The Clearances (Scottish Highers English): Revision Notes
The Clearances
Understanding crofting communities
Before the Clearances, many Scottish communities lived in a crofting system. A croft was a small plot of agricultural land, usually with a dwelling house and access to shared grazing areas. The people who lived on these crofts were called crofters or tenant farmers.
Crofters did not own their land. Instead, they paid rent to a landlord in various forms: cash, labour, or produce from the land. These communities were organised into townships, where multiple crofts were grouped together. The crofting way of life created close-knit communities where families often lived and worked on the same land for generations.
Daily life in a crofting community involved agricultural work tied to the seasons. In spring, families would dig their plots of land. Throughout the year, they would carry peat home for fuel, tend to animals like hens, and maintain their thatched-roof homes. Chimneys would smoke as fires burned inside, and children would play in the fields around the townships. This was a subsistence lifestyle, where communities produced most of what they needed to survive.
What were the Clearances?
The Clearances refers to a period during the 18th and 19th centuries when landlords across Scotland evicted tenant farmers from their homes and lands. This happened in the Highlands, the Western Isles, and in Shetland, though the timing and specific impacts varied by region.
The primary motivation behind the Clearances was economic. During the 18th century, demand for wool increased dramatically. Landlords realised they could make far greater profits by converting their estates into large-scale sheep farms rather than collecting small rents from numerous crofting families. The choice, from the landlord's perspective, was simple: maintain communities of people who had lived there for generations, or clear the land for sheep that would generate more income.
How the evictions happened
The eviction process was often brutal and traumatic for the communities involved. Landlords sent their agents to remove tenants from their homes. When families resisted leaving, their homes were sometimes burned to ensure they could not return. The phrase forcibly removed reflects the violent reality many families faced.
People who had deep connections to the land, whose ancestors had worked the same soil, found themselves herded out like animals. Their possessions would be thrown outside, and the places they had called home were destroyed. The use of the word "herded" in descriptions of these events deliberately compares the treatment of people to the treatment of livestock, highlighting the dehumanising nature of the evictions.
Impact on the Highlands and Western Isles
In the Highlands and Western Isles, the Clearances had devastating and long-lasting effects that extended far beyond the immediate displacement of people.
The clan system, which had organised Highland society for centuries, disintegrated. This traditional social structure, which bound communities together through kinship and loyalty, could not survive when the land base that supported it was destroyed.
Cultural loss accompanied social breakdown. The Gaelic language and culture declined significantly as communities were scattered. Language requires daily use within a community to survive; when those communities were broken apart, the transmission of Gaelic from one generation to the next was severely disrupted.
The Highland population fell dramatically. Some Highlanders were resettled to less fertile coastal land, where survival was harder and traditional ways of life could not be maintained. Many others emigrated, either choosing to leave or forced out under duress. Families left for North America, Australia, and other parts of the British Empire, carrying with them memories of the lives they had lost.
The Clearances in Shetland
The Shetland Clearances occurred primarily during the 19th century and profoundly affected island communities. Though Shetland had a different cultural background from the Highlands—with Norse rather than Gaelic heritage—the economic pressures and consequences were similar.
Communities in Shetland were forcibly removed from their homes to make way for sheep farming. The disruption of traditional communal land use led to social upheaval. The crofting system, which had allowed communities to work together and share resources, was torn apart.
The poet Rhoda Bulter had personal exposure to the impact of the Clearances. During her childhood, she spent time in Lunnasting, a parish in Shetland. Even years after the main period of clearances, the evidence remained visible. The southside of the parish consisted of small crofts, many of which stood vacant—silent testimony to the communities that had once lived there but were now gone.
Why the Clearances matter
The Clearances represent a moment when economic interests were placed above human communities and cultural continuity. Families who had maintained a way of life for generations found themselves displaced for profit. The question Bulter poses at the end of her poem captures the moral dimension of this history: was it worth destroying these communities and lives "for twartree extry sheep" (for two or three extra sheep)?
The legacy of the Clearances includes not just the immediate trauma of eviction, but the long-term loss of language, culture, community structures, and population in affected areas. The vacant crofts that Bulter witnessed in her childhood stood as physical reminders of absence—places where smoke once rose from chimneys, where children once played, where communities once thrived, now empty and silent.
Key Points to Remember:
- The Clearances were mass evictions of tenant farmers (crofters) during the 18th and 19th centuries, driven by landlords' desire to convert land to profitable sheep farming.
- Evictions were often violent, with homes burned if families resisted leaving, and people treated as if they were livestock being herded away.
- In the Highlands and Western Isles, the Clearances destroyed the clan system, caused major decline in Gaelic language and culture, and led to mass emigration.
- Shetland experienced clearances during the 19th century, which disrupted traditional communal land use and left many crofts vacant for generations.
- The Clearances raise questions about placing economic profit above human communities, cultural heritage, and the rights of people who had lived on land for generations.