A major new project about the ‘Highland Clearances’ was launched in June 2011 at Timespan, a museum and art gallery located in Helmsdale, in the northern Scottish county of Sutherland. Museum Without Walls uses new media app technology to open the door to the landscape and people of the Clearances – venturing beyond the walls of the museum to begin an exciting journey of discovery along a trail of reflection. For many visitors who have ancestors who were involved in the Clearances it will be like going home!
2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the instigation of the large scale removal of the native population in the Strath of Kildonan by the landowners and the establishment of large sheep and arable farms. The sequence of historical events that followed changed the lives of the people and the landscape forever. In 1813, a party of over 80 people left their homes in the Strath and emigrated to the Red River Settlement, an area that later developed into Winnipeg, in Canada. The trail tells the incredible story of those who left and the struggles endured by those who stayed behind.
In the run up to 2013, Timespan is using cutting edge digital technologies to develop a Clearances trail in the Strath of Kildonan in the form of a software application for smart phones and tablets. App users can access the information in the comfort of their own homes or they can come to the beautiful Strath of Kildonan and experience the landscape and stories for themselves. Visitors can download the app in Timespan or hire an ipod touch. The trail will start in the museum with a new interactive display that will lead visitors along the Strath road to learn about its history and the events that took place there nearly 200 years ago. The app will be completed and ready for use by May 2012.
The trail consists of 10 way-marked locations extending in length from the area around the village of Helmsdale and the Emigrant’s Monuments to the area around Kinbrace and cemetery. App users will be guided along the trail with the aid of GPS map navigation and audio instructions. The additional guidance aid of wooden way markers positioned at the 10 trail locations will be necessary to ensure all users have a visual reference to show them that they have arrived at the desired position and can navigate around this location in any direction, i.e. east of way marker etc.
Timespan hopes that the new Clearances app trail will provide a valuable interpretation tool for visitors, both from home and abroad, who wish to understand more fully the landscape and history of the Sutherland Clearances. It has been developed to provide a valuable additional educational resource for Scottish school children. As part of the Curriculum for Excellence, Scottish qualifications are changing and the new National 5s for History will include an entire topic called the Sutherland Clearances.
The project has received grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Museums Galleries Scotland.
Colin McLean, Head of the HLF in Scotland, said:
This project will give a modern twist to the 200-year-old story of the Clearances by bringing it into the digital age. The phone apps and interactive trail are sure to attract young and old alike in following the Clearance footsteps. There are also great opportunities for local people to learn new skills in using digital technologies and new media to explore their local heritage.
Timespan Director, Katie Clarke said
We are delighted to receive this funding from Museums Galleries Scotland and Heritage Lottery Fund as this means we can now open up the story of the Strath of Kildonan to a whole new audience. For us, this two and a half year project is a unique opportunity to engage our local community with the research on the Kildonan Clearances – linking the stories of the past with our lives today.
Timespan has been working alongside the digital design specialists at Bluemungus, based in Edinburgh, who are developing the interactive Clearances trail that will include GPS navigation, historic map layers, 3-D longhouse illustrations, audio and visual story of the Clearances and the locations of all the townships and related sites of interest in Kildonan, as well as a game for the youngsters using QR codes to collect items to put into an emigrant’s kist.
Recent UK research has shown that 1 in 3 adults use a smart phone and this is due to increase rapidly in the next few years. Timespan will be leading the field in utilising this technology to reach out to new audiences and developing more creative ways of interpreting the past for all ages. Newly appointed project manager, Jacquie Aitken said “I see the real potential in using this form of technology to drive the interpretation of the new ‘Clearances’ trail and allow visitors to have the freedom to download the app as and when the desire, as well as making it a more accessible and interactive medium for visitor to leave feedback and photos on Facebook and Twitter - this is truly an interactive resource from start to finish!”
