In 1792, the Highlands of Scotland were being invaded.
Men, women and children were being driven off their land.
The invaders were sheep, new breeds developed for survival on these mountains.
Suddenly, the lairds could make serious money out of this wild country.
They started clearing the people out and bringing the sheep in.
The men of Ross had had enough.
So they decided on a radical and astonishing course of direct action.
They planned to drive the sheep right out of the Highlands.
400 men began herding sheep from Ross, from Sutherland, and pushing them south.
The local sheriff was terrified.
He believed the sheep-rustlers were armed and he'd heard rumours
that they'd brought 26lb of gunpowder with them.
He wrote to the Lord Advocate
and asked for three companies of soldiers to restore order.
"You can be no stranger to the seditious acts that are going on in this county.
"The flame is spreading. What is our case today,
"if matters are permitted to proceed, will be yours tomorrow."
This is the story of the violent, unequal struggle between
the people who owned the land and the people who lived on it.
But it wasn't just force that kept the Scottish people in their place.
It was fantasy, a myth so powerfully told
that it still shapes how we think about Scotland.
1792 was a terrifying year for the landed gentry.
just across the Channel, the revolution was in full swing.
The French had deposed their king.
No French aristocrat, property or life was safe.
Dangerous ideas of freedom were spreading like sparks in the wind.
In Ross, the sheriff thought he was facing the start of Scotland's own revolution.
The rustlers crossed the Kyle of Sutherland.
Here, they set up camp for the night.
Over 6,000 stolen sheep filled the glen.
The sheriff's reinforcements arrived at around eight o'clock in the evening.
Three companies of soldiers from Fort William.
The sheriff marched them straight on through the night
to confront the sheep-rustlers,
but when they arrived in the valley, though the fires were still burning
and the sheep were still there, the Highlanders were gone.
For centuries, the Highlands had been a feudal society.
Tenants scraped a living from the (and, their housing and grazing
provided by the laird, the clan chief.
In return, they gave him their unquestioning loyalty.
But not any more. In the lowlands, estates had been cleared
and landowners had made a great deal of money.
This was a modern, commercial age and the Highland lairds refused to be left behind.
The way they viewed their land was different now.
The clan chiefs had become landlords.
As far as they were concerned,
the Highlanders lived in great poverty and squalor.
Why on earth would you want to preserve that?
So, move them to the coast, make them live on the (and that's no good for sheep.
They can't stand in the way of progress.
But for the Highlanders, nothing had changed. They still believed
they had an unwritten right to live on the land of their forefathers,
based on centuries of tradition.
The people of the Highlands felt a devastating sense of betrayal.
People fled from the countryside
into the swelling industrial towns of Scotland's Central Belt.
It was the start of the new century and everything familiar
was swept away in the rush to modernity and profit.
This was a new Scotland.
Many found it absolutely terrifying.
Walter Scott was determined that such radical change
should not lead to chaos and anarchy.
Scott was a local sheriff in Melrose.
He had taken part in suppressing a riot among the weavers of Galashiels
and been stoned for his trouble.
He believed what had happened in France could easily happen in Scotland.
"The country," he said, "is mined below our feet."
So what did he do?
He picked up his pen and wrote.
Scott's novels gave the British people exactly what they needed -
an escape from the uncertain modern world into history.
Waverley was the bestselling book of the summer of 1814
and Rob Roy was a publishing sensation,
being read everywhere from the Prince of Wales' castle to the weaver's cottage.
Scott told stories of brave Scottish bandits,
fiery Highland maidens, stag hunts, great feasts and doomed battles.
Just as the Clearances were emptying the Highlands,
Scott recreated them and celebrated their past.
By 1814, Scott wasn't just writing about history, he was building it.
He had bought a run-down old farmhouse near Melrose
called ”C [arty Hole '; which means dirty puddle.
He used the money from his writing to knock it down and build himself this.
And he didn't call it Clarty Hole.
He called it Abbotsford and he called himself the Laird of Abbotsford.
Power comes from ownership of the land.
Now Scott had that.
Over the next 20 years, he'd buy up more and more of it,
a field here, a wood there, until he owned 14,000 acres.
In a time when you didn't have to worry about border raids or attacking armies,
Scott's house harks back to the fortified buildings of the 16th century.
