How quickly the years fly! One twelvemonth more, and it will be a full quarter of a century since we last saw the wild Highland valley so well described by Mr. Robertson in his opening paragraphs.[1] And yet the recollection is as fresh in our memory now as it was twenty years ago. The chill winter night had fallen on the brown round hills and alder-skirted river, as we turned from off the road that winds along the Kyle of the Dornoch Frith into the bleak gorge of Strathcarron. The shepherd’s cottage, in which we purposed passing the night, lay high up in the valley, where the lofty sides––partially covered at that period by the remnants of an ancient forest––approach so near each other, and rise so abruptly, that for the whole winter quarter the sun never falls on the stream below. There were still some ten or twelve miles of broken road before us. The moon in its first quarter hung low over the hills, dimly revealing their rough outline, and throwing its tinge of faint bronze on the broken clumps of wood in the hollows. A keen frost had set in; and a thick trail of fog-rime, raised by its influence in the calm, and which at the height of some eighty or a hundred feet hung over the river––scarce less defined in its margin than the river itself, for it winded wherever the stream winded, and ran straight as an arrow wherever the stream ran straight––occupied the whole length of the valley, like an enormous snake lying uncoiled in its den. 137 The numerous turf cottages on either side were invisible in the darkness, save that ever and anon the brief twinkle of a light indicated their existence and their places. In a recess of the stream the torch of some adventurous fisher now gleamed red on rock and water, now suddenly disappeared, eclipsed by the overhanging brushwood, or by some jutting angle of the bank. The distant roar of the stream mingled sullenly in the calm, with its nearer and hoarser dash, as it chafed on the ledges below, filling the air with a wild music, that seemed the appropriate voice of the impressive scenery from amid which it arose. It was late ere we reached the shepherd’s cottage––a dark, raftered, dimly-lighted building of turf and stone. The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on marshy and unwholesome farms. The rafters were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank table below there rose two tall pyramids of dark-coloured joints of braxy mutton, heaped up each on a corn riddle. The shepherd––a Highlander of colossal proportions, but hard and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters––sat moodily beside the fire. The state of his flocks was not particularly cheering; and he had, besides, seen a vision of late, he said, that filled his mind with strange forebodings. He had gone out after nightfall on the previous evening to a dank hollow on the hill-side, in which many of his flock had died; the rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that, as on this second evening, filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting at the time on the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him, for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity, when suddenly what 138 seemed the figure of a man in heated metal––the figure of a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace––sprang up out of the darkness; and after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few seconds––in which, however, it traversed the greater part of the valley––as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts, during unsettled weather, so frequently startle the night traveller, and that some peculiarity of form in the meteor had been exaggerated by the obscuring influence of the frost-rime and the briefness of the survey; but the apparition had filled his whole mind, as one of strange and frightful portent from the spiritual world. And often since that night has it returned to us in recollection, as a vision in singular keeping with the wild valley which it traversed, and the credulous melancholy of the solitary shepherd, its only witness,––

By much the greater part of Strathcarron, in those days, was in the possession of its ancient inhabitants; and we learn from the description of Mr. Robertson, that it has since undergone scarce any change. ‘Strathcarron,’ he says, ‘is still in the old state.’ Throughout its whole extent the turf cottages of the aborigines rise dark and thick as heretofore, from amid their irregular patches of potatoes and corn. But in an adjacent glen, through which the Calvie works its headlong way to the Carron, that terror of the Highlanders, a summons of removal, has been served within the last few months on a whole community; and the graphic sketch of Mr. Robertson relates both the peculiar circumstances in which it has been issued, and the feelings which it has excited. We find from his 139 testimony, that the old state of things which is so immediately on the eve of being broken up in this locality, lacked not a few of those sources of terror to the proprietary of the country, that are becoming so very formidable to them in the newer states. A spectral poor-law sits by our waysides, wrapped up in death-flannels of the English cut, and shakes its skinny hand at the mansion-houses of our landlords,––vision beyond comparison more direfully portentous than the apparition seen by the lone shepherd of Strathcarron. But in the Highlands, at least, it is merely the landlord of the new and improved state of things––the landlord of widespread clearings and stringent removal-summonses––that it threatens. The existing poor-law in Glencalvie is a self-enforcing law, that rises direct out of the unsophisticated sympathies of the Highland heart, and costs the proprietary nothing. ‘The constitution of society in the glen,’ says Mr. Robertson, ‘is remarkably simple. Four heads of families are bound for the whole rental of £55, 13s. a year; the number of souls is about ninety. Sixteen cottages pay rent; three cottages are occupied by old lone women, who pay no rent, and who have a grace from the others for the grazing of a few goats or sheep, by which they live. This self-working poor-law system,’ adds Mr. Robertson, ‘is supported by the people themselves; the laird, I am informed, never gives anything to it.’ Now there must be at least some modicum of good in such a state of things, however old-fashioned; and we are pretty sure such of our English neighbours as leave their acres untilled year after year, to avoid the crushing pressure of the statute-enforced poor-law that renders them not worth the tilling, would be somewhat unwilling, were the state made theirs, to improve it away. Nor does it seem a state––with all its simplicity, and all its perhaps blameable indifferency to modern improvement––particularly hostile to the development of mind or the growth of morals. ‘The people of 140 Amat and Glencalvie themselves supported a teacher for the education of their children,’ says Mr. Robertson. ‘The laird,’ he adds, ‘has never lost a farthing of rent. In bad years, such as 1836 or 1837, the people may have required the favour of a few weeks’ delay, but they are now not a single farthing in arrears.’

