PART ONE: NARRATIVES history - myth - memory VIVID SIMPLICITIES “Occasionally, a story becomes so prominent in the consciousness of an entire society,” write Bruner and Gorfain, “that its recurrent tellings…help to constitute and reshape [that] society” (1988: 56). The Highland Clearances may be regarded as one such story.
Betrayal! In the terrible aftermath of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs… Following his magnificent reconstruction of the moorland battle in Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs grew rich on meat and wool, the people died of cholera and starvation or, evicted from the glens to make way for sheep, were forced to emigrate to foreign lands. ‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ - The Times (Prebble 1969: back cover) Faed's painting, 'The Last of the Clan', also appears on the cover of at least one other Clearance history
Despite the depth of academic research on the subject by historians, geographers and, more recently, archaeologists, the popular conception of the Clearances is one in which the power of the sensational image triumphs over the complexity of available data. “Vivid simplicities,” William Gass calls them, which are “impressed on the imagination like a decal…reimaged…re-seen” (1982: 131). Clearance ‘history’ is full of such images: the bullies setting fire to the thatch, the weeping of the exiles as they wend their ways from their ancestral lands, the scene at the coast as they gaze at the “white sailed ships” and the promise of a new start. But where do such images come from? Contrary to a popular claim (e.g. Craig 1990) I have found little evidence for the survival of a ‘folk memory’ of the Clearances save in the most vestigial of forms. Such a memory seems to have been replaced—its intricacies and particularities erased—by a genre of popular history-telling. Where old oral traditions have disappeared, Bangor-Jones observes, “the accounts of historians such as John Prebble have become the new oral tradition” (1993: 40). Prebble’s is still the most widely-available and most widely-read of the popular histories of the Clearances. It is his version—replete with its ‘vivid simplicities’—that has come to be the dominant account, surpassing previous ‘top down’ histories not with the rigour of its analysis, but with the dramatic nature of its prose. It is a process sometimes referred to as the ‘Prebble-isation’ of the Clearances. This usurpation of a ‘genuine’ memory by one derived from published accounts and documentary sources is borne out in my own research where I have generally found that those who know with certainty that their ancestors were evicted (and who often know from where and in which year) tend also to be avid readers of Clearance histories and have often carried out considerable archival investigation. The following, for example, is an excerpt from a conversation between two croft-holders I recorded. They are responding to a question about local knowledge of the Clearances:
	“They don’t know much. They don’t know much… Old A— C— who died, he was very interested in it and he had a sharp mind and his granny had been evicted. But apart from that very few people… R— B—…” “Yes, we lost them, yes…” “These people are dead… but their writings will live after them…” “They didn’t write…” “Oh, R— B— had lots and lots of stuff.” “And where is that stuff?” “I don’t know where it is.” … “Mr Basu was asking about the remaining resentment about the Clearances.” “Yes.” “They shout about it but then when…” “Yes, but you don’t know the history…” “No… no…” “I know the hi…” “If Lord Strathnaver comes around they touch their forelocks.” “I’ve read a lot about it… and I’ve got that much… but I didn’t get much tradition passed on to me by word of mouth, do you follow? Maybe a little, a wee bit from A— C—. But most of the stuff was book-learning in my case, you see.”
A retired school-teacher from Helmsdale told me that it was thanks to historians such as John Prebble and Ian Grimble that the Clearances are not now forgotten. Her comments are particularly insightful since she later taught at the same school she had attended as a child.
	“…the interest in the Clearances would have gone had it not been for John Prebble and his works. In Helmsdale School we were taught by a man from the west of Sutherland who was a red hot socialist and whose people had been cleared, and there was no mention of clearances in our history… Never heard of them in Helmsdale School. And actually I only began to take an interest in the Clearances when Ian Grimble brought out his book, The Trial of Patrick Sellar [1962], and it was then I went deeper and learnt more about them.”
I asked whether she had introduced the Clearances into the curriculum.
	“The Clearances became very popular as history. You know the books, the Then and There series, there was one brought out specifically for the Clearances, and because Helmsdale was mentioned then the children were delighted, you know, that their own area was in focus… Yes, I flogged the Clearances. I certainly saturated them in Clearance history.”
When asked how she approached the subject, she admitted that she took the “wicked landlord line” with its “fire and violence” and Sellar’s infamous utterance, “Damn the old witch, let her burn, she’s lived long enough!”
	“Oh yes, they loved that! But in a way you wonder if it’s a good thing to have done that: to breed antagonism. But how else is it remembered if there’s not something dramatic incorporated?”
'After' and 'before': representation of the burning of William Chisholm's house, Badinloskin next to an image of rural idyll. School-children's paintings on the walls of Strathnaver Museum, Farr.
Nora mourns a period of lost innocence when “true” memories concerning the “habits, customs, and folk wisdom” of a people were passed unreflectingly from generation to generation (Hutton 1993: 149). In encoding such traditions in documentary form historians materialise memory, and their documents begin to shape the way the past is remembered rather than vice versa:
	One does not discover objective knowledge in data. Rather data cue particular reminiscences (150).
In exceptional circumstances where a ‘genuine’ folk memory does survive, it is often merely a fragment of a personal story or a place name woven into or provoked by the familiar narrative of published histories. It is interesting to note in this context that a much more extensive oral tradition survives for the period of the later land agitations and subsequent ‘heyday’ of the crofting community for which there is a relative dearth of historical research. Older members of such communities can often still recall the minutiae of local land transactions and list the occupants of long-abandoned croft houses. The survival of a folk memory therefore seems to vary in inverse proportion to the ingression of academic research and publication.
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