The road through an emptying land

Eddrachilles Hotel stands peacefully above Badcall Bay, where our guests often stay, but the name belongs to a much larger parish whose nineteenth-century inhabitants had little opportunity to enjoy that peace. In the decades after the Highland Clearances, families were crowded onto narrow strips of rocky coastline while sheep occupied the great expanses inland. The removals might have ended, but the question of how to live on what remained shaped almost every part of their lives.

By the 1830s and 1840s, Eddrachillis covered more than 100,000 acres, yet only a small proportion was available to its small tenants. A family might pay about £3 a year for a holding where, in a good season, potatoes, milk and fish could sustain four people for eight months. Even when things went well, there were another four months to get through, and when the potatoes failed, much of that precarious living failed with them. Fishing could put food on the table, but without a dependable market for the catch it brought in little money to buy whatever else the household needed.

People worked difficult ground, went out on dangerous waters and helped neighbours who had even less than they did. When a corn ship was wrecked at Loch Laxford in 1838, its cargo lay exposed, yet nothing was stolen. That says something about a community which had so little, but honesty and hard work could only carry its people so far. Behind their coastal plots lay valleys and pasture supporting almost 13,000 sheep, while the families struggling to feed themselves were denied access to the land.

During the famine of the late 1840s, the Highland Destitution Committee provided £3,500 for road building, offering paid work to people who badly needed it. A new road should have given those communities something to look forward to, yet as it advanced into Eddrachillis, around forty families in the district received summonses of removal. Money intended to relieve suffering helped open up the estate at the very moment more of its people faced losing their homes. Today we follow that road through a magnificent landscape, but knowing what happened here makes those empty stretches harder to admire without also wondering who once hoped to make a living on them.

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