Isle of Skye and Its Sheep

Sheep by road to Dunscaith Castle

"As for the Highlanders, I comprehend them all in two sorts of people: the one that dwelleth in our mainland that are barbarous, and yet mixed with some show of civility; the other that dwelleth in the Isles and are all utterly barbarous." ---King James VI of Scotland



Dunscaith Castle Ruins

Clan MacLeod's Dunvegan Castle  is a sharp contrast to Dunscaith Castle, the ancestral home of Clan MacDonald.

Dunscaith has a far lovelier natural setting than Dunvegan, though I recognize that preferring more greens of trees and pastures to the brown hues of moorelands is a personal bias. The fact that Dunscaith is in ruins, however, cannot be denied.

Sheep On the Road to Dunscaith Castle

As we drove the deteriorating one lane road to Dunscaith, sheep wandered aimlessly across the road in our path. What might have once been family farmland is now overgrown. 

Beautiful, to be sure, but also a feeling of something lost.

Footpath to Dunscaith

We hiked along a rugged path to the gorgeous site that held ancient rubble. 

Amy reached the castle before me and was teetering on a six inch edge of what I assume used to be a bridge over a hallway, but the wood had rotted away centuries earlier.

Amy Enters the Castle

Taking hand holds where she could on the wall of eroded boulders, she made it across, to my relief.

Jay took an equally perilous way, climbing higher to a ledge a foot wide where he stood and walked across, leaping down at the other side.

I took a third route, on the opposite side from Amy where I thought I could get a better hold of the top of the five foot wall, wondering as I edged along how I would get back if I fell and broke my legs.   

Jay Takes a Picture of Amy Atop the Castle

The fall would have been over twelve feet to jagged rocks, and for Jay actually another five feet more.

We made it safely to the panoramic view atop the castle, imagining what it would have been like as a seat of power hundreds of years ago. We gazed at the loch by which the stone outcropping was perched and surrounding pastures, taking it all in.



Jay's Picture of Amy Atop Dunscaith Castle

Unfortunately, we found no other way back down, so back we went to creep along the edges, grasping the rock wall. Jay had his 35 millimeter camera dangling from a strap around his neck, and he realized trying to protect it made either climbing back up to the wall he walked across or edging along the narrow ridges even more perilous. He sat the camera on top where he walked previously, and then creeped along the edge. Then he jumped back on the wall, walked over to where the camera was, leaned down to pick it up, and then walked backwards across the wall. We were all happy he made it back without breaking his crown and laughed about his double derring-do to protect his camera.

Back to history, Clan MacDonald had absconded from Dunscaith about 100 years before the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, so it wasn’t backing the wrong side that cost them this particular castle. In fact, at one time, Clan MacLeod had won and occupied Dunsquaith, but the MacDonalds took it away. The tides of history don’t always flow in the same direction.

Based on the Glenfinnan Monument to Highlander loyalty to Bonnie Prince Charlie and his quest to have his family line restored to the throne, you might well assume some longstanding mutual admiration. The Highlanders undoubtedly felt Scottish pride when King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, became King James I of England, but as the quote above indicates, he viewed them with the sort of contempt that often seems to be leveled at the modern day Tea Party by those in the American government.

Mary Queen of Scots

King James V’s daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, on the other hand, would have preferred to live out her reign in the Loire Valley had her husband, King Francis II of France, not died as a teenager. She was not thrilled to be forced to return to Scotland after having lived in splendor on the continent.

Nonetheless, life goes on. Mary married her first cousin, Henry Stuart (Lord Darnley), and they soon had a son, James. A few months later, Lord Darnley was murdered, and Mary was imprisoned and forced to abdicate, based on specious charges, to their son, James VI of Scotland, who at the time was 13 months old.

James VI grew up under royal guardianship with a considerably different mindset than his namesakes who spoke Gaelic as at least one of their languages and respected Highlanders, who at the time were the majority of the population of Scotland.

James VI proclaimed Highlanders to be crude and terribly flawed.

He derided Gaelic as “Erse,” or Irish, and as such foreign to Scotland. He proclaimed it as a cause for Highlander shortcomings, and Parliament tried to abolish it as a language.  Essentially, Highlanders were treated worse than illegal aliens in their own country, where their direct ancestors had lived throughout history.  Apparently by the time of the Jacobite Uprisings, these insults were forgotten.

King James I of England

King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England, and though he wanted to combine the crowns, that would not come until later.  He did, however, rule England and Ireland as well as Scotland under separate crowns in what became known as the Jacobean Era.

Despite what he said about Highlanders, he wasn't all bad.

We all know of at least one accomplishment. The King James English translation of the Bible was completed under his watch.

Under his rule, the Golden Age of Elizabethan Literature continued, with the magnificent literary contributions of William Shakespeare.  James was an excellent scholar himself, writing several books.  And in an age without Fox News, perhaps the Highlanders never knew what he really thought of them.

Following plenty of succession drama, his ancestor King James II (King James VII of Scotland) was replaced by his half-sister Mary and her husband William, leading to the Jacobite Rebellions.

In 1689, they declared that Catholic King James II (aka VII) had “deserted” the kingdom and proclaimed that no Catholic could ever again become king, because “it hath been found by experience that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a papist prince.”  This more than any particular action by any James probably spurred Highlanders to the Jacobite cause.