Mr. Robertson gives us the tragedy of a clearing in its first act. We had lately the opportunity of witnessing the closing scene in the after-piece, by which a clearing more than equally extensive has been followed up, and which bids fair to find at no distant day many counterparts in the Highlands of Scotland. Rather more than twenty years ago, the wild, mountainous island of Rum, the home of considerably more than five hundred souls, was divested of all its inhabitants, to make way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. It was soon found, however, that there are limits beyond which it is inconvenient to depopulate a country on even the sheep-farm system: the island had been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the tenant; and on the occasion of a clearing which took place in a district of Skye, and deprived of their homes many of the old inhabitants, some ten or twelve families of the number were invited to Rum, and may now be found squatting on the shores of the only bay of the island, on a strip of unprofitable morass. But the whole of the once peopled interior remains a desert, all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance that the solitary glens, with their green, plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around. We spent a long summer’s day amidst its desert recesses, and saw the sun set behind its wilderness of pyramidal hills. The evening was calm and clear; the armies of the insect world were sporting by millions in the light; a brown stream that ran through the 141 valley at our feet yielded an incessant poppling sound from the myriads of fish that were incessantly leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and gold that incessantly fluttered over them; the half-effaced furrows borrowed a richer hue from the yellow light of sunset; the broken cottage-walls stood up more boldly prominent on the hill-side, relieved by the lengthening shadows; along a distant hill-side there ran what seemed the ruins of a grey stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a very remote age to facilitate the hunting of deer: all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting habitation for man, and in which not only the necessaries, but not a few also of the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not a man nor a man’s dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one without figures. And where, it may be asked, was the one tenant of the island for whose sake so many others had been removed? We found his house occupied by a humble shepherd, who had in charge the wreck of his property,––property no longer his, but held for the benefit of his creditors. The great sheep-farmer had gone down under circumstances of very general bearing, and on whose after development, when in their latent state, improving landlords had failed to calculate; the island itself was in the market, and a report went current at the time that it was on the eve of being purchased by some wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. The cycle––which bids fair to be that of the Highlands generally––had already revolved in the depopulated island of Rum.