But this wasn't for defence, this was for show.
This is his riff on the romantic past - a Scotsman's home is his castle.
And Scott was ahead of a trend.
Abbotsford was just one of a rash of fake medieval castles across the country.
The landed gentry started building a dream of Scotland's past in stone
and then living the dream.
(BELL CHIMES)
Scott filled his imitation castle with a magpie collection of relics
from the romantic past.
From the minute you walk through the front door,
you don't know where to look first.
No, you don't, there's so much to look at.
- How long was Scott at this collecting? - Years.
I think actually all his life.
I think he was a born collector,
- particularly of things Scottish. - And this, for example, what is this?
- Whose is this? - This is Rob Roy's sgian dubh.
- This was tucked into Rob Roy's sock? - It was, it was.
That is the real, genuine article.
- Does it open? - It does, but I'm not going to let you.
What about the cross? Whose cross is it?
That was carried by Mary, Queen of Scots, to her execution.
That would've been in her hand on her last walk?
Yes. And it's a beautiful object in its own right.
- That's got power, that's magic. - That's got real magic, yes.
- This is a strange thing. - Yes.
A musket ball and what?
It's a piece of oatcake taken from the pocket of a Highlander
after the Battle of Culloden. A fallen Highlander, obviously.
So that's a last morsel that he didn't even have time to eat.
That's right, that's right.
Do you think that's true? Could Scott have been able to have it proven to him
that that had really come from Culloden?
Scott was quite keen on getting things
that were actually real things with good provenance.
So my feeling is, if Scott said it's an oatcake
from a Highlander at the Battle of Culloden, it probably is.
In 1815, Walter Scott grabbed his chance to see history in the making.
In France, the revolutionary terror had been followed by a military dictatorship.
Napoleon had dominated all Europe.
The British had finally beaten him after 22 years of near-continual fighting.
Scott travelled to Waterloo to see the reality of war for himself.
He was one of the first British tourists to get there.
The battlefield was still littered with the corpses of the slain.
Scott was horrified.
This was what you got when the social order broke down.
This was what the French Revolution had led to -
anarchy and then tyranny and then death.
He still picked up a few trophies for his collection, though.
Now the Napoleonic Wars were over, the Continent opened up again to trade.
Weavers and factory workers had to compete with cheap goods from abroad.
The economy slumped and the whole of Britain went into recession.
Tens of thousands of ex-soldiers joined the unemployed.
The ideas generated by the French Revolution hadn't disappeared.
They'd just been shouted down while the country was at war. Now they were back.
Andrew Hardie was a weaver.
Like many weavers, he was an educated man with a fierce interest in radical ideas.
He saw a great deal wrong with the world around him.
He knew the terrible conditions of the workers in Scotland's factories
and the desperate poverty of the unemployed.
He believed in votes for all and an end to the powerlessness of the working man.
And he wasn't alone.
A huge demonstration in Paisley demanded no king, no lords, no gentry, no taxes.
They wanted nothing less than a workers' revolution.
It was exactly what Andrew Hardie wanted and what terrified Walter Scott.
So what did Scott do?
In the midst of all this unrest, he set out on a quest
to find the lost crown and sceptre of the Scottish kings.
Odd.
But Scott could see a use for them.
For hundreds of years,
the crown, the sceptre and sword had made Scotland's kings.
They were potent symbols of Scottish nationhood.
Then the Union of 1707 made the Scottish Crown jewels redundant.
For over a century, they'd been locked away in Edinburgh Castle.
There were even rumours they'd been smuggled to England.
Over a rather good dinner, Scott persuaded George, the Prince Regent,
that the Scottish Crown jewels still had symbolic power...
...and that finding them would make the people feel patriotic
and loyal to their King.
Walter Scott broke into the sealed room in Edinburgh Castle.
Apparently, someone in the little gathering picked up the crown
and began to play about with it
and then moved as if to place it on someone else's head.
Scott stopped him short.
To him at least, this was a serious business.
And these items belonged to the ancient line of Scotland's monarchs.
After all, these were the very tools of kingmaking.
This was Scotland's history.
Hundreds gathered outside the castle.
The Royal Standard was raised on the battlement
to tell them the crown had been found.
