of better understanding of disease, and, with the introduction of the potato, better food, population was increasing to an extent which could not be supplied by the old economy. They did not realize - indeed, many of them may not have known - that money spent by landlords or by charitable societies on palliatives was spent in vain. All they saw was that land was being let to sheep-farmers who could pay three times the old rent and absorbed small crofts into bigger holdings. To them it seemed that nowadays chiefs preferred sheep to men, to men whose ancestors had served their ancestors for generations. (Mackie, Scotland 317f)
I like this story:
[1991:] In the whole shameful episode of the Highland Clearances, no district lost more of its people to America [than Sutherland], and by the beginning of the Crimean War there were precious few able-bodied men left there. When the Duke of Sutherland - whose family had been the most consistently ruthless of evictors - stood up at a public meeting in 1854 to ask his tenantry for recruits to fight the Russians, he was met with stunned silence - and then this answer, from an old man. "I am sorry for the response your Grace's proposals are meeting here, but there is a cause for it [...]. It is the opinion of this country that should the Czar of Russia take possession of Dunrobin Castle and of Stafford House (the Duke's residences) next term, that we couldn't expect worse treatment at his hands than we have experienced at the hands of your family for the last fifty years." (Notes Brian McNeill, 'The Back o' the North Wind')
This is how the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown puts it in his autobiography:
[1997:] It is likely that [my mother's] near Mackay ancestors had had to endure the 'clearances' of the early nineteenth century, when whole communities of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were persuaded or driven out of the valleys where they had lived, a poor but free community under the chiefs of Mackay, for many centuries. Again, it was 'progress', that religion of nineteenth-century man - that irresistible force - that destroyed and uprooted everything that seemed to stand in its way. Nothing was sacred or beautiful; only money and profits counted. [...] The clan chief was no longer the clan's protector; he had long sided with the establishment, and sent his sons to English public schools and married among the English or Lowland aristocracy. And it had been pointed out to him that it would be more profitable for him to graze flocks of Cheviot sheep on his lands than have them tilled in the age-old unhurried rhythms. [...]
The roofs of the scattered clan were burned over their heads, the old and the sick were left to wander or die among the rocks. Those who were not forced on to ships Canada-bound were permitted to scratch a living from soil at the sea-edge northwards. The fishing, it was pointed out to them, was good. It is more than likely that hundreds of them had never even set eyes on the sea. Somehow they learned to be boatbuilders and fishermen. Somehow they learned to read the ferocious and fruitful moods of the Pentland Firth. (George Mackay Brown, For the Islands I Sing 21f)
More background in John Prebble, The Highland Clearances
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