Timespan welcomes the involvement of the Centre for History in Dornoch, which is part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, as advisers, lecturers and the potential development of an internship for a student to work alongside volunteers in Timespan. The project nicely coincides with the launch of a new online Masters which includes the module ‘Contemplating the Clearances’.
There are plans to put the trail online and there will be a unique opportunity for people to get involved in discussions and debates on the project blog, Twitter and Facebook. Jacquie said “There is already interest from Canada and we hope that the forum will be a way that people can trace ancestors in our area, discuss views about the historical events surrounding the Clearances and find useful information they can download - I look forward to facilitating a lively international discussion forum.”
The first year of the project will focus on the development of the trail and making connections with the Sutherland Diaspora and related organisations and all over the globe, e.g. Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Timespan knows that there will be an influx of overseas visitors to the area that will coincide with the 2013 anniversary and it will be ready to celebrate their return and the culture of the area – both past and present.
Timespan is keen to develop a joint project with a knitting group and Scottish dancing group in the Winnipeg area. The people of Sutherland would like to share their music, dance and knitting traditions with the people of Manitoba to explore shared histories and learn about new ideas and themes that have been developed over the last 200 years. Join the ‘Sock Sampler’ project and learn to knit old and new stocking patterns, i.e. one stocking knitted in Scotland and the other knitted in Manitoba. The Helmsdale Knitting Group is waiting to hear from you! Get involved in our song and dance exchange project where groups can learn to sing some old Sutherland songs, including ‘Old Kildonan’ and the ‘Kildonan Gaelic place names song’, as well as the traditional dances of the old villages halls. If you or your group would like to participate please contact Jacquie Aitken at archive@timespan.org.uk.
To find out all the latest news and event information, visit the project blog at:
Kildonan Clearances Trail (talk and discussion presented by Jacquie Aitken)
Museum Without Walls (Twitter feed)
Timespan is delighted to launch this international poetry competition to further explore the theme of the Highland Clearances and how it has shaped the lives of many generations of people all over the world. We are looking for budding poets from all over the globe to put pen to paper. Go on – get writing! The deadline for entries is January 31st. For information on how to enter go to http://www.timespan.org.uk/timespan-international-poetry-competition.
A major reorganisation of the Highlands took place 50 years earlier in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746 when the Jacobites, fighting for Charles Edward Stewart, were heavily defeated by the Hanoverian government forces under the Duke of Cumberland, the son of King James II. The repercussions were severe and the British Government enacted laws to subdue the rebellious Highlander. The estates of those lords and clan chiefs who had supported the Jacobite rebellion were stripped from them and then sold with the profits used to further trade and agriculture in Scotland. The forfeited estates were managed by factors that were much more efficient than a hereditary chief could ever have been. Government troops were stationed in the Highlands and built more roads and barracks to better control the region.
These changes paved the way for the industrial revolution and agricultural improvements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the Highlands. The Countess of Sutherland, Elizabeth Sutherland, who was brought up by her Aunt in Edinburgh, probably spent little time at her family home at Dunrobin Castle, near the village of Golspie. She married Lord George Leveson-Gower, 1st son of the Marquis of Stafford, on the 4th September 1785. The couple were to inherit a vast family fortune in 1803 and plans were soon underway to improve their poor Sutherland estate and make it more profitable. By the end of the 18th century wool prices had soared and there was an ever increasing need for good hill pasture land for large flocks of sheep. In 1805, the Countess of Sutherland visited Dunrobin and ‘the perfect plan’ was set in motion. A few years later the Countess wrote of her husband, "he is seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements”.
In the latter part of 1812 William Young and Patrick Sellar, the estate Factors, marked out the boundaries of several large sheep farms in the Strath of Kildonan and the dispossessed tenantry were offered allotments on the northern and eastern coasts. In the first week of 1813 a group of factors, shepherds and valuers from the estate arrived in the Strath to survey prospective farms and were confronted by a large body of people bent on ejecting them and their sheep out of their lands. The estate saw the tenants uprising as a real threat to their plans and troops were ordered into Kildonan by the local magistrate. The tenants were successful on this occasion, but it was a hollow victory and summons of removals were served. In March a petition was sent by ‘the tenants of Kildonan’ to the Countess and Marquis’s home in London, asserting that they were prepared to pay as much rent as offered by the sheep farmers. The people said that they had furnished their sons as recruits to the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders Regiment and that this ‘entitled them to their own land’. It is not known if the petition was every read.