(CROWD CHEERING)
The crowd cheered. Scott's mission had been successful.
In a time of unrest, Scott pushed a version of Scotland
ruled by kings, where everyone else knew their place.
But the radicals weren't listening.
The Scottish Crown jewels and all they stood for had nothing to offer them.
Andrew Hardie was 26 now, but he hadn't married his sweetheart, Margaret,
probably because he couldn't afford to.
Margaret hated Hardie's politics.
She thought they'd get him into serious trouble.
She was right.
The unrest spread across Scotland.
In Dundee, a protest meeting 10,000 strong
called for electoral reform,
general elections every year, and votes for everyone.
The Government listened and responded.
The Government banned public meetings.
This was class war.
The radicals were angry, because they had no voice.
There were over two million people in Scotland,
but only 4,000 got to vote.
A Paisley band were locked up for playing Scots Wha Hae at a demonstration.
Burns had written it 25 years before, at least partly as a protest song.
Now it was printed as a broadside and passed from hand to hand.
(THEY PLAY THE TUNE OF Scots Wha Hae)
This is an anthem for the Scots who bled and died with Wallace on the battlefield.
Listen to these words.
Lay the proud usurpers low
Tyrants fall in every foe
Liberty's in every blow
Let us do or die!
The song was taken up by protesters in England as well as in Scotland.
Wallace had been reinvented as a hero of the revolution.
When Andrew Hardie spoke about another fellow radical, John Baird,
he paid him the ultimate compliment by saying,
"He's worthy of being classed with Sir William Wallace."
Scott decided to act and, again, he looked to the Highlands for an answer.
He called upon the chieftains to raise the Highland host to crush the radicals.
But Sir Walter's rallying cry was met with a deafening silence.
The Highland Chieftains had better things to do.
They were busy turning sheep into gold.
So Scott decided to set up his own army.
He recruited 300 men.
He called them the Gala Marksmen.
Scott was spoiling for a fight.
He offered to bring his volunteers anywhere in Scotland they were needed.
"One day's good fighting
"would cure them most radically of their radical malady.
"And if I had anything to say in the matter
"the y should remember the day for half a century to come- ”
But the authorities didn't take Scott up on his offer
and both he and his private army stayed at home.
On the night of Sunday 1st April 1820,
walls in Glasgow, Paisley, Dumbarton and Kilsyth were plastered
with a poster demanding a general strike to overthrow the Government.
Andrew Hardie was in the crowd when a justice of the Peace came up
and ordered one of the posters to be torn down.
Hardie pushed him out of the way.
"Before I permit you to take down yon notice," he said,
"I will part with the last drop of my blood."
This was the start of the radical war.
On the Monday, 60,000 workers
went on strike all across Scotland's industrial heartlands.
In Glasgow, the Provost wrote, "Almost the whole population of the working classes
"have obeyed the order in the treasonable proclamation by striking work."
The authorities marshalled the troops and mounted cannon here on Jamaica Bridge.
They were expecting serious trouble.
Hardie was told that the whole city would be in arms in the course of an hour
and that England had risen in rebellion already.
He wanted to fight in the uprising.
What do you need to overthrow the state?
What do you need for a radical war? For any war, for that matter?
Guns.
Hardie joined forces with an ex-soldier, John Baird,
and together they led a raiding party of about 50 men.
Their destination was the Carron Ironworks,
where the guns that had beaten Napoleon were made.
Hardie's plan was to march to Falkirk and seize control of the guns.
They stopped at a tavern at midday.
They were so sure of the rebellion's success that they got a receipt
so they could claim their expenses back later from the new radical government.
when they got to Bonnymuir,
they were confronted by a troop of Government cavalry.
Hardie's men took up position beside a five-foot wall here.
The cavalry charged.
The radicals opened fire,
stabbing at the horses with their pikes when they drew close enough.
The cavalry withdrew,
regrouped and charged again before the radicals had time to reload.
They were finished. Four men were wounded and 18 taken prisoner.
But the battle for workers' rights wasn't over.
While Baird and Hardie were defeated at Bonnymuir,
another radical, James Wilson, marched 100 men into Strathaven,
and took over the town.
Wilson was 63 years old.
