8 Villages In Scotland That Still Feel Like the Highland Clearances Never Happened

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Walk into a Sutherland glen at the right hour, and the silence will tell you what happened here. Not the silence of a quiet morning, the silence of a place where 15,000 people used to live, >> [music] >> and now don't. Stand in the heather, and you'll see the rectangles. Stones in the shape of houses, walls the height of your knee, a door frame collapsed into the ground that someone, two centuries ago, walked out of [music] for the last time. Between roughly 1750 and the 1880s, landlords across the Scottish Highlands cleared tens of thousands of people >> [music] >> from land their families had worked for generations.

[00:00:38]They replaced them with sheep. Most of those glens are still empty. Most of those villages were never rebuilt. But in eight specific places, scattered [music] across the Highlands and Islands, something held on. Not because the clearances missed them, because something, a geography, a law, a refusal, got in the way. By the end of this, the map of Scotland is going to look different to you. Entry number eight, Plockton, >> [music] >> Wester Ross. You arrive in Plockton, and the first thing you see is the palm trees. Cordyline palms along the harbor front, leaning toward Loch Carron, which is improbable on this latitude, until you remember the North Atlantic Drift comes in close along this coast. The white-washed cottages line the bay in a curve so neat, it looks designed.

[00:01:29]>> [music] >> Because it was. Plockton was a planned village. According to local history records, it was surveyed and laid out in the early 1800s by a man named W.

[00:01:38]with the parish [music] church and some of the houses designed by Thomas Telford. The landlord, Sir Hugh Innes, had a problem. He was clearing the inland glens of Loch Alsh for sheep, and the people he was evicting had to go somewhere. Emigration was one option.

[00:01:54]The other was a new fishing port on the coast, where displaced crofters could become herring fishermen.

[00:02:00]Plockton, in other words, did not [music] survive the clearances. Plockton is what the clearances built on the way out.

[00:02:07]The settlement, once known in Gaelic as Am Ploc, the blunt promontory, became the relocation site for people the Laird had evicted from elsewhere on his estate.

[00:02:16]The herring boom funded a real prosperity for a while.

[00:02:20]By the mid-1840s, the population had risen to 547.

[00:02:24]And Plockton fared comparatively well during the potato famine that devastated the wider Highlands.

[00:02:30]Then, [music] the herring shifted their migration patterns. The boom collapsed.

[00:02:35]The Gaelic name the village earned itself in the years that followed was Baile na [music] Bochdainn, the village of the poor.

[00:02:42]What you see today is the compromise frozen in stone.

[00:02:46]The cottages, the harbor, the curve of the bay, all of it is the surviving evidence of what landlords offered when they were willing to relocate rather than expel.

[00:02:56]>> [music] >> Plockton survived because someone needed it to.

[00:02:59]The next village survived for the opposite reason, >> [music] >> because no one could easily reach it.

[00:03:04]Entry number seven, Applecross, Wester Ross.

[00:03:08]The name in Gaelic is A' Chomraich, the sanctuary. [music] To get to Applecross until 1976, you had to drive the Bealach na Bà, the pass of the cattle, one of the highest road passes in Britain, which climbs to 626 m in a series of hairpin bends that the official tourist information still warns is unsuitable for learner drivers and large vehicles.

[00:03:33]In winter, it closes regularly.

[00:03:35]Before the road was tarmacked, getting to Applecross meant a boat or a long walk.

[00:03:40]That isolation is the village's history in a single fact. The clearances were a logistical exercise. Factors arrive with eviction notices, sheriff officers enforce them, ships waited at coastal ports to take the displaced to Canada or Australia.

[00:03:56]The whole machinery required [music] access.

[00:03:59]Applecross, behind its mountain wall, had less of it than almost anywhere else on the western mainland.

[00:04:06]The peninsula was not entirely untouched. Clearance and emigration affected the wider parish.

[00:04:11]But compared to what happened in Sutherland or Ross's accessible [music] glens, Applecross retained more of its older Gaelic-speaking communities for longer.

[00:04:21]The coast road from Shieldaig to Applecross was not completed until 1976.

