Post #3764979 · Elektrine

2026-07-12 15:31 UTC

Here is one house, quite a large one, of what must have been a thriving community. There was a mill in a burn nearby, and excellent soil for cultivation, apart from the grazing available for those wonderful black cattle. But notice the quality of the building even 200 years later. It wasn't poor people who lived here, and their economy must have been a good one. Yet greed robbed them of all this.

Replies (2)

@withaveeay@mastodon.scot 2026-07-12 15:34

It must have been heartbreaking being forced from your house and your farms, forced to small, uneconomic, wretched pieces of ground near the coast, where you'll depend on the largesse of the capitalists, working only if they gave you work, unable to make a living on the sour ground they abandoned you on, thinking back to the view you had all your life.

Open ##3764978
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot 2026-07-12 15:46

@withaveeay@mastodon.scot Exactly. The pre-clearance Highlanders were not materially poor. The landscape had not yet been wrecked by sheep, nor, so short a period after the extinction of the wolves, by deer. What they were was cash poor. They had a self-sufficient subsistence economy; they exported little, and therefore brought in little coin. The Lairds wanted money; and so, the folk were cleared. #LandReform

Open ##4694928