This is about Achanlochy Clearance Village, which I visited at sunset on my way back from Durness on 9th April last year. I'm doing another of those holiday posts intended to remind readers that wide open spaces exist, and we won't be closeted indoors forever.
So. This was a crofting community in Strath Naver, a long valley in the far north of Scotland, in the old county of Sutherland. Here are two location maps - click on them to enlarge them.
As you can see, Achanlochy lay on level land next to a small loch, and not far from a flood-prone river, all hemmed in by steep, rocky valley-sides. The lower map shows an awful lot of bare rock, and otherwise a vast sea of rough grazing.
Crofting was a way of life involving a cluster of small-scale activities at subsistence level. It wasn't just working a small patch of not very fertile land. There always had to be other things to bring in extra income. It was a hard life, and all crofters were poor and often hungry. Some of them might have been dispossessed from sweeter land, and were resentful for losing it. Crofters still paid rent, but had low status and no security of tenure. The estate official (the tackman) who oversaw them and collected the rents might well regard them as not much more than squatters. Certainly, if backed up by the ultimate landowner - in this case the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland - it was in his power to coerce them with police and military action.
'The Clearances' was a term for a long series of crofting evictions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gaelic-speaking crofters were forced off land they occupied so that it could be used for something else that brought in a much higher rent for the landowner. Generally sheep rearing replaced the crofting, conducted on a large scale by farmers with some money. The crofters themselves might be offered other land, or a job in forestry, fishing, or some local industry (such as the coal mine at Brora), but in any event they were moved from the inland valleys to the coast, leaving the land empty except for sheep. Some crofters were shipped overseas, where they might or might not find a better life. Their old turf-and-thatch homes were burnt down, so that they couldn't go back.
The landowners were originally the traditional clan chieftains, and for a long time they put up with a poorish income from their crofting tenants because they upheld the right of every loyal clansman to his patch of land, and would not evict. And in hard times, they would answer their clansmen's pleas for famine relief, at whatever the cost. This way of thinking did not last. No chieftain wanted to become totally impoverished. So evictions began. It thinned out the chieftain's dependants, and once started he got used to a commercial approach, where the quest for profit determined which tenants could remain and which had to go.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, progressive Highland landowners were waking up to the possibilities of greater income if the countryside and coast were developed. It would lead to prosperity for all. So there was mining and quarrying and new fishing ports, land enclosures and large consolidated farms. Crofting and crofters were often in the way, but in any case an unprofitable anachronism, whose removal was justifiable.
Inducements to leave were offered, and weighed up carefully. Some accepted, and went. Others did not, and their resistance, and the forthright attempts to expel them, generated enduring stories of home-burnings, injury, and destitution.
With all this in mind, I was keen to see what was left of a presumably typical Strath Naver crofting village, exactly two hundred years after it was cleared in 1819.
With Fiona parked, I walked over to an information panel.
On the left, a map of Strath Naver. This was but one of many crofting communities in the valley that ceased to exist. On the right, a cross-section into one of the turf-and-thatch dwellings constructed here. This was a surprise. I thought I'd be seeing a series of stone cottages, albeit roofless, not something like this. The place was humbler than I'd imagined.
Now up a gentle slope to another information panel.
Onwards. There was the small loch.
But where had the turf houses been? I looked around.
It seemed to be just clumpy grass and bracken. Backed by that sheer rock face. Then I noticed a low shape in the ground near where I was standing.
A long rectangle, not very wide. And that was about all there was to see. Signs of human habitation fade so quickly.
How cramped (and dark) it would have been in these houses! And the land around anything but lush and green. Not a kind place to scratch a living from. What would the winters have been like? Pretty harsh. I felt very glad not to be a nineteenth-century crofter.
It's hard to decide whether it was cruel or kind to move the crofters from this semi-wild place to somewhere else, on the coast, where there was more of a chance for a better life. The motives of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland were clearly based on notions of modernity and progress, and the profits to be had from developing their extensive estates. They believed they were doing good, or at least the correct thing, and were perplexed to find that not everybody agreed. Nor do they to this day.