He'd been politicised by the French Revolution
and involved in radical politics for nearly 30 years.
Now his moment had come.
Wilson formed a raiding party and went around the Lanarkshire town
requisitioning all the weapons he could find,
at gunpoint where necessary.
The local gentry were taken by surprise.
By the end of the night, Wilson had control of Strathaven.
MAN: Welcome to this annual commemoration of James Wilson
and the events of 1820, specifically the 1820 Rising.
"I am glad to hear my countrymen are resolved to act like men.
"We are seeking nothing but the rights of our forefathers.
"Liberty is not worth having if it is not worth fighting for."
...and we'll have one minute's silence.
The next morning, Wilson and 24 others set off towards Glasgow.
They hoped to meet up with the rumoured huge radical army of workers
who would've joined to overthrow the state.
They carried with them a banner reading, "Scotland free or a desert."
But the masses hadn't risen.
At the rendezvous at Cathkin Braes, there was no-one else there.
So they hid their weapons in the bracken, turned around and fled for home.
By the end of the week, the status quo had been restored.
The uprising, such as it was, had been suppressed and the radical war was over.
However angry and unhappy the Scottish people were without a vote,
they would never again go the way of France and join in open revolution.
88 people were found guilty of high treason.
James Wilson, John Baird and Andrew Hardie were sentenced to death.
"My dear and loving Margaret, before this arrives to your hand,
"I will be made immortal.
"I shall die firm to the cause which I took up arms to defend
"and although we were outwitted and betrayed,
"yet I protest as a dying man that it was done with a good intention on my part.
"Could you have thought that I was sufficient to stand such a stroke?
"Which at once burst upon me like an earthquake and buried all my vain,
"earthly hopes beneath its ruins
"and left me a poor, shipwrecked mariner on this bleak shore,
"separated from the world and thee, in whom all my hopes were centred.
"My dear Margaret, I will be under the necessity
"of laying down my pen, as this will have to go out immediately.
”A gain, fare we [1, my dear Margaret. ”
John Baird and Andrew Hardie were executed in Stirling.
They were only allowed to speak from the scaffold
on the condition they didn't talk about politics.
But Hardie shouted to the crowd,
"I die a martyr to the cause of truth and justice. "
Hardie's letter to Margaret was published in a broadside
and sold on the streets of Edinburgh for a penny.
Scott bought a copy and wrote on it,
"Curious particulars regarding Baird, who suffered for high treason, 1820."
The letter's from Hardie, of course, not Baird.
Scott's got them muddled up.
But, as far as Scott was concerned, the letter was a relic for his collection.
After all, the radical war was history.
But Scotland's workers were still unhappy.
Government by the elite under the King
had been defended with the bayonet
but, in order to rule effectively, governments need popular consent.
It was a problem.
Scott thought he could solve it.
In 1820, roly-poly George finally became King.
He made Scott a baronet.
Now George IV decided to visit Scotland to see for himself
the country he had only read about in Scott's novels.
Naturally, he asked Sir Walter Scott to organise things.
And Scott took the ball and ran with it.
He set up his headquarters here, at 39 Castle Street.
Scott understood the opportunity.
As one of the greatest communicators of his age,
he knew that he had to make the visit tell a story.
He realised that what was needed
was a simple, dramatic, romantic, visually striking image.
Complexity wouldn't work.
He painted with bright colours and a broad brush.
He turned Scotland tartan.
We were all Highlanders now.
But the tartan image of Scotland wasn't just attractive and appealing.
It was also backward-looking.
The traditional feudal society of the Highlands appealed to Scott,
because it was a world where the working classes knew their proper place.
Scott wrote this, an advice pamphlet.
Hints, Addressed To The Inhabitants Of Edinburgh And Others,
In Prospect Of His Majesty's Visit.
In it, he said that George was the descendant
of a long line of Scottish kings,
and therefore the kinsman of many Scots.
"Let us, on this happy occasion, remember that it is so,
"and behave towards him as a father."
This was a brilliant lie.
George was mostly German, of the House of Hanover,
and yet Scott was telling his fellow Scots that we had to be loyal,
because "we are the clan and our King is the chief".
Because King George was already a huge fan of Scott's Highland romances,
he adored the idea of being the Highland chief of chiefs.
