Cattle Droving and Sheep Farming
Among the thousands of items held in the Highland Folk Museum's Kingussie collection is a piece of metal which can be seen to have something of the shape of a cow's hoof. That piece of metal, the only one of its kind I've ever seen, constitutes something of a link with what had become, by the later decades of the eighteenth century, easily the most booming business in the Highlands. This business consisted of cattle-droving.  

With eighteenth-century Britain's towns and cities expanding rapidly, there was an urgent need for new sources both of beef and of hides: the former being a major food source; the latter being turned into the leather from which boots, shoes and many other goods were made. The Highlands were well placed to meet this demand. In the period following Culloden, therefore, thousands of cattle were regularly moved southwards.  

The drovers who organised the cattle trade, and who were mostly Highlanders, seemed, to the southerners with whom they dealt, decidedly unprepossessing: 'great, stalwart, hirsute men'; 'shaggy and uncultured and wild'; 'dressed usually in homespun tweeds which smelt of heather and peat smoke'. But for all their rough-and-ready appearance, drovers were men to be reckoned with. Like the nineteenth-century American cowboys - themselves, very often, of Highland extraction - whose job it was to get millions of cattle annually out of localities like Texas and Montana, eighteenth-century drovers typically combined immense physical exertion with entrepreneurial abilities of a high order.

And that piece of metal in the Folk Museum's Kingussie collection? It's a shoe of the type fastened to cattle's hooves to protect those hooves from the effects of being driven over many miles of the roughly-metalled roads which had been constructed by General Wade's troops.

For much of the eighteenth century, the profits generated by the export of cattle were just about sufficient to meet the cash requirements of men who, though they or their forebears had been clan chiefs, were now lairds or landlords. As such, they were acquiring all the expensive tastes of the southern landed gentry with whom they mingled increasingly. The rents levied by the lairds on tenants of the sort then living in Raitts went up steeply.   

But because such tenants were themselves getting higher and higher returns on the calves they sold each autumn, higher rents - though bitterly resented - could be paid. This was what was meant by the Church of Scotland minister, serving the parish of Alvie (a parish which included Raitts), when, in the course of the 1790s, he observed: 'The rent is paid from the increase of the cattle.'

By that point, however, enormous changes were in the offing. Southern sheep breeds like the cheviot and the blackface, which had been introduced to the Highlands some 20 or 30 years earlier, were proving much more lucrative, from a landowner's point of view, than cattle. Although Highlanders had long possessed some sheep, they were smaller and less profitable than those now being established. To buy worthwhile numbers of such sheep required more capital than was possessed by most Highland tenants of the traditional sort. Nor did Highlanders have the management skills needed to handle big numbers of blackfaces or cheviots. The arrival of what Gaelic-speakers called na caoraich mora, the big sheep, was consequently accompanied by the enforced removal from their homes of many thousands of families - whose lands were rented to incoming sheep farmers.

These events are known as the Highland Clearances. They began in the later eighteenth century. They continued until the middle decades of the nineteenth century. During this period, many long-established townships were completely emptied of people. Among the townships to suffer this fate was Raitts. In the 1790s, the then parish minister of Kingussie commented: 'Sheep farming has not as yet made any considerable progress in the parish.' Half-a-century later, in the 1840s, this minister's successor wrote: 'The greater part of [the parish] now consists of large sheep walks [farms].'

In 1828 or thereby, some 30 families were cleared from townships at the foot of Ben Shiant in Ardnamurchan on the orders of the landlord, Sir James Riddell. An Ardnamurchan poet, Iain MacLachlainn, John MacLachlan, who visited the locality some years after its people's departure, reflected on what he saw there. MacLachlan's poem contains something of the sadness, and anger, which the Highland Clearances - still a cause of contention in modern Scotland - engendered among Highlanders.

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