The Flockmasters

This is the final novel in my Nigel Tranter project, fifty books re-read. The shelf is now bare, well, not quite, as I have simply filled it with other titles😉. Oxfam is hopefully a few quid better off. This novel is set during the Napoleonic Wars and explores the Highland clearances of that period.

The painting on the cover is Sir John Sinclair by Raeburn and is in the National Galleries of Scotland. While Tranter's tale is not directly about him, he was based in Caithness, while this story is set in the West Highlands, there is a link. Sinclair established, in Edinburgh, a society for the improvement of British wool and was notorious for clearing his tenants' land to make way for sheep. His family was also the owners of enslaved persons in the West Indies. All told, not a good person, even by the standards of the times.

We tend to think of the Highland clearances as being a later 18th-century practice. However, it started in the 1750s. The eviction of tenants went against dùthchas, the principle that clan members had an inalienable right to rent land in the clan territory, although this was never recognised in Scots law. It was gradually abandoned by clan chiefs as they began to think of themselves simply as commercial landlords, rather than as patriarchs of their people.

Tranter's story involves the MacRory clan, which I assume is a nod towards Clann Ruaidhrí, who were based in the West Highlands. The hero is a tacksman of the clan who had been wounded serving in a Highland regiment in the Peninsular War. He came home to discover the clearances in operation with houses being burned and the people being forced to barren land on the coast, before being shipped off to Canada. I won't spoil the story, but he organises some resistance against the factor of the clan chief, who is also the colonel of his regiment.

It is a grim tale, but well told by a master storyteller.

Some of my 28mm Napoleonic Highlanders.