The Clearance Villages, Perthshire.
‘The Highland Clearances’ is the name for a period of time in Scottish history, mainly 1750 to 1860, where tenants were evicted from their homes so land owners could boost their income with large scale pastoral farms. Many people were displaced and forced into new lives in new places. A whole way of life was lost.
Over the summer of 2021 we visited many of these abandoned townships in Perthshire and we hope to visit more across Scotland. There are so many beautiful examples of drystone in these places, a real step back in drystone history. I have written a little about our experience in these places.
In the nooks and crannies of Scotland’s great landscapes, if you care to look, you can find places where the past hasn’t yet settled into the ground. Instead it sits in the air around you and in the proud piles of fallen stone. Once essential, a gable end, a kiln, now rendered simple monuments.
Loyal to a fault.
These are the Clearance villages. An entire way of life thrown to the wind so that livestock could graze.
Walking there now I notice the sour smell of sheep shit and the way the heather scratches my legs and tugs at my clothes. Pleading with me, ‘Don’t go’. A curlew’s languishing cry sounds from above. As a child I imagined these birds as mourners who would take to the sky sounding their wails across the summer moors, grieving for all things lost. They expressed what we didn’t, or what we couldn’t. I too pine for what has been lost.
Drystone and graft. Stones for the crofts dug from the ground beneath them, stacked by hand. The satisfaction and security of a good harvest, the devastation of a lean year. Life was both infinitely more simple back then and made more complex by reliance on things completely beyond human control. But it wasn’t the weather that pushed them out.
I don’t think they ever went back to their homes, landowners used the land for other things and the grief was probably too great. So they settled in the village below. Working for others instead of themselves and building new lives from the ground up. They let the curlews mourn for them.
*all images shot on 35mm film, click on them to have a closer look.