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story in the Highlands, though nowhere was as thoroughly cleansed as Knoydart, and it has been
vividly recounted many times. Here is one from Neil Gunn, a Scottish novelist of the early
twentieth century:
As always the recollection is dominated by dramatic images – the ragged remnants of a
once proud peasantry hounded from the hills by the factors and police were driven aboard
disease-ridden ships bound for outlandish colonies, their families broken, their ministers
compliant and the collective agony sounded by the pibroch and the wailing of pathetic
humanity.
By and large, the English were blamed for this human translocation and spiritual genocide, not
that the landlords were themselves English but came from a heavily anglicized Scottish aristocracy
who spent most of their time in London. Still the Celtic identity, in Ireland, Wales and Scotland,
and the language, defines itself in part at least as being ‘not English’. That is not to say it is an
aggressive demarcation, and as an Englishman with very little Gaelic living on Skye I have never
been made to feel less than welcome.
Of course, the main emigration of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whether by
the forced hand of the landlord or for the opportunities for a better life on offer in Glasgow and the
other industrial towns of the Central Belt or the colonies, meant that as people left Scotland, and
Ireland too, they arrived somewhere else. Estimates vary, but one set of figures has it that there are
28 million people of Scottish and 16 million of Irish descent spread throughout the world. Even if
these figures are way off the mark, and they are conservative estimates, there are now far more
Celts living overseas than in the Isles. Most made their homes in the New World, mainly the USA
and Canada, but emigration to Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent South Africa adds
millions to this list. In some places, like the southern part of South Island, New Zealand, the Scots
practically took over the whole country and, tellingly, the principal town Dunedin has the Gaelic
name for Edinburgh.
Many emigrating Celts and their descendants did extremely well, of course, but ironically,
given the circumstances of their leaving, they were also sometimes guilty of dispossessing the
indigenous people of their tribal lands. As Paul Besu, a social anthropologist from University
College London, writes:
Scots pioneers in Victoria (Australia) were often land-grabbers and squatters who
were notorious for their ruthlessness and the Scots, like the English, Welsh and Irish,
played a full part in the harsh treatment of Aboriginal peoples. It was ironic that some
of the most notoriously involved were Highlanders who themselves had suffered
clearance and privation in the old country.
Paul Besu was researching what it was that drew the descendants of these emigrants to search out
their roots in Scotland and he interviewed people about their reasons for making these journeys
from the other side of the world. Tens of thousands of Americans, Canadians, Australians and New
Zealanders come to Scotland and Ireland every year to seek out and placate their innermost desires
to see and feel the homelands of their ancestors. Of course there are comparable numbers of