Description: This is the story of how Scottish chiefs and lairds preferred The Great Cheviot Sheep to the clansmen who had once been their warrior rent-roll. Between 1790 and 1850 a whole race was dispossessed and dispersed.

The uprooting of the Highland people, and the final destruction of their society in favour of wool and mutton, was actively supported by the Law and by the established Church. In some counties, Sutherland particularly, it was called Improvement. Roads were built through emptied glens, bridges crossed deserted rivers. When the ‘idle and indolent peasantry’ protested, their ministers told them that the laird’s wish was God’s will, and that famine and pestilence, which came all too frequently in the wake of the eviction, were a Divine punishment on a sinful and lazy people. 

The Highlanders were defenceless against the new sheep economy. They were the victims of their own traditions, and of the melancholy that had lain on their spirits since the military defeat of the clans at Culloden. They were betrayed by their chiefs, whose children they believed themselves to be. The lairds Clanranald, Atholl, Breadalbane, Lochiel, Ross, Sutherland, Argyll and the Isles became the chiefs of roast lamb and worsted cloth. Their people went to the slums of Glasgow, or died from fever and smallpox on their way to Upper Canada and the stock farms of Australia.

The story is told, where possible, in the words of the people, or of those few men who wrote in their defence. It is told, too, in the words of those who defended Improvement: Donald MacLeod of Geanies, the militant Sheriff of Ross; James Loch and Patrick Sellar, who brought 200,000 sheep to Sutherland; Mrs Beecher Stowe, who found no Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Sutherland, and who equated civilization with the sale of shoe-blacking.