In 1994 protestors climbed atop Beinn a' Bhragaidh with dynamite and the ambition to topple the 100-foot statue known locally as ‘the mannie’. The statue of the Duke of the Sutherland, a critical orchestrator of the clearances, continues to loom over the coastal village of Golspie but weathers the marks of an ongoing campaign for its removal. Graffiti and signs of wrenching offer evidence of the ongoing emotive memories of clearance and illustrate how the memory of clearance was, and still is, an important tool for resistance.
I first learned of the Highland clearances as an event: between about 1750 and 1860, the people of the Highlands and Islands were removed from their land to make way for sheep-farming in the name of social, economic and agricultural improvement. First-hand accounts of the clearances tell stories of merciless lairds and brutal evictions, in which the rural poor were turned over to suffer the elements, and their homes burned behind them to prevent their return. But the clearances were broader than this. Forced eviction was only one tactic used to clear people. Thousands more were cleared through social-economic pressures: the transition from a goods-based to a cash-based economy, unaffordable rent increases, famines, the lure of urban employment, and paid passage to emigrate.
The primary violence of clearance is the act of displacement. But clearance is not an event, it is a process. People who were cleared to the coasts were incorporated into new industrial economies and people who emigrated brought with them the technologies and traumas of clearance. Many of those who emigrated became part of the colonial occupation of Canada, America and Australia, and cleared the land of indigenous occupiers through disease and famine.
Resistance to clearance is often omitted from popular histories of clearance. The Highlanders and Islanders who suffered the clearances in the 18th and 19th century were not passive victims. They employed a range of strategies of resistance and obstruction, including rent arrears, sheep thefts and land raids. The oral tradition and written diaries also played an important role in resistance. Donald Mcleod of Sutherland kept a diary of his experience to ‘keep up the remembrance of the evil that was done to many an innocent individual, and others as well’ (McLeod, 1851). Accounts of clearance in diaries, stories, songs and poetry preserved first-hand accounts of the experience of clearance: the pain and suffering of clearance, but also the resistance and solidarities.
Rewilders often highlight the unnaturalness of the absence of birds, predators, and woodlands. The absence of non-human life is the result of different types of land management. But these landscapes have been to managed to become peopleless too.
Unlike the enclosures in most of the UK, the Highland Clearances were also a ‘civilising’ project. Highlanders and Islanders resisting the early clearances centuries ago were cast as a primitive people failing to effectively harness the economic potential of the land. They were dehumanised, and cleared to the coast, to ensure their participation in the modern economy and to free the land up for new management.
This was the origin of the crofting tradition that prominent rewilders now identify as being at odds with the goals of rewilding, as an obstacle to the progress of new land management. While rewilding offers a science-led approach to ecological recovery, its public appeal benefits from imaginaries of wilderness. As environmental historian, William Cronin explains:
“Wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet.”
Imagining wilderness as a remedy to ourselves falsely identifies human civilisation, rather than colonial-capitalism, as the root of ecological destruction. According to Cronin, this also constructs a ‘wilderness’ that is imagined as a ‘savage world at the dawn of civilization’.
Nature is not somewhere separate from civilization, as ideas of wilderness suggest. Nature is also where people live, work and call home; it is where social life happens. Some natures, landscapes, and species are more impressive and charismatic than others. Some actions, like reintroductions and culls, are more likely to leave a legacy. And the prioritisation of natures that are to be ‘experienced’ as wilderness, are more likely to create places that are to be visited rather than lived in.
Men can be real men in the wilderness. They can escape the hustle and bustle of the city as rugged individuals standing steadfast against the elements, hunting for their dinner, and sleeping below the stars. Or, if in the Highlands in 2023, in a ‘renovated bothy’ at Alladale Wilderness Reserve. The old buildings that scatter rural landscapes, now decorated as luxury accommodation with quintessentially Highland tweeds, tartans and taxidermy, preserve the region’s role as a playground for wealthy visitors.Instead of providing the infrastructure to rectify the injustices of past economic transitions, as affordable homes to repeople cleared landscapes, they have been incorporated into a new one, and provide retreats to a Highland re-wilderness.
‘Rewilding’ – or something akin to it by another name – is an ecological necessity. As a major beneficiary of fossil fuel and stolen colonial wealth, it is also part of the Highlands and Islands’ responsibility to the world. But like a lot of places identified for ‘rewilding’, there is a violent history of clearance and dehumanisation that lay the foundations for the region becoming understood as a peopleless ‘wilderness’. Instead of regarding resistance to ’rewilding’ or conservation as an obstacle to the recovery of nature, these forms of resistance could feed into the development of an approach to nature recovery that prioritises land justice and historical accountability. Rewilding – without land justice –risks redesigning more biodiverse rural landscapes simply for the enjoyment of the wealthy men who own and visit it.
Popular tourist destinations are currently undergoing clearance. As the wealthy capitalise on the economic inequality in highly sought-after tourist destinations by purchasing second homes and renatable tourist holiday accommodation for tourists, local people are squeezed off their land and out of their communities by unaffordable house prices.
Clearance is an ongoing social and economic process, in Scotland and in the countries Scotland helped to colonise. Evoking the memory of clearance, in places and among people familiar with the word, can carry an emotional weight that rallies resistance. We need to be careful how we use it, as it refers to a history that the right also draws upon for its own ends. Clearance is not inherent to tourism, ecological recovery or the conservation of oceanic life, but it can constitute them. Instead, then, the history of clearance as a tool of resistance demands that we remain attentive to processes that effect the liveability of places. When places become unlivable they become empty: empty of more than just people, but the history, culture, and language that also belonged there.
By Heather Urquhart
For more on the same themes, see this article:
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2023/08/01/rewild-or-re-wilderness-the-dangers-of-colonial-masculinities/