As the situation heated up in Kildonan a man called Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, approached the Countess with an offer to take many of the married men to Canada to serve in the regiments, their families to follow at the end of the war. Selkirk was a director of the Hudson’s Bay Company and owned large areas of land around the Red River ready for colonisation. Lady Stafford vetoed this idea as “totally inadvisable”, which left the problem unsolved. News of Selkirk’s proposal reached the tenants, who were keen to sign up to it rather than waiting to be ejected from their homes. A total of over 80 tenants accepted his offer and by May 1813 a local newspaper announced the sale of the tenant’s horses, cow and sheep. In June 1813 the Hudson’s Bay Company ship called The Prince of Wales set sail from Stromness in Orkney for Canada and with it over 80 people from the Strath of Kildonan. It must have been a difficult and confusing time for those who left and those who stayed behind, wondering if they would ever see their families and friends again.
For those who stayed it wasn’t long before the removals were in full progress and people were relocated to the coast en masse. This removal from the interior to the sea shore created for the first time a new individual, the crofter. The removed tenant was given a small piece of land - the croft. If this land was bad- it was often the land which even the sheep farmer wouldn't touch.
A new fishing village was established at Helmsdale as part of the improvements to encourage the displaced tenants to take up fishing at the time of the great herring boom at the start of the 19th century. It didn’t quite work as they had planned as many of the crofters didn’t take to the sea and skilled fisherman from Moray shire had to be brought in to teach the men how to fish. Many men preferred to work as coopers, curers, smiddies and labourers.
One of the families that were separated by the events during the Clearances in Kildonan was the McPhersons of Balnavaliach, whose daughter Catherine, immigrated to Canada with the first party from Kildonan in 1813. She married Alexander Sutherland of Gailable in 1814 and together they were allocated Lot 10 at the Red River Settlement by Lord Selkirk, but they later settled at Point Douglas. Sutherland Avenue runs though their Point Douglas property in Winnipeg today. Catherine’s brother William writing from Scotland to her brother John at the Red River Settlement in 1815 lists the items that he has sent with members of the second party traveling to Canada “we sent five yards and a quarter between yourself and your sister with Alexander Matheson, Ouldbreachy of Pladain, and your name in the end of it, and we sent two gray yarns for stockings and black ones for the same and a little of black and white sewing thread with Widow Matison Ouldbreachy and another gray one that Kitty Bannerman Badfluch sent you with Christy Bannerman, and three dozen of several kinds of forks with Angus Matison Ouldbreachy….” The Sutherlands only had one child John, who was appointed as Manitoba’s first senator in 1871. Alexander and Catherine both died within months of each other in 1867 and they are buried in Kildonan Cemetery, Winnipeg.
Back in Sutherland, the Clearances continued to sweep over the County until 1821 when most of the land required for sheep farming was converted into sheep walks. Some tenants were allowed to stay for several years but eventually most of the Strath had been cleared of its native people leaving only shepherds and labourers, who worked for the sheep farmers. Large profits were made through sheep farming until the prices fell in the mid 19th century and the land owners turned to shooting and hunting as a means to create revenue for the estate. Lodges were built along the Helmsdale River for the wealthy visitors and deer were bred along with salmon hatcheries to stock the rivers.
The crofters who had tried to make a living found that the rents were becoming increasingly high, there was no security of tenure and there was little, if any, rights of access to estate land for their sheep. A royal commission was set up in 1883 by Francis Napier into the conditions of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands. This led to the passing of the Crofting Act in 1886.
Page revised: 29 January 2012
