Chapter 6
Coll Reginald Macdonald
The Highland Clearances
My paternal grand-mother was born a Macdonald. Her father Coll
Reginald Macdonald was born in 1850 in the village of Kilmore on
the east coast of the remote and beautiful island of Skye, situated
off the west coast of Scotland.
The history of Skye is the story of mass emigration where the
islanders departed their island either voluntarily, or in the vast
majority of cases involuntarily, as a result of the Highland
Clearances following the crushing defeat of Scottish nationalism
by the English at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The clearances
were savagely carried out by the victorious English soldiery and
their Scottish allies.
Peasants were evicted from their homesteads, packed
on ships to far-flung Nova Scotia or Australia,
unprepared to face an uncertain future in unknown
lands.
Their vacant Scottish holdings combined to produce
sprawling, mainly uninhabited, acreages for the rearing
of sheep by often absent English landlords and by those
Scottish leaders who, with an eye on the “main
chance”, gave up their old religion and fell into line with
their English masters.
That legacy of misery will undoubtedly have to some
extent shaped my great-grandfather and had one of its
outpourings in his utterance “Burn everything English,
except their coal” as related to me by one of my uncles.
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