Highland Clearances: 1800 - 1890

A visitor said that the children of Badbea were tied to the cliffs. The man who grew up there never mentioned it. The truth about the NC500’s most dramatic clearance village is most compelling.

The people of Eddrachillis are hungry, crowded onto the rocky coast and watching sheep occupy the land behind them. Then relief money arrives to build a road. It should bring hope. Instead, the road advances through a district where around forty families have received summonses of removal.

In the hungry years after the potato famine, a ship carrying corn is wrecked at Loch Laxford. Its cargo lies exposed before a struggling community, but nothing is stolen. That single memory tells us something remarkable about the poor of Eddrachillis.