The north coast is alternating beautiful broad golden sand beach and cliffs and heads. It was a less fine day, with mixed weather, but generally OK. We stopped at the Thurso Tesco for proivisions, then drove on to Bettyhill and the Strahnaver Museum. This is the main “Clearances” museum and also a Mackay museum, this being the heart of Mackay country. The museum was very much a county museum, just like in Montana—incredible stuff, humbly but sincerely displayed, with (volunteer?) staff to welcome you and answer every question. Despite being on the north coast of nowhere, cold and wet and deserted, there was a constant flow of visitors. Descendants of the Clearancees—when early 19th century Scottish “nobility” forced thousands of subsistence tenant-farmers off their lands, to make way for the more profitable sheep ranching--must now number in the millions. The exhibits told the terrible story, simply but effectively. True to human nature, the Sutherlands thought they were actually improving the lot of the 'savage and indolent' Highlanders. If you had to burn all the dwellings and posessions and kill a few tenants in the process, well, that was just a little more collateral damage. Perhaps the most astonishing find for us was a book called Gloomy Memories, by one Donald MacLeod—an account and condemnation of the Clearances and the Sutherlands, published much later, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Sunny Memories, which treated the Sutherlands as bold social engineers (so we read). Must look into this.
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Right on the coast |
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Just about every other headstone is a Mackay |
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Neolithic beaker, found in the vicinity |
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By order of the Queen (apparently Highlanders threw rocks at the telegraphs) |
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Mackay crest and tartan (modern) |
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The Farr Stone, a Pictish stone in the cemetery, 7th or 8th century |
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