We have said that the sheep-farmer had gone down, in this instance, under adverse circumstances of very extensive bearing. In a beautiful transatlantic poem, a North American Indian is represented as visiting by night the tombs of his fathers, now surrounded, though reared in the depths of a forest, by the cultivated farms and luxurious dwellings of the stranger, and there predicting that the race 142 by which his had been supplaced should be in turn cast out of their possessions. His fancy on the subject is a wild one, though not unfitted for the poet. The streams, he said, were yielding a lower murmur than of old, and rolling downwards a decreasing volume; the springs were less copious in their supplies; the land, shorn of its forests, was drying up under the no longer softened influence of summer suns. Yet a few ages more, and it would spread out all around an arid and barren wilderness, unfitted, like the deserts of the East, to be a home of man. The fancy, we repeat, though a poetic, is a wild one; but the grounds from which we infer that the clearers of the Highlands––the supplanters of the Highlanders––are themselves to be cleared and supplanted in turn, is neither wild nor poetic. The voice which predicts in the case is a voice, not of shrinking rivulets nor failing springs, but of the ‘Cloth Hall’ in Leeds, and of the worsted factories of Bradford and Halifax. Most of our readers must be aware that the great woollen trade of Britain divides into two main branches––its woollen cloth manufacture, and its worsted and stuff manufactures: and in both these the estimation in which British wool is held has mightily sunk of late years, never apparently to rise again; for it has sunk, not through any caprice of fashion, but in the natural progress of improvement. Mr. Dodd, in his interesting little work on the Textile Manufactures of Great Britain, refers incidentally to the fact, in drawing a scene in the Cloth Hall of Leeds, introduced simply for the purpose of showing at how slight an expense of time and words business is transacted in this great mart of trade. ‘All the sellers,’ says Mr. Dodd, ‘know all the buyers; and each buyer is invited, as he passes along, to look at some “olives,” or “browns,” or “pilots,” or “six quarters,” or “eight quarters;” and the buyer decides in a wonderfully short space of time whether it will answer his purpose to purchase or not. “Mr. A., just 143 look at these olives.” “How much?” “Six and eight.” “Too high.” Mr. A. walks on, and perhaps a neighbouring clothier draws his attention to a piece, or “end,” of cloth. “What’s this?” “Five and three.” “Too low.” The “too high” relates, as may be supposed, to the price per yard; whereas the “too low” means that the quality of the cloth is lower than the purchaser requires. Another seller accosts him with “Will this suit you, Mr. A.?” “Any English wool?” “Not much; it is nearly all foreign;” a question and answer which exemplify the disfavour into which English wool has fallen in the cloth trade. But it is not the cloth trade alone in which it has fallen into disfavour. The rapid extension of the worsted manufacture in this country,’ says the same writer in another portion of his work, ‘is very remarkable. So long as efforts were made by English wool-growers to compel the use of the English wool in cloth-making––efforts which the Legislature for many years sanctioned by legal enactments––the worsted fabrics made were chiefly of a coarse and heavy kind, such as “camlets;” but when the wool trade was allowed to flow into its natural channels by the removal of restrictions, the value of all the different kinds of wool became appreciated, and each one was appropriated to purposes for which it seemed best fitted. The wool of one kind of English sheep continued in demand for hosiery and coarse worsted goods; and the wool of the Cashmere and Angora goats came to be imported for worsted goods of finer quality.’ The colonist and the foreign merchant have been brought into the field, and the home producer labours in vain to compete with them on what he finds unequal terms.

Hence the difficulties which, in a season of invigorated commerce and revived trade, continue to bear on the British wool-grower, and which bid fair to clear him from the soil which he divested of the original inhabitants. Every new sheep-rearing farm that springs up in the colonies––whether 144 in Australia, or New Zealand, or Van Diemen’s Land, or Southern Africa––sends him its summons of removal in the form of huge bales of wool, lower in price and better in quality than he himself can produce. The sheep-breeders of New Holland and the Cape threaten to avenge the Rosses of Glencalvie. But to avenge is one thing, and to right another. The comforts of our poor Highlander have been deteriorating, and his position lowering, for the last three ages, and we see no prospect of improvement.

‘For a century,’ says Mr. Robertson, ‘their privileges have been lessening: they dare not now hunt the deer, or shoot the grouse or the blackcock; they have no longer the range of the hills for their cattle and their sheep; they must not catch a salmon in a stream: in earth, air, and water, the rights of the laird are greater, and the rights of the people are smaller, than they were in the days of their forefathers. Yet, forsooth, there is much talk of philosophers of the progress of democracy as a progress to equality of conditions in our day! One of the ministers who accompanied me had to become bound for law expenses to the amount of £20, inflicted on the people for taking a log from the forest for their bridge,––a thing they and their fathers had always done unchallenged.’

One eloquent passage more, and we have done. It is thus we find Mr. Robertson, to whose intensely interesting sketch we again direct the attention of the reader, summing up the case of the Rosses of Glencalvie:––

‘The father of the laird of Kindeace bought Glencalvie. It was sold by a Ross two short centuries ago. The swords of the Rosses of Glencalvie did their part in protecting this little glen, as well as the broad lands of Pitcalnie, from the ravages and the clutches of hostile septs. These clansmen bled and died in the belief that every principle of honour and morals secured their descendants a right to subsisting on the soil. The chiefs and their children had the same 145 charter of the sword. Some Legislatures have made the right of the people superior to the right of the chief; British law-makers have made the rights of the chief everything, and those of their followers nothing. The ideas of the morality of property are in most men the creatures of their interests and sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt, however: the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands––their children in mournful groups going into exile––the faggot of legal myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin––the hearths of their loves and their lives the green sheep-walks of the stranger.

‘Sad it is, that it is seemingly the will of our constituencies that our laws shall prefer the few to the many. Most mournful will it be, should the clansmen of the Highlands have been cleared away, ejected, exiled, in deference to a political, a moral, a social, and an economical mistake,––a suggestion not of philosophy, but of mammon,––a system in which the demon of sordidness assumed the shape of the angel of civilisation and of light.’

September 4, 1844.