And he'd always loved dressing up.
He went to his tailor and ordered the complete Highland dress.
It cost 1,354 pounds and 18 shillings.
In today's money, George spent around £100,000 on his outfit.
Say what you like about Scott, but he wasn't afraid of hard work.
King George gave just two weeks' notice of his visit.
But in 14 days Sir Walter was able to organise three royal processions,
a great gathering of the clans, two balls, several grand dinners,
a royal review of the troops on Portobello beach and, finally,
a royal visit to the theatre to see a performance of Scott's own play, Rob Roy.
The King's advisers were horrified.
George was always in debt and this sounded very expensive.
Scott was running away with himself.
Couldn't he keep it simple?
"When His Majesty comes amongst us, he comes to his ancient kingdom
"of Scotland and must be received according to ancient usages.
"If you persist in bringing in English customs,
"we turn about one and all and leave you.
"You take the responsibility on yourself."
That shut them up. You've got to admire Scott's brass neck here.
He was making up most of these ancient usages as he went along.
And now there was no stopping him. In a bravura piece of myth-making,
Scott took the Company of Archers, a gentlemen's sporting club,
and reinvented them as the ceremonial bodyguard to the King in Scotland,
a role they still have today.
So which one of your ancestors
was in the Company of Archers in Walter Scott's clay?
There were a number of my family, me included,
who have been in the Royal Company of Archers,
but in Scott's day it was the 4th Earl of Hopetoun,
who was my five-greats grandfather.
And he was the Captain General, who's the commander of the Royal Company.
And what, then, was the role of the company
during the course of George IV's visit?
They paraded when the King arrived. They were there to receive him.
They acted as his retinue, his bodyguards,
and to be on display and on parade wherever he went.
And this is actually what Scott thought a royal archer should look like?
This was exactly that. This is the 4th Earl's uniform,
as designed by Sir Walter Scott for the visit.
And this painting, is this a faithful rendition
of the King's visit to this house?
Yes, it is. This is a painting by a man called Denis Dighton,
who was here on the clay,
and then he worked up this fantastic painting afterwards.
So you've got the house itself in the background.
You've got Royal Company formed up there
on the steps of the house to receive the King,
looking, I have to say, slightly thinner than we believe he was in real life.
- He's been Photoshopped, hasn't he? - He's been touched up. He has indeed.
He looks very splendid.
And then round across the roofs of the pavilion for the house
you've got members of the local public,
you've got tenants, you've got employees and the like,
all of whom had turned out to greet the visit of George IV to Scotland.
(CROWD CHEERING)
Scott knew that what George really wanted to see was the romantic Highlander.
He persuaded the Scottish chiefs to put on all their finery and fill the city.
They absolutely loved the idea.
Scott's gathering of the clans was his masterstroke.
The clan chiefs and their tail of Highlanders in fancy dress
knew exactly how bogus this all was.
No Highlander out on the Scottish hills wore a short kilt.
Even the idea of each clan having its own tartan was a fairly recent invention.
But they didn't care. They were enjoying the party.
As they looked out across the cheering crowds,
the landed gentry of Scotland must have thought their position was secure.
It was less than two years since the radical war
and the people still didn't have a vote.
But they seemed to have forgotten their hardships in this glorious spectacle.
King George's visit to Scotland was a popular success and a triumph for Scott.
But had it worked?
Well, no.
Despite all the tugging at the patriotic heartstrings,
Scott's reinvention of Scotland had failed to prevent the one thing
he had set out to thwart - electoral reform.
The calls for change hadn't gone away.
Scott's triumph was a triumph of spin, not of substance.
Unemployment, poverty, powerlessness all remained.
The protests continued.
It took another ten years. But in 1832, the Government
finally gave way to the pressure for electoral reform across Britain.
"It is impossible to exaggerate the ecstasy of Scotland,
"where, to be sure, it's like liberty given to slaves.
”We are to be brought out of the house of bondage, out of the [and of Egypt. ”
By now, Scott was very ill, months from death.
But as the bill passed through Parliament he pushed himself to the limit,
speaking out against it at public meetings.
When the crowds booed and hissed at him, he told them,
"I regard your gabble no more than geese upon the green."
