A History of the Highland Clearances
A History of the Highland Clearances

Author: Eric Richards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-05

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1000081613

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First published in 1982, A History of the Highland Clearances looks at the forcible clearance of tenants from land they had farmed for centuries by landlords in the Highlands of Scotland in the early nineteenth century. It examines the general context of historical change, provides a full narrative of the clearances and offers a critical evaluation of the documentary sources upon which the entire story depends. By placing his subject in its historical perspective and into the context of the rest of Britain and Europe, Eric Richards vividly illustrates the realities of the Highland experience in the age of the clearances.

The Highland Clearances
The Highland Clearances

Author: Eric Richards

Publisher: Birlinn

Published: 2012-11-05

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 0857905244

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The Highland Clearances stands out as one of the most emotive chapters in the history of Scotland. This book traces the origins of the Clearances from the eighteenth century to their culmination in the crofting legislation of the 1880s. In considering both the terrible suffering of the Highland people as well as the stark choices that faced landowners during a period of rapid economic change, it shows how the Clearances were one of many 'attempted' solutions to the problem of how to maintain a population on marginal and infertile land, and were, in fact, part of a wider European movement of rural depopulation. In drawing attention away from the mythology to the hard facts of what actually happened, The Highland Clearances offers a balanced analysis of events which created a terrible scar on the Highland and Gaelic imagination.

Mador of the Moor
Mador of the Moor

Author: James Hogg

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1474469213

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With an Essay on Hogg's Literary Friendships by Janette Currie and an Appendix on the Popular Context by Suzanne GilbertScottish popular tradition includes a group of stories about a King who has adventures - amorous and otherwise - as he wanders in disguise among his people. Many of these stories focus on James V and in Walter Scott's long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) the King encounters a mysterious lady while he is wandering alone and unrecognised in the Highlands. At first sight Scott's heroine seems to be a simple country girl, but she turns out to be a daughter of the great aristocratic house of Douglas, living for the time being in a rural exile.Scott's romantic and aristocratic version of the old 'wandering King' stories was hugely popular in its day, but Hogg subverts and questions this tale in Mador of the Moor (1816). The name 'Mador' suggests 'made o'er', 'made over', and Mador of the Moor is in effect a makeover of The Lady of the Lake. Hogg's poem, like Scott's, tells how a deer-hunt in the Highlands leads a disguised King of Scots into a love-adventure with a young woman. However Hogg's heroine, Ila Moore, is not a chaste aristocrat but a girl of low social standing who is made pregnant by the wandering King. Ila's inherent resourcefulness and strength of character suggest that a peasant girl pregnant out of wedlock can be a heroine fully worthy of respect, and Mador (rejected as shocking and ridiculous by its original readership), now re-emerges as a flowing and immensely readable narrative that eloquently challenges the deeply-ingrained class and gender prejudices of Hogg's society.