While some Highlanders like the MacLeods were loyal to the official government and curried favor, Highlanders in general were held in contempt as backwards and worthless by the elite in the new government, a belief stoked by Highlander support of the Jacobite Rebellions. It’s natural to paint enemies in an unflattering light.



"The Commons" Painting of the Highlander Clearances

However, the government also knew that Highlanders had proven themselves to be the most loyal, tough and gallant soldiers of the British military.  

Because they were such valiant warriors, the government justifiably feared they may rebel again after the '45 Rebellion was suppressed, and so when Bonnie Prince Charlie skirted off to France in 1746, the Parliament passed the Act of Proscription designed to crush the clan system. This basically put teeth in the Disarming Act of 1715 which had not been strongly enforced.

The Dress Act made it illegal to wear a kilt or tartan in Scotland, with the only exception being for soldiers in the Black Watch Regiment of the British Infantry (Royal Highlanders), which still does to this day.

It also made it illegal for anyone in defined parts of Scotland to keep and bear any “broad sword or target, poignard, whinger, durk, side pistol, gun, or other warlike weapon." Obviously this stands in stark contrast to the U.S. Bill of Rights which asserts the right for law abiding citizens to keep and bear arms, and the framers of the Constitution undoubtedly knew about this precedent.

Farm With Pastureland Near Dunscaith Castle

Around the same time that the Jacobites struggled to regain the throne for their Catholic King, other big changes were afoot.  

In the era of clans, “crofters” worked the lands controlled by the clan chiefs very much like share croppers. These small farms produced enough food to allow the farmers to feed themselves and provide some excess to the clan. Starting in the 16th Century, the Scottish Government began requiring clan chiefs to come to Edinburgh once a year to post a bond for the people under their control.  

Each generation, clans grew larger and more like towns than families, which made clan chiefs feel more like landlords and tax collectors than father figures. They started finding that raising livestock and droving herds to sell in the lowlands was more profitable and easier than handling landlord problems and collecting the estate's share from the crofters.

Talisker Distillery on Isle of Skye

With the advent of the industrial revolution and excitement about immigration to the colonies, some of the more industrious risk-takers left the family farms to seek fortunes elsewhere, either in city factories or claiming lands of their own to farm in the Americas or Australia, but the change wasn’t happening fast enough for clan chiefs and others seeking to maximize profits.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand was forced into an iron glove.

Clan MacLeod “experimented” with clearing out crofters starting around 1732, and what became known as the Highland Clearances shifted into high gear in 1762.  Clan chiefs brought in factors and other outside experts in sheep farming from the lowlands to help increase efficiency.  

Some clans found it easier to sell out completely, allowing other landholders to become more powerful.

On the Scottish mainland, the Duke of Sutherland came to own 1.5 million acres in the Highlands, and the level of his wealth can be described in a quote from Queen Victoria upon visiting his estate. “I have come from my house to your palace.”

Painting of the Highlander Clearances

Needing more grazing lands, landowners evicted crofters, sometimes burning their thatched roofs to hasten their departures. This forced population exodus was euphemistically called “necessary improvements” by wealthy landlords.

Families were left to freeze and starve without their means of livelihood. Immigration to the colonies seemed the best choice for most, and there are now more descendants of Highlanders in North America than in Scotland.

In 1840, 30,000 non-English speaking Highlanders were forced to move to Glasgow, where very few spoke Gaelic, to work in factories.  Not all could find jobs in the city.



Portree Harbor

As Americans on holiday, we drove from the ruins of Dunscaith in our Fiat 500L several generations after the Clearances, and sheep looked at us as if to ask what we thought we were doing on their roads. There still seem to be more sheep than people on the Isle of Skye.

We meandered into the village of Portree, which still survives as a central marketplace,  and we visited the Talisker Distillery, indicating the whiskey industry has prospered.  Tourism certainly now plays a huge role in the economy, but most of the island is sheep country. It’s a lovely place to visit, but I don’t think I’d want to live there.  

On the Statue of Liberty, which has become an international symbol for welcoming immigrants to the USA, there’s a bronze plaque featuring “The New Collosus” by American Poet Emma Lazarus, including this excerpt:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

A Welcome Sight for Displaced Hihglanders in the USA

These words were not an invitation to a welfare state but a challenge to prove the class systems of the old world was wrong in pushing them out of their former homelands.

In the long run, the Clearances proved to be a blessing for future generations of Highlanders who grew to their potential under our freedoms, as well as for America, which benefited from their strengths.

Before moving on, let’s consider an alternative viewpoint of the Highlander situation. We can understand why the emerging British Empire gradually uniting England and Ireland with Scotland would require assimilation of Highlanders. They certainly didn’t want to simply put up a wall like the Romans when they saw a sort of manifest destiny for their mainland to be united similar to that expressed by the western expansion of the United States from the original 13 colonial states.  

Statue of Economist Adam Smith In Edinburgh

Modernization in all its forms, including science, technology and economics, was coming regardless of whether the Highlanders preferred to stay in feudal times or not. Feudalism relies on subservience rather than freedom, and freedom leads to greater happiness and prosperity in the long run.   

Squabbles and outright battles among clans were counter-productive, and like it or not, those who want to be successful in business in Western Civilization speak English, not Gaelic. 

As the old saying goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And man does not live by haggis alone.