Thanks Boab - I will back out quietly! What I was being lazy about expressing properly was that I believe the laws that lead to the clearances in the Highlands applied throughout Scotland and so had a psychological and cultural effect on the lowlands, even though I don't think they were a significant number of evictions (etc) there. As I said in my last post, I'm not in the least surprised people got confused by what I meant on this one. That tends to happen when you don't say what you mean. On the other hand it looks as if my last post managed to confuse my meaning still further. Perhaps I'd better just quit while I'm behind...