[00:04:26]Until then, the place was effectively cut off in winter by weather.

[00:04:30]And in summer, by the difficulty of the Beala.

[00:04:33]A whole world existed on the other side of that mountain.

[00:04:37]Gaelic-speaking, croft-working, fishing the loch, gathered around the small Clachan settlement at the head of Applecross Bay, where the original monastery had been founded in 673 by Saint Maelrubha.

[00:04:50]The coast is what it has always been.

[00:04:53]The community is small.

[00:04:54]Young people leave. The road that finally connected Applecross to the rest of Scotland in 1976 [music] also connected it to the same pressures everywhere else in the Highlands faces.

[00:05:05]Second homes, holiday lets, the slow conversion of working villages into picturesque ones.

[00:05:13]Applecross was saved by its mountain.

[00:05:16]The next village was saved by something rarer.

[00:05:19]The fact that clearing it would have been politically impossible.

[00:05:23]Entry number six, Iona, Inner Hebrides.

[00:05:27]You arrive on Iona by ferry from Mull, a crossing of about 10 minutes across the Sound of Iona.

[00:05:33]The Abbey is the first thing you see.

[00:05:35]The medieval [music] reconstruction rising over the white sand beaches and the machair grass.

[00:05:41]This is where Columba came in 563.

[00:05:44]This is where the Book of Kells was likely begun.

[00:05:47]This is, in the religious imagination of Britain, where Christianity in Scotland started.

[00:05:53]Iona was part of the vast holdings of the Dukes of Argyll.

[00:05:57]Mull, the much larger island next door, suffered severe clearances in the 19th century.

[00:06:02]Iona's experience was different, less drastic, more drawn out, but the comparison matters.

[00:06:09]The Duke of Argyll's family did clear tenants on Mull.

[00:06:12]>> [music] >> They did not clear Iona in anything like the same way.

[00:06:16]Why? The honest answer [music] is that historians point to several factors.

[00:06:21]The island's small size and limited agricultural value made large-scale sheep economics less [music] appealing.

[00:06:28]The religious significance of the site mattered to a family whose public reputation was important to them.

[00:06:34]And the Duke himself, the eighth Duke of Argyll, was unusual. [music] A politician, a writer, a man who took his stewardship of Iona seriously enough that the Abbey ruins were eventually transferred to the Iona Cathedral Trust in 1899.

[00:06:50]The result is a working community of around 170 people on an island roughly 3 mi long.

[00:06:56]>> [music] >> The Iona Community, founded in 1938 by the Reverend George MacLeod, >> [music] >> restored the Abbey buildings through the middle of the 20th century.

[00:07:05]The population today is sustained largely by tourism to the Abbey and by the small crofting and farming that the island still supports.

[00:07:12]The paradox sits in plain sight.

[00:07:15]Iona was protected partly by what it represented to people who had the power to destroy it.

[00:07:20]>> [music] >> The next village had no such protection.

[00:07:23]Its people made their own.

[00:07:24]>> [music] >> Entry number five.

[00:07:26]Arnol, Isle of Lewis.

[00:07:29]You walk down a single road in Arnol on the west coast of Lewis and you pass them.

[00:07:34]Long, low buildings with double dry stone walls, thatched roofs weighted down with stones tied to old fishing nets. No chimneys.

[00:07:43]These are blackhouses, taighean dubha in Gaelic. People lived in them.

[00:07:49]People here lived in them within living memory.

[00:07:51]The Arnol Blackhouse Museum, run by Historic Environment Scotland, preserves number 42, a blackhouse built around 1880 >> [music] >> and continuously occupied by a Hebridean crofting family until the residents moved out in 1966.

[00:08:07]According to Historic Environment Scotland and Britain Express [music] records, a peat fire still burns on the central hearth with smoke filtering up through the thatch as it did when the family lived there.

[00:08:18]There is no chimney.

[00:08:20]There never was.

[00:08:21]The smoke was the point. It killed the bacteria, fertilized the thatch for use as crop fertilizer, and kept the building dry from the inside.

[00:08:31]Lewis crofters [music] did something the people of Sutherland could not do in 1814.

[00:08:36]They organized.

