INTRODUCTION LOCUS CLASSICUS
	The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates…what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled lands were held. [Karl Marx, Capital , Volume 1]
Of all the Highland Clearances, those that took place in the name of the Duchess/Countess of Sutherland (1765-1839) and her millionaire English husband, Lord Stafford (1758-1833, created 1st Duke of Sutherland in the year of his death), are perhaps the most notorious. Described as among “the most controversial episodes in modern British history” (Richards 1985: 360), they have come to represent the entire process of rural dispossession, evoking all the violences associated with the transition from subsistence to capitalist production. Between the years of 1806 and 1822, amid claims of brutality and inhumane treatment, several thousand people were cleared off their ‘ancestral lands’ in the interior of Sutherland and resettled on coastal plots to enable the large-scale expansion of sheepfarming. Many emigrated, either abroad or to the industrial cities of the South. The controversy surrounding the Clearances was compounded by the nationally publicised trial of Patrick Sellar, a key figure among the clearers, for homicide. It was also in Sutherland that the word ‘burnings’ came to be associated with the Highland evictions and that the racial theme became especially prominent: the Estate owners, its managers and its sheepfarmers being identified as Lowlanders or, “still worse, as Englishmen” (Richards 1982: 284). Although much has been written about the Clearances, the landscape over which such fierce antagonisms raged, and indeed still rage, has received surprisingly little academic attention. In 1935, Highland novelist Neil Gunn described the sombre mood of the landscape of Kildonan, Sutherland, clan lands of the MacKeamish Gunns until cleared in 1813-14:
	…in Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill, of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed (1987: 32).
Indeed, even now, nearly two-hundred years after the events, the ‘memory’ of the Highland Clearances still hovers like a dark cloud over many areas of Scotland. At a conference held in 1989 the late Sir Robert Cowan, Chairman of the now defunct Highlands and Islands Development Board, suggested that the ruins of the old houses that still litter the Highland landscape—the debris of the evictions—should be “cleared away” because they are “psychologically debilitating.” A reply in The Scots Magazine was not long in coming: Some Tourist Board chiefs might be attracted to the strange vision of neat, tidy glens, cleansed of all embarrassing reminder[s] of the Clearances. For yes, these broken walls and piles of stones are depressing but they are a monument to the communities that were driven from their homes, the families scattered to the four corners of the earth. The fragments of long-emptied houses and abandoned barns are, as a delegate pointed out, part of our heritage. They are material for historians and archaeologists as well as precious places of pilgrimage for people of Scottish blood from all over the world (quoted in Gibson 1996b: 55). We might call such landscapes symbolic. METHODOLOGY The tendency persists in which the remarkable is seen only in the exotic—in the aboriginal landscapes of Australia, Melanesia or America, perhaps, or among the standing stones and burials of prehistory. In this article I attempt to employ the literature of such exotica in the analysis of a ‘modern’ landscape, and one rather closer to home. After all, the anthropological paradox remains true, that it is through the investigation of ‘the other’ that we may come to re-examine the familiar and find it equally remarkable. Rosaldo, for example, writes of his perplexity when confronted with the modes of Ilongot recollection, where a great density of meaning—spatial and temporal—seems to be compressed into incessantly repeated lists of place names. He describes how his informants are moved to tears as they recite “place name after place name,” while he, “in uncomprehending boredom,” can do nothing but transcribe them (Marcus & Fischer 1986: 99).
	[Ilongot]…excursions into the past are meticulously mapped onto the landscape, not onto a calendar…This is a problem as basic as it is vexing in the translation of culture. Were I to use their multiple ways of speaking about places, I would capture the tone of their texts but lose their historical sense (Rosaldo quoted in Marcus & Fischer 1986: 99).
