This barbaric and unnecessarily cruel method of clearing the people from the land was started (1810-1820) by Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of Sutherland (1765 - 1839). Her husband was George Levenson-Gower, Marquis of Stafford (1758 - 1833), who was made 1st Duke of Sutherland in 1832. Both usually lived in London, rarely visited the Sutherland estate and neither of them spoke Gaelic.

The income from their Stafford estates alone brought in the huge sum of 300,000 pounds Sterling annually but despite this enormous wealth, which is equivalent to several million pounds Sterling at today's values, they rushed through an "Improvement" program for their remote Sutherland estate.

They employed a lawyer called Patrick Sellar and a factor called James Lock to carry out the actual "Improvements" or, as the tenants would have it. "To Clear" them. Both of these men hated the Gaels and they are still remembered in the Highlands to this day due to their cruelty and barbarity towards the tenant farmers.

Sellar had a personal interest in clearing as many farmers as he could for he owned one of the largest sheep farms on the Sutherland estate and wished to expand even further. Lock, Sellar and the Duke of Sutherland cleared 15,000 people to make way for 200,000 sheep. The estate records show that evictions at the rate of 2,000 families in one day were not uncommon.

With no shelter remaining for the cleared families many starved and froze to death where their homes had once been. The Duchess of Sutherland, on seeing the starving tenants on her husband's estate, remarked in a letter to a friend in England, "Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals."

The stories which have come down to us from those dreadful times are horrific and beggar belief. In 1811 sixty new tenants had been brought in as shepherds on the Sutherland estate and they were all immediately sworn-in as Justices of the Peace, thus giving them a legal authority over the remaining tenants.

It was also common, in later years after much adverse publicity about the mass Clearances, for these imported shepherds to have clauses inserted in their rental agreements binding them to personally clear one or two families a year in order to lessen the publicity that mass evictions caused.

Written and published by the Highland Clearances Memorial Fund

Back to Highland Clearances Memorial Fund Series Main Page

Part One: Background
Part Two: Highland Portrait
Part Three: Bonnie Prince Charlie
Part Four: The Clearances
Part Five: The Improvements
Part Six: The Sutherland Estate
Part Seven: The People and the Church
Part Eight: US Slave-Owners
Part Nine: Queen Victoria and Red Deer
Part Ten: 1840-1880 Eyewitness Accounts
Part Eleven: Famine!
Part Twelve: Famine Immigration
Part Thirteen: Forced Eviction to the Cities
Part Fourteen: Changing Ways
Part Fifteen: Things Change Yet Remain The Same
Appendix A: Highland Clearances, Dates & Places
Appendix B: Bibliography