Goodbyes

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It was goodbye to Orkney and goodbye to Rit and Kamiel, our travel companions of the last four days. They loaded us down with Belgian chocolate so we are well provided for as we continue our travels.

Orkney was a great place for John to practice driving on the other side of the road and on narrow single track roads. The Orcadian drivers are very courteous and traffic is light at this time of year. Orcadians are friendly and very laid back. Their ferry boarding procedures would give BC Ferries workers heart attacks, they let you figure things out and are very casual about when you pay, you can pay on board after driving on if you pay in cash or cheque.

It was sad to see Orkney recede into the distance as our ferry headed to mainland Scotland, it is truly an astounding place with such ancient history, a beautiful countryside, seaside cliffs and all that stone.

Sunrise Over Orkney

Ship At Sea

Lighthouse On Island Near Mainland Scotland

Abandoned Houses on Island Near Scotland

Dunnet Beach

The Farr Stone (Pictish Stone In Churchyard of Strathnaver Museum)

Orkney is fenced, the Highlands are not. The sheep are on the highway a lot, you have to slow down to give them time to wander off. They are strange little beasts and we bust out laughing when we see them on the road in front of us. The odd one will make a sudden move onto the highway and you have to brake hard.

Sheep Own The Road

Strathnaver

A Man-Made Wilderness

The Highlands were not always as sparsely populated as they are now, the ruins on the land testify to this, and as Paul Basu wrote, “The ruin is a metaphor for the Clearances: the whole of the Clearance story is written in every ruin.” Indeed it is.

The Highland Clearances were the systematic forced removal of families from their homes and from the land where they lived a life of subsistence farming. A wave of ‘agricultural improvements’ took place where the land owners, who often owned large tracts of land, decided that they could make far more money by replacing people with sheep.

In the far north of Scotland, one of the more notorious and documented Clearances was that of the Sutherland estates, only because this particular Clearance was vast and quick. The Clearances had been going on since 1790 and continued until 1870 when almost all the land that was suitable for sheep farming was put to sheep farming.

Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland inherited the vast Sutherland estates in 1766 when she was an infant. In 1785 she married a very wealthy man, George Granville Leveson Gower and this set into motion her grand plan to ‘improve’ her lands. This involved the removal of thousands of people from their homes and the resettlement of the people into coastal allotments where they could generate cash rents and be more profitable tenants for the estate.

The small allotments on the coast of a couple of acres were not meant to sustain a family. The estate owners thought the substance farmers lived an easy life and would be shaken out of their lethargy to find other productive activities along with fishing, a typical attitude of people who don’t know any better and could never survive off the land themselves. There were no productive activities for the people and fishing was problematic since there were no harbours along the coast. The people suffered and became politicized.

An individual named Patrick Sellar figures prominently in this story. He was a factor on the Sutherland estate and approached the job of clearing out the people with great enthusiasm. It was alleged that Sellar gave the order to burn down a house with no regard for an old woman who was inside, she subsequently died and Sellar was put on trial for culpable homicide in Inverness. He was acquitted. Sellar had been accumulating land for his own tenancy and continued to do so after being dismissed by Countess Sutherland, but she retained him as a tenant. Seller set about to build a large and profitable sheep business. The previous pre-clearance population of Seller’s farm exceeded two thousand people but his sheep farm only required the employment of 19 shepherds from the south of Scotland. Ironically, Seller was the son of a poor farmer from Banffshire who was cleared. Seller was an abrasive man and an effective sheep farmer who ended up with his own estate, but his memory is vilified beyond Strathnaver to this day.

Donald MacLeod, born in the community of Rosal, was cleared in 1814 and expelled from the Sutherland Estate in 1830. From that point forward until his death in Canada in 1857 he embarked on a campaign against the ‘improvement’ policy. Eventually a Crofter Holdings Act was passed in 1886 to guarantee security of tenure for smallholders.

We visited the Strathnaver Museum in Bettyhill today, they have done an excellent job and have a wonderful collection of artifacts. The most interesting exhibit for me was a series of colourful hand printed posters prepared by school kids, they tell the story of the Clearances. John was taken with the implement room and especially the turnip slicer which was used to slice turnips for cattle feed.

Then we drove the Strathnaver Trail and visited the ruins of Rosal, the largest cleared settlement in the Strath. The approach to the ruins is via a nice trail through a forested area which has been planted. All that is left of the settlement are rock piles (all too familiar for many farmers) and rock foundations. When the list of evictions was read in the church, which is now the museum, the families had to get out and the houses were burned down. They have interpretation signs and a trail to follow at Rosal which we didn’t really appreciate as the ruins should be viewed in their desolate isolation. It is a very sad and tragic setting really, the emptiness, former homes and farms reduced to nothing, but the sheep, they are still there.

There was so much more to see on the Strathnaver Trail, even a battlefield where the Celts defeated the Norse, and brochs and cairns, but we had to keep going. The road is very narrow, single track and very winding but the views were just stunning.

Cleared Village of Rosal

Kyle of Tongue

Beach At Durness

We arrived in Durness, the most northerly town in Scotland. Our first stop was the chocolate shop, which a gas station attendant way east of here told us to visit for the best hot chocolate in the world. It is wickedly good and they make truffles so we had to buy a small box, like we need more chocolate. We are staying in Durness tonight, the day was great, fantastic scenery and sunny weather until mid-afternoon when showers came in.

We had dinner in the pub tonight and the waitress said there was music at the hall if we were interested, a band was starting at 10:00 p.m. and then someone said something about pipe music and one guy said yeah, they are still making noise. So we decided to head out to the hall.

The Highland Scots remind me so much of home, they swear up a storm in the pubs, it made me laugh. Their favourite phrase is ‘for fuck’s sake,’ especially when they play pool.

We got to the hall and asked if there was a charge to get in and the women working in the kitchen said no just go on in. Two pipers were playing then a group stood in a circle and the main guy, James, tuned everyone’s pipes. A woman from the kitchen came up and asked us if we would like to eat, we said no thanks we just ate and she pointed out food over there if we wanted some, we basically barged into this party and they asked us if we wanted food. I asked a woman at the next table what was happening and she said it was the 25th reunion party of the Durness Pipe Band, we missed the main band and this was people just getting up to play and it was fantastic.

Then the local band (not pipe band) came on at 10:00 and omg, they played country music. The woman at the next table kept saying to me, you will know this song, of course I did not, but I just nodded. Then one guy played accordion and they wanted people to get up and perform some dance, the lead singer asked if we would and I said no, we don`t have a clue. They stood in a line and did some type of celtic dancing I think.

The hall was decorated with fabric and large swaths of tartan, it looked really great. We had a few drinks and then took off back to our hotel around 11:00 p.m. since we were up at 5:30 this a.m.

Pipers at Durness