Free Waterfall Glen by Davie Henderson Page A

loyalty and kinship, and that should have counted for something,” Finlay told her.
    Kate sensed his quiet outrage, and in a strange way found herself sharing it. But she also felt some things that Finlay McRae would never feel as he wandered around Glen Cranoch: responsibility, guilt, and a humbling shame. “What happened to the people who were cleared off the land?” she asked, with a sense of dread.
    “The ‘lucky’ ones were sent to the edge of the estates and given little parcels of land so barren that it broke their ploughshares as well as their hearts. They had to turn to the sea for a living and learn how to build and sail boats, make and mend nets—all on coastlines with few places to launch or land a boat or shelter from a storm,” he told her. “Imagine living on land so poor that in spring the wind blew seeds from the soil before they could take root…
    “Mildew and sea spray rotted the harvest in summer …
    “And in winter, if you didn’t want to watch your family starve in front of your eyes, you had to put to sea in an open boat in storms that drove down from the Arctic or all the way across the Atlantic. A hundred boats were lost in a single year on the thirty-mile stretch of coastline just north of here,” he said. “In this one county the Government and landowners spent a million pounds to accommodate sheep, and just £500 to house the people who’d been ‘removed’ to make way for them. People who’d lived and worked on almost 800,000 acres were ‘relocated’ on just 6,000.
    “If you weren’t ‘lucky’ enough to get a plot of barren land on the coast, but had a little money to fall back on, you could try making a new life over the water, booking passage on one of the coffin ships bound for America—”
    “I know I’m going to be sorry I asked, but why were they called coffin ships?”
    “Because the conditions were so bad that many passengers ended up in a different promised land from the one that was advertised at the harbor gates.
    “As for the survivors, they arrived in a strange land with only the clothes on their back and homesickness in their hearts.
    “Of course if you were a young man and didn’t fancy the fishing boats or the coffin ships, you could always join the army and fight for ‘your’ country. A prime minister of the day said that besides ensuring even the bloodiest of battles would be won, sending in the Highlanders had the advantage that not many of them would return home tocause trouble; while an English general who commanded them declared that it was ‘no great mischief if they fall’.
    “And as for the people who had no plot of land on the coast, no passage on a coffin ship or place in the army, all they could do was head for the cities to the south, where they were forced to swap their ‘primitive’ cottages for tenement slums and their Highland glens for rat-infested alleys, coal mines, and factories.”
    Looking from the ruined cottages to the woman at his side, he said, “I’m well aware that there are two sides to every story, Lady Kate, and I don’t know enough about history to tell you what the other side of this one is. All I can speak of is the side that the people who once lived here would tell you if they had a voice you could hear.”
    “I understand, Finlay,” Kate said quietly, shocked by what he’d told her and by the contrast between the idyllic setting and the terrible images his words conjured up. “And this was happening all across the Highlands?” she asked.
    “Aye, all across the Highlands.”
    “You said something about it being worse here than in other places, though,” Kate said as they continued towards the far end of the lochan. “That’s hard to believe, because it sounds as if it was terrible everywhere.”
    “I don’t think there could be a kind way to evict people from their homes and exile them from their glens, but some ways were crueller than others. Lady Carolyn’s way was the cruellest of