The Clearing of the Highlands

THE CLEARING OF THE HIGHLANDS

The year that Patric Sellar came to Strathnaver
black smoke hung along its length
from the homes so lately vacated by his tenants;
too late for one young woman who would not leave,
so perished in the flames, her unborn child within her.
Old men, led out in time, were laid
to die from frost instead of fire.

Some went meekly like the sheep that replaced them
down the road to the barren, rocky coast,
driving their salvaged beasts before them,
oats and barley left for the sheep to trample,
potatoes in their lazybeds left to rot.

A Lowland jury cleared him later of all charges.

Many were the poor and destitute in Bettyhill,
in Farr, in Tongue, in Golspie and in Helmsdale
who died later from cholera or famine.

Others, who could survive Atlantic storms
and carve new life from a frozen wasteland,
found Canada no more tough than Sutherland;
there are more Gaels in North America
than ever crossed the Minch.

Not only in Strathnaver but in every glen
and by the side of every ben
factors served writs, burnt out, moved on a people
betrayed by the chiefs for whom they had always fought,
but who now wanted a four-footed tenantry;

though not named Sellar
only their faces were different.

Seventeen babies died on the Street of Starvation
when six hundred people were cleared from Ulva
and dumped on Mull.

The lairds and Lowland shepherds said
it was for the "Improvement of the People"

- that vast peasantry
who lost their homes, their hopes
and the inheritance they had thought infinite ?

© GERALD ENGLAND

Composed: Ashton under Lyne, 5th May 1980

Publications

1983 Moorlands Review (USA)
1985 SPEAK TO THE HILLS (Aberdeen University Press)
1992 STEALING KISSES (Hyde, New Hope International)
1993 The Frogmore Papers (UK)
1999 The Animist (Internet)