Life After Death

Chapter Seven Scotland: The Highland Clearances On 15 January, the first rent-day of 1814, and in bitter snow-driven weather, Sellar arrived at _Achness. With Mr MacKenzie the minister as his host, ally and interpreter, he gave notice to _those tenants whom he wished to quit his property at Whitsuntide. Others were told that their time for removal would come later and still more of the people were warned that within four years Mr Young proposed to clear the whole of Strathnaver from Altnahara to Dunvedin and place it under sheep. Meanwhile a surveyor would come north as soon as the spring thaw permitted and would lay out those new lots on the coast where Lord Stafford had decided the people should now live. The surveyor did indeed come with the melting snow, but left immediately because of illness in his family, and although he returned in May his work was still unfinished when Whitsunday came.

Confused, uneasy, and stubbornly reluctant to leave the known for the unknown, the people remained where they were. In April beef prices had fallen with the end of the long European war, and the year ahead promised to be a hard one for all Highlanders who still lived on a black-cattle economy. In spring, too, fodder was always scarce, and now there was even less of it. As soon as the snows melted, Sellar's principal shepherd, John Dryden, had come to burn tens of square miles of dead heath so that cotton grass and deer hair might grow more richly for the coming sheep. Burning to prepare pastures was no new thing in the hills, but never had it been done here on so vast a scale. Much of the townships' muir-pasturage was burnt, and the Strathnaver cattle roamed raw-ribbed in search of food. There was more to make the people despair. In previous removals the evicted had been allowed to take their house-timbers with them for use in the building of new homes. Now it was learnt that the moss-fir was henceforth to be burned when it was torn from the cottages. The people were to be paid the value of the wood, or the value which Sellar set upon it, but this was no compensation at all in a land so sparsely timbered as Sutherland. John Prebble, The Highland Clearances, pp.7677, Penguin Books, 1969 One of Malthus's main concerns was that the excess population in Ireland would eventually have serious implications for Britain, due to the proximity of the two islands. The surplus Irish population would be tempted to emigrate to Britain, especially as wages were far higher on the mainland. Malthus warned that the outcome of this would be to depress both wages and normal standards within Britain. The need to protect Britain was obvious. Malthus, however, offered a solution. The population of Ireland, particularly in the poorest part of the agricultural sector, had to be reduced. In a widely quoted comment to Ricardo he explained that: "...the land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the