Clearance Quotes

“During the 20th century, the Forestry Commission (FC) bought land and planted it with commercial forestry crops on a massive scale. In most cases the land was bought from cash-strapped private land-owners who were required, prior to afforestation, to terminate or otherwise end farm tenancies. What is less well known about this period of forestry expansion is that following purchase the FC embarked on an active programme of property ruination, involving the abandonment and deliberate destruction of hundreds of vacated residential properties, mainly farmsteads. The ruins of these farmsteads are still visible in many forests currently managed by Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) and act as a poignant symbol of Scotland's clearance legacy.”
― Douglas MacMillan, Reforesting Scotland 71, Spring/Summer 2025

“Scotland's passage from a mainly pastoral and agrarian society to a commercial and industrial one was brutal, rapid and relentless. In that transition, an entire peasant class, the cottars - perhaps as much as half of the rural population - was lost forever. They and tens of thousands of even poorer people were forced off the land across the Lowlands, Highlands and islands. They ended up in towns, cities and planned villages, they worked in mills, mines, quarries and iron works, or they emigrated to other parts of the world, or became soldiers, sailors, engineers, administrators and merchants in the service of the British Empire or the companies that thrived under its bellicose protection. Many prospered, many did not.”
― James Robertson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“Even in the early phases of tenant reduction, during the seventeenth century, many of the dispossessed appear to have maintained a foothold in the local area, often by turning to spinning and other activity associated with sheep farming - a more formal division of production and gendering of the working population. However, by the 1710s, the decade when the Buccleuchs began efforts to rationalise their 'South Country' operations, as many as two thirds of the Ettrick and Yarrow valley farms were under a single tenancy. By the 1790s, it was nine in ten. It is across this period that widespread dispossession seems to have turned into widespread clearance across the Southern Uplands in general, and Ettrick and Yarrow in particular. Tenants compelled to flit at the end of a tack would take with them wives, children, elderly relatives and unrelated servants, each removal amounting to a substantial dent to the population.”
― Angus Sutherland, Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025