Free Waterfall Glen by Davie Henderson

not trying to defend whatever it is my family did in the past—I don’t even know the what of it yet, let alone the why—but I think they can at least be forgiven for imagining there was room for improvement.”
    “Maybe over time they might have been forgiven for the what and why, but there are a lot of people who’d say they’ve been damned by the how.”
    “Damned is a pretty strong word—was what they didreally that terrible?” Kate asked.
    “To be fair, what they did was little different from what most of the other landed families were doing at the time. It was the way they went about it that led to talk of a curse.”
    “What
were
the landed families doing?”
    “Getting rid of the people who lived on their land. I don’t mean with a bullet in the head, though in some cases that would have been a kinder way to go about it. No, it was more of a knife in the back, an abdication of ancient responsibilities, a betrayal of time-honored traditions.”
    “Why would they suddenly start acting so badly?”
    “After Culloden the Highlanders were stopped from wearing tartan, speaking the Gaelic and carrying arms, so that a ‘rebellion’ might never be allowed to happen again. Law and order was brought to what had been lawless lands—”
    “I’d have thought that was a good thing,” Kate said as they walked beside the lochan, Hamish splashing happily in the cool, clear water.
    “In a way it was, but it meant that the chiefs no longer relied on their clansmen for protection from warring neighbours, and their prestige no longer depended on how many fighting men they could put in the field. In other words, they didn’t need their ‘children’ for status or security any more.
    “No longer able to play the part of warlords, or forced to play the part of benevolent fathers, they sought new roles. They looked to the growing cities in the south:
    Glasgow and Edinburgh and London; to town houses and ballrooms, gaming parlours and gentlemen’s clubs, boardrooms and stock exchanges. They were exposed to a different way of life that was based on cold, hard cash and not a warm heart: where a man’s worth was determined by his bank balance rather than his benevolence; where honor and responsibility didn’t count for nearly as much as the cut of a man’s clothes, the cutlery on his table, the art collection on his walls and the bottles of wine in his cellar. One by one they succumbed to the temptation to sell their souls for coin of gold.”
    “In what way?”
    “They soon found out their lavish new lifestyles couldn’t be funded by the old clan system, so they brought in factors to manage their estates as commercial enterprises, to evict the Highlanders and give sheep the run of the land after renting it out to the highest bidder.
    “Later, after the wool boom had gone bust, they planted forest for deer—” he gestured to the trees on the hillside above them “— groomed the moors for grouse and hired out their Highland homes as hunting lodges. Glens like this one that had once been the home of little communities were turned into playgrounds for handfuls of privileged men who hunted animals for fun rather than to feed their families.”
    “I think I’m starting to understand,” Kate said quietly.
    “You can call these changes ‘improvements’ rather than clearances, ‘removals’ rather than evictions … Youcan argue that there had been more cattle and people than the land could comfortably support, and that without what happened there wouldn’t have been any hope of progress, just recurring poverty and famine …
    “But you can also argue that land is held in trust rather than owned outright, that it should be cared for to support the many and not just exploited to benefit a few. You can question whether this is progress, Lady Kate,” he said, pointing to the next cluster of ruined cottages up ahead.
    “There had been famines and poverty before the clearances, but there had also been trust and