That evening, after an hour or so of talking, I made to leave, wanting to get to sleep. Before coming to the hotel, I had identified a place to spend the night: in a roadside sitka plantation, where the tightly meshed canopy of needles would keep light rain off me. I didn’t tell Angus I was going to sleep in a plantation; I thought he might disapprove, and I was a touch embarrassed.
As I stood to go, Angus asked if I wanted to come fishing for sea-trout with him the next day, in the estuary of the Naver. I said that I would, very much. He gave me directions to his house, which he told me he had built himself. It was impossible not to find it, he explained, for it was the only house on the waterward side of the long road that ran along the shore of Loch Naver. I should come there first thing, and we would drive together up the strath to the river-mouth, where the free fishing was.
Near the estuary, he said, there was a grave set up on a ridge, looking out over it. A child, Elsa Danckwerts, had died of leukaemia in 1902, and her parents, who were Dutch immigrants, had chosen to bury her there, overlooking the sea. The gravestone was a sight in itself, let alone the view from it. He also said that as we drove, he would tell me about the Clearance history of the glen - for the valley was the scene of one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history.
On a warm Sunday morning in May 1819, the Reverend Donald Sage took the pulpit for the last time at the little church of Langdale in Strathnaver. It was a beautiful day, and the trees, the mountains and the river, he later remembered, ‘with which all our associations of “home” and “native land” were so fondly linked, appeared to unite their attractions to bid us farewell’.
Sage ministered to many of the small parishes - Achness and Kildonan and Syre - that lay in the long river valleys which stretched between the Pentland Firth on the northern coast, south-west to Caithness and the North Sea coast. That Sunday would be his last in the Langdale church, he knew, because he and his congregation had been warned that the Clearance of the townships of Strathnaver would begin again soon. Men working for the Countess of Sutherland, who owned the valley, would come in numbers and compel the inhabitants from their homes, so that the land could be turned over to the more lucrative rearing of sheep.
The accounts of what happened in Strathnaver over the following weeks and months are contradictory and disputed. It is known that a total of 1,200 people, almost the entire population of its townships, were evicted from the strath that year, by a combination of threats and false promises. It is known that the Clearances were driven by nothing more or less urgent than greed for profit on the part of the landowners. It is known that, by May of 1820, a crow had built its nest inside the abandoned church at Langdale.
What is unclear is the degree of violence used. Donald MacLeod, an inhabitant of the Rosal township in Strathnaver, recorded that on the day of one of the Clearances, he walked at eleven o’clock at night to a hill above the strath, and looked back. In the darkness, he wrote, he could still hear the cries of women and children, the barking of dogs and the lowing of cattle. He could see, too, the buildings of that district, over two hundred of them, burning, either in full flame or collapsed into glowing timbers. The Countess’s men had come on horseback and on foot, he said, bearing brands, mattocks and sledgehammers, and with these they had broken up and burnt the schoolhouses, kilns, corn-mills, stables, barns and byres, as well as dozens of houses.
Strathnaver was cleared in two campaigns, 1814 and 1819. The displaced inhabitants were mostly driven north, to the coast. There they were expected to make new lives on the Pentland Firth, where the topsoil was thin, sandy and salt-blasted. Even the journey to the inhospitable coast was arduous; there were deaths along the way from fatigue and exposure. One man, Donald Mackay, whose two daughters were weak with disease and malnourishment, was so desperate to get them aboard a small sloop travelling to Caithness that he carried them on his back, one at a time, to the coast. He laid the first down in the open air on the beach, then walked back, and picked up the other. In this way, he walked twenty-five miles.
Those who completed the exodus to the coast faced great hardship. Unacquainted with the skills of the sea, many came close to starvation, and were reduced to gleaning for cockles on the shoreline, or eating nettle broth thickened with oatmeal. Such exigencies must have been painful to the refugees, for they had been turned out of one of the reputedly most idyllic of all Scottish glens.
But, over the course of five years - by emigration, conscription, death and displacement - Strathnaver, like so many of the valleys of Scotland, was all but emptied of its people. During the Clearances, wrote Alexander MacKenzie in 1881, the families of the northern glens were ‘utterly rooted and burnt out’, and parish after parish was ‘converted into a solitary wilderness’.