[00:08:38]By the 1880s, rent [music] strikes were spreading across the crofting counties.

[00:08:42]The Battle of the Braes on Skye in April 1882, which we'll [music] come to, was part of a wider movement that included land seizures, refused rents, and confrontations with sheriff [music] officers across the Hebrides.

[00:08:56]The outcome was the Crofters Holdings [music] Scotland Act of 1886, which gave crofters security of tenure, >> [music] >> fixed rents by tribunal, and the right of inheritance.

[00:09:08]That law is the reason a family was still living in number 42 Arnol in 1966.

[00:09:15]The act did not end poverty in the Highlands. It did not bring back the people who had already been cleared, but it stopped the eviction machinery that had emptied [music] Sutherland a generation earlier.

[00:09:26]And it meant the blackhouses of Lewis kept being lived in generation after generation until the families themselves [music] chose to move into the whitehouses next door.

[00:09:37]The cost is what it has always been on Lewis. Gaelic, the language those families spoke around the peat fire, is thinning [music] generation by generation.

[00:09:47]The blackhouse village down the coast at Gearranan, restored as a heritage site, was abandoned as recently as 1974.

[00:09:55]Arnish survived because the law caught up.

[00:09:58]The next village survived because of where the law was forced to look first.

[00:10:02]Entry number four, the crofting townships of Braes, Isle [music] of Skye. The road runs south from Portree along the coast of Skye, past the Sound of Raasay, >> [music] >> and the townships that line it have names that read like a roll call.

[00:10:15]Penchuran, Balmeanach, Gedintailor.

[00:10:18]These are the Braes, the slopes. [music] And on the 19th of April, 1882, this is where the modern crofting movement was born. The crofters of Braes had lost grazing rights on Ben Lee, a hill their animals had used until 1865, when their landlord, Lord MacDonald, withdrew it. According to records held by Scotland's People and the Highland Archive Service, by 1881, the crofters had returned their animals to the hill in defiance [music] and were refusing to pay rent. Eviction notices were issued.

[00:10:49]When the sheriff officers came to serve them, the crofters seized and burned the papers. On the 19th of April, 1882, around 50 police officers were sent from Glasgow to Braes to enforce the law. The Highland Archive Service records that they were met by roughly 100 local people armed with [music] sticks and stones. A journalist who witnessed the confrontation described stones coming down like hail. Several were injured on both sides. Many of the casualties were women. The police retreated to Portree with five arrested crofters. The press coverage was immediate and national.

[00:11:24]According to the Scottish History Society and Highland Archive Service, the resulting public pressure forced the government to appoint the Napier Commission on the 17th of March, 1883.

[00:11:35]The commission, chaired by Lord Napier, toured the crofting counties for five months. It held 71 meetings in 61 locations and heard from around 800 witnesses. The first testimony was given by Angus Stewart, a crofter from Paye Chorain in Braes, on the 8th of May, 1883, in Gaelic. The recommendations of the Napier Commission led directly to the 1886 [music] Crofters Holdings Scotland Act. Braes is still here. The township [music] still work the land.

[00:12:07]The road that runs through them is still a single track road and the old grazing dispute on Ben Lee was eventually resolved in the crofters' favor. The community that started a national movement is still a community. The cost is what it is across the whole island.

[00:12:21]Skye's tourism economy now stretches infrastructure [music] built for a tenth of the visitors. Gaelic is in retreat.

[00:12:28]The revival efforts are real. The descendants of the people who fought at Braes in 1882 are still farming the same slopes. Braes changed [music] the law.

[00:12:38]The next place needed something else entirely. It needed the crofters to come back as their own landlords. Entry number three, Assynt, Sutherland.

[00:12:47][music] Sutherland is where the worst happened.

[00:12:50]According to the Assynt Crofters Trust's own historical records >> [music] >> and the Scottish History Society, around 15,000 people were cleared from the Sutherland estates between 1811 and 1821 under the management of the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford and their factor, Patrick Sellar.

[00:13:07]>> [music] >> The whole interior of the county was emptied. The coastal strips became overcrowded resettlement zones where displaced families were expected to take up fishing or kelp farming on land that could not feed them. In 1814, Sellar carried out clearances in Strathnaver.

