Landowners must bear responsibility for tragedy of the Highland Clearances

Wilbert Girvan puts the blame for the Highland Clearances on the Scottish potato famine of 1846 and largely exonerates the landowners of blame (Letters, 29 July).

This is nonsense. Long before the potato famine, between 1770 and 1850, a policy of forced clearance of people in favour of enormous sheep runs had been carried out by many of the landowners.

They are too numerous to list, but the most notorious were the clearances carried out by the Duchess of Sutherland and her vicious factor Patrick Sellar.

On her estate, between 1814 and 1821, 15,000 Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were violently driven from their fertile glens in the North of Scotland, where their ancestors had lived and farmed for millennia.

Their houses and villages were burned – in some cases before they even had time to move their possessions – and one old woman who could not move was burned to death in her home.

Where there was resistance the army was brought in to enforce the law. Truly, it was said, the poor had no lawyers.

The people were forced to resettle on the poorest land on coastal strips where it was impossible to make a living and so starvation or immigration were the only options.

Later, when the duchess wanted to follow the example of the Duchess of Gordon and raise a local militia regiment, she was told by an old clansman: “You have driven the men from the land for sheep. Let the sheep defend you!”

Sutherland, even today, is largely a man-made desert with the scattered foundations of the lost villages in the empty glens.

JAMES DUNCAN Rattray Grove, Edinburgh I was interested to read the article by former Scottish National Party Justice Minister Kenny Macaskill on historical land use in Scotland (“Action is needed to assuage the collective pain etched deep in the Scottish soul”, Thursday, 27 July).

In it Mr Macaskill talks often about pain and hurt coming down to the present generation from how the land and the people on it were governed in the past.

But the major source of Scottish pain in recent times has not been distant memories of the Highland Clearances, but the monstrous boil on the body politic that is the SNP government, and their threats of an unwanted second referendum; which boil was partially lanced to many great sighs of national relief in the recent separatist bloodletting of 8 June.

RICHARD TALLACH Viewlands Terrace, Perth