Sir Walter Scott died a disappointed man,
terrified that electoral reform would bring anarchy to his beloved Scotland
and with the huge debts he'd run up buying the estate at Abbotsford still unpaid.
The Scottish Reform Act extended the franchise, but not to everyone.
As long as you had a property worth £10, you got a vote.
50 that's not the working man - or women of any class, of course.
The reforms gave 16 times more people than before a vote.
But that's only 65,000 out of two million.
Still, it's a start.
In 1846, Thomas Cook started package tours to Scotland
using all the latest technology, the newly built railway and paddle steamers.
Well-heeled middle-class Victorian tourists
from London, Manchester and Glasgow
started travelling north for their summer holidays.
Now you could visit this heroic wilderness without the bother of trudging through it.
Sir Walter Scott had taught the Victorians to love this landscape.
Visitors looked in awe upon scenery they believed
had been left as nature created it.
However, the reality is
the people who once lived here had been cleared.
This is as true of the Lowlands and Loch Katrine here in the Trossachs
as it is of the Great Glen and the mountains of Sutherland.
The Highlanders were an endangered species, every bit as hard to spot
as the rest of the wildlife the tourists had come to see.
They had been moved to the coast.
The Highlanders had become crofters.
Crofts are smallholdings with a little (and,
but not enough for a family to survive on.
Crofters had to grow their own food
and then top up their income catching fish, gathering seaweed
or going down to the Lowlands to help with the harvest.
The crofters were barely getting by.
What they mostly survived on was potatoes.
The potato grows in thin soil and it takes up very little space,
so every croft grew them.
By 1846, the potato provided the average crofter
with four-fifths of his staple diet.
A Highland minister of the time
told a story about asking a small boy what he ate for breakfast.
"Mashed potatoes" was the answer. "And at noon?"
"Mashed potatoes." "And for dinner?"
"Mashed potatoes." Did he have anything else, the minister asked.
"Of course I do," said the boy.
"I have a spoon."
In the 19th century,
huge expanses of the Highlands and Islands had absentee landlords.
A third of the islands of Skye and Uist
were owned by Lord William Wentworth Macdonald.
But he spent little time here.
Like many Highland chiefs in the 19th century, he was born in London,
educated at Eton and married to an Englishwoman.
Lord Macdonald saw his Highland properties
first and foremost as a way of making money.
In July 1846, potato blight spread on the wind
across the sea from Ireland to Scotland.
It was devastating.
Field after field was blasted, full of black, rotting plants.
Then, as now, it's people living on the margins who are vulnerable to famine.
If you're barely making enough to exist when the times are good,
when times are bad, you starve.
On Skye, barely a fifth of the potato crop survived.
One minister wrote,
"We frequently had bad springs, but this is a winter of starvation."
The Government felt no duty of care towards the starving.
It was hard to grasp the scale of the crisis from Westminster.
And anyway, they believed you shouldn't interfere with the free market.
Grain and oats grown here were actually shipped south throughout the famine.
In the spring of 1847, after a winter of hunger,
the sight of ships full of food leaving the Highlands was too much to bear.
Food riots erupted across the north east
and, in Wick, starving people broke into the grain stores.
The sheriff called for back-up and two companies of soldiers
marched to the clocks to stop the looting.
The crowd pelted them with stones and, in response,
the troopers fixed bayonets and attacked.
The mob fled.
Under armed guard, the ships were safely loaded and set sail.
But bad though the famine was in Scotland,
it was infinitely worse in Ireland.
Something like one million people are estimated to have died
in the Irish potato famine.
In Scotland, the dead numbered in the hundreds. Why?
In Ireland, the better-off felt no moral responsibility to help the starving.
In Scotland, though, they did.
This is at least partly Sir Walter Scott's legacy.
He had celebrated the Highlander
and made people across Scotland identify with their romantic history.
Now the city dwellers of Edinburgh and Glasgow
were determined not to let their brothers starve.
Scotland's Free Church helped collect money and organise relief.
£250,000 was raised to help the starving.
That's over £15 million in today's money.
But Lord Macdonald, along with many of his fellow landlords,
felt there was no future for the crofters.
The Macdonald family seat was this mock-medieval castle, here on Skye.
