The emptying of the glens
In the months following the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746, the British government launched a systematic campaign of retribution against the Highland clans that had supported the Jacobite cause. What began as military reprisal evolved into a programme of cultural destruction and forced removal that would continue, in various forms, for over a century. The Highland Clearances — the mass eviction of people from the land they had occupied for generations — transformed the landscape and demography of northern Scotland forever.
The immediate aftermath of Culloden was savage. The Duke of Cumberland's troops swept through the Highlands, burning homes, seizing cattle, and killing suspected Jacobites. Women and children were left without shelter in the depths of a Highland winter. Fugitives were hunted through the glens for months. The brutality was deliberate — Cumberland intended to make the Highlands ungovernable and to break the clan system as a political and military force.
The legislative assault was equally thorough. The Act of Proscription banned Highland dress, tartan, and the carrying of weapons. The Heritable Jurisdictions Act stripped clan chiefs of their traditional legal authority, transforming them from patriarchal leaders into mere landowners. Gaelic was suppressed. The entire social structure of the Highlands — a system built on mutual obligation between chief and clansman, on cattle, kinship, and military service — was deliberately dismantled.
The later Clearances of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries completed the transformation. Landlords — many of them the descendants of the old chiefs — discovered that sheep were more profitable than people. Entire communities were evicted to make way for Cheviot sheep. Families were put on ships bound for Nova Scotia, the Carolinas, Australia, and New Zealand. The Sutherland Clearances, the evictions on Skye, and the forced emigrations from the western Highlands emptied vast tracts of land that had been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. The haunting beauty of the empty Highland glens — the lonely straths, the ruined townships, the silent hillsides — is not natural. It is the landscape of dispossession.