From the road, Angus’s house had a tight, low look. Its single grey pebble-dashed storey seemed crouched down into the land. But its position was magnificent. Immediately behind it stretched the loch, which was flashing in the clear dawn light. Stands of silver birches fluttered in the wind, their trunks as bright as whitewash. And rising to the south was Ben Klibreck, still backlit, its outline long and curvaceous. On either side of the house’s driveway sat a massive glacial boulder, on which a complex map-work of snail trails glimmered.
We drove up the strath road in Angus’s car, with black fishing-rods sticking out of each back window like aerials. He pointed out landmarks as we drove: houses abandoned during the Clearances and never reoccupied, lazy beds, old fish ponds, Bronze Age hut circles. After forty minutes or so, we reached the river’s mouth, and parked near a girdered steel bridge, which had recently been painted a gleaming black. I got out. The air was cold in the nose, and smelt different from the loch air: sharper, saltier.
A path led over the steep rocky ground to the western side of the bridge. We followed it, and stepped down on to the wide golden flats that banked the river. The sand was airy, and I sank in it up to my ankles.
An exquisite optical effect had been created by the combination of dry air and strong wind. Billions of particles of loose sand were being blown across the flats, giving expression to the wind, moving with such coherence and fluency that they seemed to form a rippling second skin, silky and supple, which shifted so quickly over the set sand beneath it that it was hard to conceive of the two as of the same substance and different only in their motions.
We trudged downstream through the shifting sand, the river to our right, towards the sea. At one point, we disturbed an otter, which loped and skittered away over the rocks, then poured itself into the brown water, where it was instantly invisible. The winter sunlight was so bright that it lay in ingots on the riverbed.
Angus gestured to the easternmost of the headlands, at the entrance to the estuary. Up there, he said, were the ruins of a nineteenth-century look-out point. During the spawning season, men would sit there, watching for incoming shoals of salmon. The salmon were then so many in number, he said, that when they shoaled they would form dark masses under water, big enough to be visible from the look-out. The watchers would shout, and boats would be launched to haul a net across the mouth of the estuary. Those days were gone, though: the river was poor in salmon now.
He told me that the first settlements had been established in Strathnaver more than six thousand years previously, and that there had been human presence of some kind here more or less ever since. Marks of these successive occupations were to be found everywhere in the strath. The Neoliths had buried their most important dead in chambered cairns whose ruins were still visible. There were rings and rows of standing stones, erected in the Bronze Age. Up round the corner of the bay - he gestured north and west - was a Christian settlement, established by Cormaic, a colleague of St Columba. The settlement was on an island: Eilean Neave, the Island of the Saints.
Then he pointed up at an outcrop ridge of sand and rock, which ran lateral to the river, hackled with green marram grass. Up there was a broch, he said, the remains of an Iron Age broch. Its walls were fifteen feet thick! In those days, he said with a slow smile, they knew how to keep the wind out of a building.
For the rest of that sunlit morning we fished the western bank of the river, moving silently for hours, rods held low and angled down to the water, while above us two buzzards turned in tight spirals.
Two centuries previously, the exiled people of Strathnaver would have passed along that bank of the river. They would have reached this river-mouth exhausted and frightened. The dunes which stood so splendidly to either side of the estuary would, to them, have been the gateway to a new and hard coastal land.
It is difficult, even now, to travel through the cleared glens of Scotland and miss the evidence of earlier calamity. Difficult, too, not to be disturbed by it, not to find one’s own relationship with the land changed by the knowledge of what once occurred here. The pasts of these places complicate and darken their present wildness; caution against romanticism and blitheness. To be in such landscapes is to be caught in a double-bind: how is it possible to love them in the present, but also to acknowledge their troubled histories?
Sorley MacLean, the poet who led the revival of Gaelic verse in the twentieth century, knew this bind well. MacLean was born on the island of Raasay, on the west coast of Scotland, in 1911. During the Clearances, Raasay’s population had been almost eradicated. Dozens of families emigrated, and dozens were forcibly evicted. Those who stayed were pushed to the rocky northern end of the island, making room in the more fertile south for the Cheviot sheep. All four of MacLean’s grandparents were forced from their farms. The abandoned dwellings and steadings were boarded up, or left to dissolve into the land, gathered back by moss and ivy.
