Badbea: life on the edge

If anyone travelling the North Coast 500 visits a Highland clearance village, it will probably be Badbea. The turning is signposted, the walk is manageable and the surviving ruins occupy one of the most dramatic locations imaginable, high above cliffs exposed to everything the North Sea can throw at them. I have flown my drone over Badbea and submitted the resulting photographs to my university for use in teaching because they show, more effectively than any diagram, the extraordinary place in which this community was expected to survive.

The Badbea remembered today was created when Sir John Sinclair transformed the nearby Langwell estate through agricultural improvement. He introduced Cheviot sheep, cleared families from the more fertile Berriedale straths and relocated twelve families to this narrow coastal ground. Sinclair argued that as many people as possible should remain employed on the estate, while also acknowledging that there would not be work for everyone. He therefore understood the human consequences of his experiment, even as other people were made to endure them.

The families at Badbea built more than a collection of miserable cottages. They created a functioning community, cultivating small crofts, keeping cattle and pigs, fishing, spinning their own clothing and distilling whisky. Fish were shared with widows and households unable to put a man to sea, visitors were accommodated during religious gatherings and Badbea joined with neighbouring Auchencraig to support a school. An 1881 visitor was told that children had once been tethered for their safety, although the man who grew up at Badbea never mentioned the practice in his extensive recollections.

The real dangers require no embellishment. Contemporary reports record a fourteen-year-old boy falling more than 200 feet while turning cattle away from the precipice and a fisherman being swept away during a storm. Later landlords reduced the community’s grazing land, demanded poorly paid labour and removed further families until Badbea gradually emptied. A memorial built from the stones of its houses now overlooks the ruins, but Badbea should be remembered for more than suffering. The people sent there turned an appalling location into a home and sustained a community on the very edge of the land.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.