Let’s leave The Mannie on his cold pedestal as reminder of past injustices

Duke who enforced brutal Clearances has long been damned for his crimes

While it seems half of the world’s statues have been toppled off their perches The Mannie still stands there high on Beinn a’ Bhragaidh, above the village of Golspie.

The Mannie, of course, is George Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford and 1st Duke of Sutherland, who oversaw the brutal clearance of thousands of people from his Highland estates in the early half of the 19th Century.

And a good thing too he still stands there, I say, as a daily and highly visible reminder that history shouldn’t be swept under the heather. There he is in all his shame.

“History is written by the victors” is no idle phrase. Visible in stone all over the world, while the hidden and distorted and vanquished history of the poor and the disenfranchised and the defeated has been largely ignored.

Though not totally. It survives in the “leid o’ the folk” as Grassic Gibbon so beautifully put it. In song and stories, in memory and tradition, in the un-statued corners where, until now, only folklorists and dedicated local historians have delved.

Take The Mannie himself, for example. Though he stands there in stone, indigenous Gàidhlig poetry toppled him long ago along, with all the other perpetators of the Clearances. Not least in the songpoetry of the great Skye bard and harpist, An Clàrsair Dall (The Blind

Harpist), Roderick Morison, who foresaw it all through the anglicisation of the chief of Clan Macleod a century or so before the Clearances.

Granted, the clan chiefs largely responsible were not often blamed directly for the brutal evictions, and the vitriol was addressed to their factors and agents (such as the infamous Patrick Sellar) and to the innocent sheep which had replaced the people. But, despite that, it was clear ultimate responsibility, as now, always lay at the top.

The most famous articulation of the people’s anger is found in the great Sutherland song, Mo Mhallachd aig na Caoraich Mhòr (My Curses on the Big Sheep), composed by Ewan Robertson from Tongue in the 1880s.

Though the title’s curse is directed at the sheep, the culprits are searingly named in the fifth, sixth and seventh verses of the song: The Duchess of Sutherland, Sellar – and The Mannie. These three verses read: “Bhain-Diùc Chataibh, bheil thu ’d shìth?

Càit bheil nis do ghùntan sìod’? Do chùn iad thu bhon fhoil ’s bhon fhrìd

Tha ’g itheamh measg nan clàraibh? Shellair bhioraich tha san ùir, Ma fhuair thu ’n gràs ris ’n robh do dhùil,

’N teine leis do chuir thu ’n tuath fo ruaig

Tha fuaim aig nis ri d’ fheusaig. Ceud Diùc Cataibh le chuid foill, ’S le chuid càirdeas do na Goill, Gum b’ ann an Iutharn ’n robh do shàil,

’S gum b’fheàrr leam Iùdas làmh rium.”

And, in translation: “Duchess of Sutherland, are you at peace?

Where now are your silken gowns? Have they protected you from the decay

That consumes you between the boards?

Wicked Sellar that’s in the earth If you received the grace you expected

In the fire through which you cleared the tenants

It now bristles your beard.

Tha First Duke of Sutherland With all his friendship to the non-Gaels

May it be that your feet are in Hell And I’d prefer Judas next to me.” So, I understand the desire to knock the duke physically off his pedestal: a dismemberment which happened emotionally and culturally long ago.

Some of the people who have talked about and planned blowing up The Mannie’s statue are friends of mine. I’m personally against it for two reasons. First, my aversion to any form of violence whatsoever, even to (maybe especially) a stone sculpture.

I don’t believe any violence, such as taking a hammer or dynamite to a statue, does any good. Force only breeds force. But, more importantly, I

want him to remain there high on the hill as a visible reminder of injustice.

I know you can also do that in alternative ways, through statues of the poor and educational reminders, but The Mannie himself, left there frozen in stone, should make us think deeper. Of how history is so partial and skewed. Of how the rich and the powerful have their monuments, and the poor and powerless their ruins.

And to remind us he gazes unseeing down on a country where iniquitous land ownership, overpriced housing and rentals, loss of the indigenous young, and the decline of the parish’s native Gàidhlig continue unabated.

The Mannie is not personally responsible for that, though the power, the class, the system and the exceptionalism he stands for is.

Angus Peter Campbell is an awardwinning writer and actor from Uist.

The rich and powerful have their monuments, the poor and the powerless their ruins

FALLEN IDOL: The Mannie – the statue of George Leveson-Gower – gazes from its pedestal above the east Sutherland coastline and the lands that he had cleared of people for sheep pasture.