Several of MacLean’s finest poems are set on Raasay, and the island’s wildness was, to MacLean, partly a consequence of loss: its spaciousness declared an absence, and its solitude a calamity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his dream-poem, ‘Hallaig’, which is set in the cleared Raasay township of that name, and in the woods that surrounded it.
Wood was central to Raasay’s pre-Clearance culture. The surprisingly extensive forests of the island were worked by its inhabitants. Their boats were made of oak and pine, with oars and rudders of ash. Hawthorn and holly were used for hedging. Houses were made with beams of oak and thatch-supports of hazel. Baskets were woven of willow, and bowls were turned out of elder, and then polished up until the hooped patterns of grain could be seen on the wood. Life demanded the indefinite flourishing of the trees, and so the woods were worked and sustained. But when the people were cleared, the grazing of the sheep that took their place repressed the woods and prevented their regeneration. The woods departed, as the people had departed before them.
For MacLean, the woods that remained on the island were precious and beautiful. He wrote once of standing in a storm in a pinewood, near the ‘green unpressed sea’, and feeling the moving trees as ‘wind-headed’ and ‘giddy’ about him: ‘the great wood in motion, / fresh in its spirit’. But the woods were also, for MacLean, eloquent of the island’s tragedy. They were uncanny realms, where time flickered back and forth, where past and present became confused. In the Raasay forests, he wrote, ‘the dead have been seen alive’, and the disappeared ‘are with us still’. So it is that in ‘Hallaig’, the cleared generations return as ghosts in the forms of trees. The poem is set at twilight, and in it, MacLean imagines a crowd of young Raasay girls, strolling along ‘lightsome and unheartbroken’ out of the wooded hills of the island - ‘a flickering birch, a hazel, a rowan’.
We caught sea-trout; Angus took four, I took one. Small silver fish, little more than a pound each, which glittered in the light. Angus left me early in the afternoon, taking his catch back to his family. I thanked him for his kindness, and watched him walk away over the soft sand towards the bridge.
I turned and made my way to the ridge that Angus had pointed out to me earlier, with the broch on its summit. I climbed its steep side, scrambling up over sand that gave way beneath my feet in little spills, grasping fistfuls of sharp grass for support, until I reached rock.
Near the end of the ridge, I came to the broch. Its massively thick walls were well preserved, or had been re-created: they formed a rough stone ring, about thirty feet in internal diameter, with an entrance passage opening to the north-west. The ground around the broch still bore the marks of a ditch and a rampart, and, on the lower ground just to the west, I could see the imprints of what might have been hut circles.
I stepped inside, and was surprised by the sudden calm. Rounded black stones, striated with quartz, lay about on the mossy floor like cannonballs. A dark charcoal ring marked the site of an old fire. I knelt by one wall, and scraped away a patch of moss and sand at its base. The stones descended as far as I could dig. The floor on which I was standing was the result of centuries of sand-drift. I remembered how, in certain parts of the Sahara, people did not try to keep the sand out of their houses, but would instead invite it in. They spread it thickly across the floors, then laid hand-woven rugs over it, and in this way used it to soften their sleep.
Later that afternoon, I left the broch and went walking, to see what the land and the water held. At the edge of the river, where the bank angled down into the water, the tides had cut the sand into stepped terraces.
Down on the shore, I found a limb of pale dry driftwood, rubbed by the sea back to its grain lines. I saw the tracks of an otter, perhaps the one we had seen, pressed into the wet sand as cleanly as a pastry cut, with a forwards fling of sand from the tip of each sharp toe-mark, showing that it had been moving at speed. I came across a set of animal bones, scattered in a rune I could not read. I picked up other things, carried them back to the broch, and laid them on its floor. A worn black stone, two inches long, shaped roughly like a seal; basalt, I guessed. A little rhomboid stone, whose grey and white strata recalled the grain of the driftwood and the sand terrace. A hank of dried seaweed. A wing feather from a buzzard, tawny and cream, barred with five dark diagonals. When I teased two of its vanes apart, they unzipped with a soft tearing noise. I arranged the objects into lines and patterns, changed their order. I would give the seal stone to my friend Leo, I thought, the seaweed to Roger, and I would keep the other objects for my storm-beach.