Sir Walter Scott would have loved it.
Now, though, Lord Macdonald was in debt to the tune of £218,000.
He felt he had no choice.
He decided to turn more of his estates over to sheep farming.
The crofters would have to go.
Emigration was the answer.
The Highland landowners began to clear the land.
Crofters were forced to leave Scotland
and travel across the ocean to Canada, America and Australia.
Most would never return.
The clearances on Skye were particularly brutal.
Over 1,700 writs of removal were issued
to evict nearly 40,000 people from their homes.
Lord Macdonald's factors evicted thousands of crofters,
pulled down the roofs so they couldn't move back
and forced them to emigrate.
In 1853, he emptied the township of Suisnish.
"I could see a long and motley procession
"winding along the road that led north from Suisnish.
"There were old men and women too feeble to walk who were placed in carts,
"while the children with looks of alarm walked alongside.
"Everyone was in tears.
"It seemed as if they could not tear themselves away.
"When they set forth once more, a cry of grief went up to the heaven,
"a long, plaintive wail,
"and, after the last of the emigrants had disappeared behind the hill,
"the sound seemed to re-echo through the whole wide valley
"in one prolonged note of desolation."
Most of the people of Suisnish boarded the boats to Canada,
but some hid out here in the hills.
After the police and the sheriffs had gone, they crept back
to try and repair their ruined homes,
but Lord Macdonald's factor was a thorough man.
Five days after Christmas, he returned.
Among those driven out into the freezing winter weather
were an 81-year-old woman and a mother and her three-week-old baby.
John Murdoch was a retired civil servant in Inverness
who was horrified by the way the lairds were treating the crofters.
Murdoch always wore the kilt.
By the 18505, the reinvented kilt had become a symbol of national identity.
Murdoch realised how powerful such symbols could be.
"If Canada and Australia really are gardens of pleasure,
"as the lairds argue, they should emigrate themselves.
"The country can spare them better than it can spare any other class."
In Ireland, the land reform movement had pushed for a fairer deal for tenants.
The struggle was bitter and bloody.
John Murdoch had worked in Ireland and had seen it for himself.
He hated the violence, but he liked the results.
Now he decided to lead a non-violent campaign
to overthrow the power of the landlords.
The first thing John Murdoch had to do was to get the crofters on side,
so he travelled all over the Highlands and Islands.
He went to the markets, he went to the shearings,
he walked over 20 miles a clay
just to get to wherever he thought that crofters would gather.
And he talked to them, but more important than that, he also listened.
Murdoch was canny enough to realise
that the way you win people around to your way of thinking
is by listening to their way of thinking first.
What he found, he said, were people who lived in such a state of slavish fear
that they dare not complain about their grievances
in case they were forced from their homes.
John Murdoch had hearts and minds to change, so he set to work.
He set up a crusading newspaper called The Highlander.
The Highlander wasn't just about land reform.
Murdoch was printing his version of history.
"In Highland tradition, the lands in the Highlands
"belonged to the clans as such and not to the chiefs.
"A Chieftain is the head of the clan or family
”and not owner of the great tract of [and which that clan occupied. ”
The landlords, in other words, were in the wrong.
Murdoch wasn't just talking to the crofters.
His campaign had another audience, just as important.
It was still the case that only property-owning men got to vote.
Obviously, the lairds were never going to vote for land reform.
So Murdoch needed to sell his version of Scottish history to the middle classes.
And there was one man who helped him do it.
A man he'd never met, a man who would have hated
everything he stood for, a man who'd been dead over 40 years.
Sir Walter Scott.
Brought up on Waverley and Rob Roy, middle-class Victorians
saw the Highlanders as a noble people
with a proud tradition, so Murdoch was pushing at a half-open door.
50 years earlier, Scott had taken the idea of the Highlander
and made it represent all of Scotland.
So when Murdoch told the story of the Highlanders thrown off their land,
it wasn't just happening to people far up north,
it was happening to everyone, it was happening to Scotland.
In 1881, the Irish Land Act
gave the Irish fair rents and security of tenure.
Skye fishermen working in Ireland for the summer brought the news home with them.
One group of Skye crofters said they might
"turn rebel ourselves in order to obtain the same benefits".