[00:13:24]He was tried for culpable homicide in 1816, accused of causing the death of elderly tenants whose homes had been burned during eviction, and acquitted by a jury of landowners in Inverness. The grass, the saying still goes in some [music] parts of the Highlands, will not grow on Patrick Sellar's grave. The reality is that he was buried in Elgin Cathedral, and his gravestone [music] is still visited. For nearly two centuries afterwards, Assynt and the wider Sutherland coast survived as crofting communities, while the interior glens stayed [music] empty. Then, in 1989, the Vestey family sold the North Lochinver Estate, a [music] strip of 21,300 acres containing 13 crofting townships, for over 1 million pounds to a Scandinavian property company. According to the Assynt Crofters [music] Trust and the Press and Journal's 30th anniversary coverage, the company went into liquidation in 1992, and the estate [music] was put up for sale in seven separate lots. The crofters did something that, until then, had not been done in modern Scotland. They formed a trust, >> [music] >> ran a public appeal, and bid for their own land. According to the trust's records, the agreed purchase price was 300,000 pounds. [music] Almost half was raised by crofters and supporters across Britain, >> [music] >> and from the diaspora, descendants of the Sutherland clearances sent donations from Canada, Australia, and the United States.

[00:14:51]>> [music] >> Public agencies, including Sutherland District Council and Highland Regional Council, made up the rest.

[00:14:57]>> [music] >> On 1st of February, 1993, the Assynt Crofters Trust took title to the land.

[00:15:03]According to a 2013 Scottish Parliament motion noting the death of the trust's founding chairman, Allan MacRae, [music] the buyout inspired the community land movement that has since brought roughly half a million acres of Scotland into local ownership. The interior glens behind Assynt are still empty. The sheep won that fight two centuries ago and the land has not come back. But the coastal townships are owned now by the people who live on them. That's not nothing.

[00:15:29]That's the slow undoing of something that was supposed to be permanent.

[00:15:33]Assynt fought back through patience and law. The next village fought back by simply refusing to leave. Entry number two, Eriskay, Outer Hebrides. You cross to Eriskay now over a causeway. It opened in 2001, 1,650 m of road built across [music] the sound from South Uist. Before that, Eriskay was reached only by boat. 2 and 1/2 mi long, a mile and a half wide. A population, according to the most recent data from Eriskay Heritage, of around 134.

[00:16:06]In 1838, according to Britain Express's [music] history of the island and corroborating sources on Undiscovered Scotland, Colonel John Gordon of Cluny purchased Eriskay along with South Uist, Benbecula, and Barra. He proceeded to clear thousands of crofting families from the larger islands. Eriskay's land was considered too poor and too rocky to support the sheep he wanted to graze on the bigger islands. So he allowed displaced families to resettle there.

[00:16:33]The figures recorded by Undiscovered Scotland are stark. Eriskay's population of 80 was swollen to around 480 by the arrival of refugees from Gordon's clearances on the neighboring islands.

[00:16:45]They survived by building lazy beds, raised peat beds [music] fertilized with seaweed, and by fishing. The land that was supposed to be too poor to support anyone supported a community that has now been there for nearly two centuries.

[00:17:00]According to Father Allan MacDonald's recorded folklore work on the island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and according to the ongoing work of Comann Eachdraidh Eirisgeidh, the Eriskay Historical Society, the Gaelic that arrived with those displaced [music] families is still spoken by older residents as a first language. The island is one of a small number of places in Scotland where Gaelic remains in everyday domestic use, the language [music] of the home. The famous incident that put Eriskay on the wider cultural map happened in February 1941 [music] when the SS Politician ran aground off the north shore. Among its cargo, according to Britain Express, were over 264,000 bottles of Scotch whisky bound for New York. The islanders salvaged a substantial quantity. Compton Mackenzie's 1947 novel Whisky Galore and the 1949 Ealing film made from it fictionalized the event. The novel and film softened the ending considerably.

