John Prebble - The Highland Clearances

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES

John Prebble was born in Middlesex in 1915 but spent his boyhood in Saskatchewan, Canada. He became a journalist in 1934 and is now a historian, novelist, film-writer and the author of several highly praised plays and dramatized documentaries for BBC television and radio. During the war he served for six years in the ranks with the Royal Artillery and later wrote a war novel, The Edge of Darkness, based on his experiences. He is the author of Age Without Pity, The Mather Story, The High Girders, an account of the Tay Bridge Disaster, The Buffalo Soldiers, which won an award in the United States for the best historical novel of the American West, and Culloden, a subject he became interested in when he was a boy in a predominantly Scottish township in Canada. Culloden was subsequently made into a successful television film. His other books include The Highland Clearances (1963), Glencoe (1966), The Darien Disaster (1968), The Lion in the North (1971), Mutiny: Highland Regiments in Revolt (1975), John Prebble's Scotland (1983), The King's Jaunt (1988) and Landscapes and Memories: an intermittent autobiography, for which he was awarded the McVitie Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, 1993. Many of his books are published by Penguin.

JOHN PREBBLE

Since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you!

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First published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1963

Published in Penguin Books 1969

Copyright John Prebble, 1963

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193316-0

FOR SARAH

MAPS

T HE decision to write this book was made for me when I wrote the last sentences of my account of the battle of Culloden and its aftermath in the Scottish Highlands. I quote them here as an introduction and an explanation:

Once the chiefs lost their powers many of them lost also any parental interest in their clansmen. During the next hundred years they continued the work of Cumberland's battalions. So that they might lease their glens and braes to sheep-farmers from the Lowlands and England, they cleared the crofts of men, women and children, using police and soldiers where necessary.

This book, then, is the story of how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed. It concerns itself with people, how sheep were preferred to them, and how bayonet, truncheon and fire were used to drive them from their homes. It has been said that the Clearances are now far enough away from us to be decently forgotten. But the hills are still empty. In all of Britain only among them can one find real solitude, and if their history is known there is no satisfaction to be got from the experience. It is worth remembering, too, that while the rest of Scotland was permitting the expulsion of its Highland people it was also forming that romantic attachment to kilt and tartan that scarcely compensates for the disappearance of a race to whom such things were once a commonplace reality. The chiefs remain, in Edinburgh and London, but the people are gone.

Finally, we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lesson for us.

February, 1963

JOHN PREBBLE