By now, the generation who'd witnessed the Clearances,
whose brothers and friends had been forced to emigrate, were mostly gone.
The next generation were less scared and more angry.
Finally the crofters had had enough, and it all started on Skye.
By 1882, Ronald Archibald was the new Lord Macdonald.
He received a petition from his crofters in Balmeanach
demanding their traditional grazing rights on the sides of Ben Lee.
Lord Macdonald said no.
The crofters refused to pay him any rent for their houses
until he changed his mind.
So Lord Macdonald told his factor to evict them from their homes.
But when the crofters received the eviction notices they burned them.
50 policemen were sent north from Glasgow to Skye
and they arrived here at Balmeanach around six in the morning,
when most of the villagers were still asleep or just having their breakfast.
Boys whistled and shouted warnings, but it was too late.
My grandmother was preparing the breakfast
when the shout came that the police were here.
And my grandfather... He was sitting at the fireside
holding a baby. He just threw the baby
across the fire to my granny and then took out up the hill to the road.
So your grandfather and great-grandfather were among those arrested?
Yes, yes.
But, er, folk... they could take so much,
stand so much, but it just couldn't go on.
They had to make a stand.
What exactly did the crofters have in mind for this spot on the road?
Well, it was to release the prisoners
and cause all the damage they could to the police.
We had this cairn of stones and clods
and whatever else that came to hand just to pitch over the top.
Just rain it down on them?
Rain it down on them, cause as much damage as they could.
But the police formed a cordon around half a dozen prisoners
and, in order not to injure or maybe kill our own folk,
the cry went up, "Stop, stop!"
And then the police broke through
and headed towards Portree with their prisoners.
90 years before, when the men of Ross
had tried to drive the sheep out of the Highlands,
they'd been regarded as dangerous revolutionaries.
35 years before, when the people of Skye had attempted to resist the Clearances,
they'd met little public sympathy and the full force of the law.
But now things were different.
Less than a week after the Battle of the Braes,
11 journalists came to Skye to follow the story,
including one from the London Standard.
The crofters were seen as plucky underdogs and the message spread.
Thousands of crofters stopped paying rent.
The Sheriff of Skye persuaded the Government
to send troops to enforce the rule of law.
On 21st November, a gunboat and 450 troops arrived here in Loch Dunvegan.
But the Government wanted to keep on the right side of public opinion.
They gave the sheriff strict instructions
the troops were not to inflame the situation,
so the sheriff was not allowed to use them to evict people.
After six months of stalemate, the troops were withdrawn.
Now the crofters knew they could do what they liked.
The factors, the lairds, even the Government, were powerless to stop them.
Lord Lovat of Skye wrote, "The Queen's writ does not now run in the island,
"the lands seized are still mostly in the hands of the law-breakers.
"Rents and taxes are unpaid and many defaulters are still at large."
And come rent day, when Lord Macdonald put out the demands to his tenants,
not a single farthing was paid and not a single tenant appeared.
So what did the Government do? They set up a commission.
The Napier Commission held its first meeting here, in the church in Braes,
close to the spot where the crofters and the 50 police had their pitched battle.
A Royal Commission was the traditional way, then as now,
to kick a difficult issue into the long grass.
But John Murdoch realised this could be a real opportunity.
He went around the Highlands organising and preparing people for it.
Crofter after crofter gave testimony.
They told stories of betrayal, of persecution and of hardship.
Public pressure steadily grew to give the crofters more rights.
In the 1885 General Election,
four Crofters' Party MPs won seats in Westminster.
This was an astonishing achievement.
Now, the reformers had political power.
The Government had to act.
The Crofters Land Act of 1886 gave them security of tenure and set fair rents.
Never again would the lairds be able to turn crofters out of their homes.
The Clearances were over.
For centuries, the control of the landowners had been absolute.
Now, at last, the balance of power was beginning to shift.
Walter Scott had created the myth of the Highlander
in an attempt to secure the loyalty of the Scots to their King.
Ironically, that myth was subverted
to give the Highlander rights over the land.
For good or ill, Scott rebranded Scotland.
Nearly two centuries later,
his tartan is woven into our national identity.
The stories we tell ourselves about our history
don't just shape our past, they shape our future as well.