[00:18:01]According to the historical record, 19 men were prosecuted for theft and several served prison [music] sentences in Inverness. Eriskay survived because it was too poor to be worth clearing and the people sent there as a last resort built something the Laird did not anticipate would last.

[00:18:17]>> [music] >> It has lasted. The final village on this list is the one that should not exist at all. [music] Entry number one, Helmsdale, Sutherland, and the cleared coast around it. You drive up the A9 on the east coast of Sutherland and the land empties as you go. Glens stretching inland, no houses, no smoke, [music] only the occasional ruin in the heather.

[00:18:39]Then you reach Helmsdale, a small fishing town built around a harbor >> [music] >> at the mouth of the Strath of Kildonan.

[00:18:46]Helmsdale was a relocation village.

[00:18:48]According to the Scottish History Society and the wider literature on the Sutherland clearances, when the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford emptied the interior straths between 1811 and 1821, displaced families were resettled along the coast in planned settlements like Helmsdale where they were expected to learn a fishing trade they had never practiced. The The was the same one that built Plockton on the west coast. Build a coastal village, move the people there, let the inland sheep run. What makes Helmsdale extraordinary is what stands above the harbor, the emigrant statue. A bronze sculpture by the artist Gerald Laing, unveiled in 2007 according to the Timespan Heritage Centre records, depicts a Highland family looking out to sea. A father, a mother, a son already turning to leave, a daughter looking back. There is an identical statue in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The two statues face each other across an ocean. Helmsdale today is a working fishing village of around 600 [music] people. The Strath of Kildonan behind it is still largely empty. The clearance villages along the river, places like Cain [music] and Swiss Gill, exist now as ruins in the heather, the same low rectangles of stone you find [music] across the empty Highland interior. According to the Scottish History Society, around 15,000 people were cleared from the Sutherland estates in that decade alone. Most of those people, or their children, ended up in Canada, in New Zealand, in Nova Scotia. The Gaelic-speaking communities that settled in Cape Breton trace their lineage to the very straths behind [music] Helmsdale. But the village itself survived. The fishing trade it was built to support failed and revived and failed [music] again, and the village kept going. The Timespan Museum on the harbor front records the names of the cleared families and the ships that took them west. The descendants come back, they always [music] have. Some of the donations that funded the Assynt buyout in 1993 came from those descendants. The diaspora has a long memory. Helmsdale is the village that was meant to be a transit point and chose to become a place. The Strath of Kildonan behind it is the warning.

[00:21:00]>> [music] >> The two together are what the clearances actually look like two centuries on. The empty glen and the village that held on at its edge. Here is the thing the heritage signs [music] do not quite say.

[00:21:12]The Highland clearances were not a single event. They were a process that lasted over a century and they emptied a third of the Highlands. Most of those glens are still empty. The sheep won.

[00:21:25]Walk into Strathnaver or the upper reaches of any of the Sutherland glens today >> [music] >> and what you will find is heather, water, the wind and the wrecked tangles in the ground. But in these eight places something refused. Geography refused at Applecross. A landlord chose differently at Iona. The crofters of Braes [music] fought 50 policemen with stones and changed British law. The crofters of Assynt [music] bought their own estate back. The people sent to Eriskay as a last resort built a Gaelic speaking community that is still there. Plockton and Helmsdale survived as the relocation villages they were always meant to be.

[00:22:03]Arnol kept its black houses lit until the families themselves chose to move out. And number 42 still has a peat fire burning on its [music] hearth. What you walk through in these eight villages is not preserved Scotland.

[00:22:16]>> [music] >> It is continuing Scotland. The difference matters. Continuity is not the same as heritage.

[00:22:23]>> [music] >> A peat fire that has not been allowed to go out since 1880 is not a museum exhibit. It is a fire. The empty glens are still there. They are most of the Highlands. But these eight places refused in their different ways to let the silence [music] finish what it started. If this gave you a different way of looking at a country you thought you knew, subscribe. We cover the parts of Britain that take longer than a postcard to understand. And if you've stood in any of these places, >> [music] >> at the harbor in Plockton, on the road into Braes, in the doorway of number 42 Arnol, tell me in the comments [music] whether the silence felt like absence or whether it felt like something still holding on. I want to know.