The evictions continued.  "The scene was truly heartrending," Donald Ross, the lawyer, wrote to the Northern Ensign.  "The women and children went about tearing their hair and the heaven with their cries.  Mothers and tender infants at their breasts looked helplessly on, while their effects and their aged and infirm relatives were cast out, and the doors of their houses locked in their faces.  No mercy was shown to age or sex.  All were indiscriminately thrown out and left to perish.  There was no word spoken of emigration, or of other land on Skye which, in an unguarded moment, Lord MacDonald had said might be theirs.  The doors were nailed up and the people were told to go.  When the officers left at dusk the women and children crawled into the byres and sheep-cots.  And waited. 

     At Portree, the two MacRaes and MacInnes gave their word to appear before the Court of Justiciary in Inverness.  Without food and without money, they walked a hundred miles and arrived two days before their trial, surrendering themselves with dignity at the Tolbooth.  Factor and Sheriff-Officers, who were to appear against them, had already arrived in their conveyances, said Donald Ross, at the public's expense, and lived right loyally, never dreaming but that they would obtain a victory and get the three men sent to the penitentiary to wear hoddy, break stones, or pick oakum for at least twelve months.' 

     At their trial the men were defended by a persuasive and passionate advocate called Rennie.  'It really becomes a matter for serious reflection,' he said, 'how far  the pound of flesh allowed by the law is permitted to be extracted from the bodies of the Highlanders.  Here are thirty-two  families driven out, and  for what?  For a tenant, who I believe, has not yet been found.  But it is the will of Lord MacDonald and Messrs Brown and Ballingall that they should be ejected; and the civil law having failed them, the criminal law with all its terrors is called in to overwhelm these unhappy people.  But, thank God, it has come before a jury!'  And the jury, with great enthusiasm, returned a verdict of Not Guilty. 

     The MacRaes and MacInnes went back to Loch Eishort, where their families and others were living in the shelter of walls and huts.  The men opened the houses, put back the roof timbers and lit peat on the hearths again.  The little victory was brief.  Notwithstanding  the verdict at Inverness, the writs of removal were still valid in law.  Five days after Christmas, in a bitter wind and drifting snow, the factor MacDonald came again with his men.  In Suishnish they turned out all the MacInnes family, the old man Neill who was its head, and his sons Alexander and Donald.  Bedding, furniture and crockery were thrown through the doors.  Donald MacGinnis was away looking for sheep in the snow when he heard the cries and shouts from Suishnish, and he came back at the run.  His sick wife was cowering against a wall in a bed-gown and with child at her breast.  He tore down the bars from his cottage and carried her inside again, and when the factor threatened him with prosecution he 'armed himself with a formidable oak cudgel which he promised  to bring with all his strength over the head of the first who would meddle with his wife or with himself'. 

     In Boreraig the factor's men were floundering in the snow, dragging out the belongings of the MacRaes.  The mother of John and Duncan was eighty-one and MacDonald yelled at her to take up her bed and walk.  When she said nothing, but stared at him with dark eyes, he ordered her to be pulled out on her blanket.  A MacRae child of seven stood before the factor crying, 'O nam bitheadh m'athair an so an diugh, co aig an robh a' chhridhe so dheanamh oirnn!'  (If my father was here today, who would dare to do this to us!)  But it was done, and once more the houses were nailed up and the snow fell on the little heaps of clothing, on the women and the children huddled against the walls.

     Many of them were still there in February, living like animals in the open, when Donald Ross came from Glasgow with food and clothing.  He found Flora Robertson, a widow of ninety-six, existing on half a crown a month from the Parochial board.  She had been living in a sheep-cot since the September eviction and was starving.  Anything more wretched than the appearance of this old woman I never yet witnessed.  Her bed, a pallet of straw and some pieces of old blanket was on the bare floor.  Her face and arms were the colour of lead.  I asked her what was it she complained of most.  She tried to raise herself up, and she replied, "I complain of nothing, but weakness  and the want of food." 

     He saw seven children, all under the age of eleven, lying in a shed on a collection of rubbish, fern, meadow-hay, straw, pieces of old blanket and rags of clothing.  Rain and snow fell upon them.  They were so thin, and so  light, he said, that he could have carried them all in his arms for a quarter of a mile without feeling their weight.  It would be insulting the feelings and commonsense of right-thinking persons to ask them if this is a fair and legal treatment of the poor. The injustice is so palpable, the inhumanity so great, that one can scarcely find language sufficiently strong to condemn it!  The Parish Relief for the families was rarely more than two shillings a month.

     Eighteen people were still living on the shore of Boreraig when spring came, or on the muir about Suishnish.  The others had gone or had died in the open like Flora Robertson. 

     One of the last to leave Boreraig had been an old man of eighty-six.  I have paid sixty-six rents to the MacDonalds, he told Donald Ross, and I am not one farthing in arrears.  To be cast out of my house and my home to make room for his sheep is what I never expected.  It is breaking my heart.

The Highland Clearances
by John Prebble

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