Highland Clearances
The Clearances were a feature of Highland life in the later eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Emigration was encouraged as a drastic measure to counter the effects of overcrowding and concomitant poverty. However, the infamous Patrick Sellar, factor to the Marquess of Stafford (later 1st Duke of Sutherland) took this to new heights when he cruelly evicted many rural dwellers from the Sutherland estates to make way for sheep.
The 2nd Marquess of Breadalbane instituted a similar policy of clearing parts of his huge estates and replacing people with sheep. According to the pamphlet's author, Glenquaich, which runs north-west from Amulree towards Loch Tay, suffered the removal of around sixty families, leaving only four or five. Whatever the true figure may be, a significant number of emigrants from Glenquaich settled in North Easthope township in Ontario, Canada, and their stories, and those of their descendants, are told in 'A History of the North Easthope Pioneers' published in 1937.
The pamphlet (illustrated above) runs to 26 pages and opens with a copy of a letter from the Marquess of Breadalbane which appeared in the Perthshire Advertiser on 23rd June 1853. There follows a strongly worded refutation by Mr R Alister of the points made in the Marquess's letter, concluding with the statement 'I could have brought forward many more facts to prove that the systematic extermination of the peasantry...is particularly felt on the Breadalbane estates...' Incidentally, the pamphlet contains one of the earliest known uses of the phrase 'to bite the dust'.