And yet such a mode of story-telling is not without analogy in the West, perhaps not anywhere. For instance, in listing the names Somme, Mons, Marne, Arras, Passchendaele, etc. we recall not merely places, nor even moments in history; we evoke an array of images of mud, trenches and barbed wire that are saturated with both blood and emotion; they are sedimented in our national psyche and reverberate in individual family histories. The names resonate through the history books of the twentieth century, through the poetry of Owen, the sculptures of Jagger, through the silences of November 11 (see Fussell 1975; Dyer 1994). To those who know, the names Kildonan and Strathnaver, Grummore, Grumbeg, Achadh an Eas and Rosal are equally redolent. The article is structured around three broad themes: NARRATIVES, LANDSCAPES and IDENTITIES. These correspond approximately to three questions one could ask of landscape narratives: what is told? how is it told? and why is it told? Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape remains a key text, particularly his section on ‘landscape and the arts of narrative’:
	…when a story becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the place dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. Places help to recall stories that are associated with them, and places exist (as named locales) by virtue of their emplotment in a narrative. Places, like persons, have biographies inasmuch as they are formed, used and transformed in relation to practice. It can be argued that stories acquire part of their mythic value and historical relevance if they are rooted in the concrete details of locales in the landscape, acquiring material reference points that can be visited, seen and touched (1994: 33).
Much of what follows is an attempt to elaborate these assertions within the specific context of the Sutherland Clearances. A short period of fieldwork was carried out in the course of researching this article during which I was able to visit and photograph sites implicated in the ‘Clearance story’ in Sutherland and Caithness and where I had the opportunity to talk with a number of local people about their personal experiences of such places and about their knowledge of the evictions in general. To sample attitudes from a more diverse group of people who nevertheless share a common heritage, a questionnaire was distributed at the 1997 international gathering of the Clan Gunn Society. Respectful of their privacy I have not included the names of any interviewees or informants. The remainder of the research was library-based or else carried out through correspondence. A summary of the research was presented at a seminar in Inverness as part of the Highland Council’s ‘Archaeology Week’ in August 1997. A dilemma central to the research project has been whether to survey a broad range of sites and stories connected with the Clearances in Sutherland, or else produce a much more detailed analysis of just one or two examples. Since it is not only the depth but also the variety of landscape narratives that fascinates, I have attempted to tread a middle path. If such a strategy makes the article somewhat introductory in nature, it is hoped that it also suggests an agenda for further research. IMAGES & TEXTS Barthes writes that the photograph is not “an isolated structure” but that “it is in communication with at least one other structure,” namely the “text” that accompanies it: a title, caption or essay for instance. The totality of information conveyed is born from a dialogue between image and text (1993: 195). Throughout the article I develop this notion and, drawing particularly from the work of Berger (1972; 1982) and Burgin (1982; 1986), experiment with different image-text combinations to explore other “ways of telling”. I employ a convention where images and texts are intended to engage in a dialogue. Discussing the potential of such “photowork” in archaeology, Michael Shanks encourages the use of montage—“the cutting and reassembling of fragments of meanings, images, things, quotations, and borrowings”—as a way of accessing new insights, understanding and meaning (1997: 84). Where they are available, we might equally extend the range of our anthropological sources, as Jedrej and Nuttall do in their study of rural repopulation in Scotland, to include “Novels, poetry, official documents, books, newspapers, biographies, magazine articles, pamphlets, histories, programmes, advertisements, brochures, guides, academic disserations, surveys, manifestos,” etc. (1996: 5). I have not discounted any of these avenues of investigation. Like Shanks’ Dunstanburgh Castle, the Scottish Highland landscape “reeks of the picturesque” (1992: 148). Such an impression is made familiar through its ubiquitous representation in tourist brochures, posters and commercials and in countless ‘coffee-table’ books (Gold & Gold 1995); I attempt here to present an alternative—though, it is important to add, no less ‘conventional’—aesthetic. SPELLING OF PLACE NAMES For the sake of consistency, when referring to places in the text, I have used the spellings that appear on the latest edition of the Ordnance Survey map. A gazetteer of places mentioned in the article is included in the References section, this gives alternative spellings where used in quotation and National Grid References of the sites.
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