Land and People in the Northern Highlands:

The Strathnaver Conference

Bettyhill, Thursday 4th - Saturday 6th September 2014

In 2014 it will be 200 years since the Clearances in

Strathnaver associated with Patrick Sellar. It will also be

300 years since the renowned Gaelic poet Rob Donn was born in

neighbouring Strath More. The confluence of history,

archaeology and literature inspires this interdisciplinary

conference which examines the relationship between land and

people in the northern Highlands. The keynote speakers are

Professor Eric Richards, from Flinders University, Adelaide,

and Professor James Hunter, from the University of the

Highlands and Islands. Panel sessions will inspire discussion

on the literature of Rob Donn, emigration, politics, and the

changing economy and society of the far north from the

eighteenth to the twentieth century. This conference is

funded by the generosity of the Carnegie Trust, as part of the

Carnegie Professorship which has allowed Eric Richards to be

based at the UHI Centre for History for a three month period.

Programme

Thursday 4th September

1-1.45 Lunch

1.45 Welcome and Introduction – Elizabeth Ritchie

2-3.10 Keynote Speaker – James Hunter (University of the Highlandsand Islands)Chair: Elizabeth Ritchie ‘“Savages from Scotland”: The North American Dimension of theSutherland Clearances.’

3.10-3.45 Coffee

3.45-5 Panel 1: The World of Rob DonnChair: Malcolm Bangor-JonesWilliam McKay: ‘Jacobites at Heart?’Ellen Beard: ‘Rob Donn, Iain Tapaidh, and Gray of Rogart’Margaret M McKay: ‘Rob Donn’s World Transformed: Durness, its Land and People 1760-1820’

5-7 Visiting Strathnaver museum and dinner

7-8 Evening Session:Chair: Ronnie LansleyJim A. Johnson: ‘10,000 Years in Strathnaver: An Illustrated Talk’Presentation on work of Strathnaver Museum

Friday 5th September

9.30-10.45 Keynote Speaker – Eric Richards (Flinders University,Adelaide)Chair: Issie MacPhail‘Not the Highland Clearances: Other Responses to the HighlandCrisis’

10.45-11.15 Coffee11.15-11.30 Short film: ‘A Northerly Land’

11.30-12.45 Panel 2: Agents or Victims of Change?Chair: David Worthington

Malcolm Bangor-Jones: ‘Tacksmen and Small Tenants: Strathnaver in the 18th Century’Iain MacKinnon: ‘To Bridge the Great Divide – Transcending Historiographic Division over how to Interpret the 18thand 19th Century Highlands and Islands.’

Packed lunch

1-6 Field Trip: Part 1: The Clearance Township of RossalPart 2: Settlement and Industry on the North Coast

7.30 Conference Dinner: Bettyhill Hotel

Saturday 6th September

9.30-10.45 Panel 3: Governing the Land Chair: Marjory HarperAnnie Tindley: ‘“Castle Government”: the Psychologies of Land Ownership and Management in North Sutherland, c. 1860-1911’Ben Thomas: ‘“The Clach” – The life and times of Alexander MacKenzie’Iain J. M. Robertson: ‘Landscape, Environment and Protest: the Land Wars in the North after 1914’

10.45-11.15 Coffee 11.15-11.30 Presentation on the work of Mackay Country- IainCopeland

11.30-12.30 Panel 4: Northern Emigrants Chair: Kirsty ReidPamela Sharpe: ‘The Highland Clearances and Emigration to Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s: Dissecting the Details of a Case Study’Marjory Harper: ‘From the Northern Highlands to the “Great White North”: The Perception and Practice of Emigration from Sutherland and Caithness since 1774’

12.30-12.45 Short film: ‘A Part of Who We Are’

12.45-1.30 Lunch

1.30 Depart

Abstracts and Biographies of Speakers

Keynote Speaker

James Hunter: ‘“Savages from Scotland”: The North AmericanDimension of the Sutherland Clearances.’

Based on material Jim Hunter aims to include in a forthcoming book about the Sutherland Clearances, this talk will touch on some of the many ways in which events in clearance-era Sutherland interacted with developments in North America. The two emigrations – in 1813 and 1815 – from the Strath of Kildonan, by way of Hudson Bay to Red River (now Winnipeg) constitute just one aspect of a complex set of relationships. Some of these had to do with Sutherland participation in the three-year British-American conflict known as the War of 1812.Others stemmed from earlier Sutherland involvement in the fur trade – not least on the part of that most intriguing Strathbrora man Donald MacKay who, Hunter argues, did more to shape our modern world than James Loch, Patrick Sellar and theMarquis and Marchioness of Stafford (later Duke and Duchess ofSutherland) ever did. MacKay’s cattle were herded on the hillsabove Strathbrora by his Cree-speaking sons. And when their father, then in his late sixties, finally quit Sutherland for Nova Scotia he was making his ninth crossing of the Atlantic. Despite ‘improvement’ rhetoric to the contrary, Sutherland’s pre-clearance communities were in no way cut off from the wider world.

Panel 1: The World of Rob Donn

William McKay: ‘Jacobites at Heart?’

Both Donald 1st Lord Reay and his son John were supporters of the Stuarts. During the minority of John’s grandson, George, 3rd Lord Reay, many Mackay gentry took a new political and religious direction. Men who had supported Charles II took uparms against James VII, in numbers comparable with those who supported the Hanoverians in the next century. Several clan gentry families were involved, in particular the Scourie

family in the persons of General Hugh Mackay and his sister Barbara, Lord John’s wife. In consequence, neither in 1715 nor1745 did the Jacobites seriously look to the Reay country for support.Yet Rob Donn is seen as witnessing to radically different views among the people. The Song to Prince Charles hails the Pretender as one whom he hopes will wear King George’s Crown. Black Coats is similar but less explicit, more a complaint of ill- treatment than a call to arms. But fifteen or so men in the Reay Independent Companies in 1745 were his near neighbours. Is he a reliable witness of public opinion or is there another explanation of his verse?

Ellen Beard: ‘Rob Donn, Iain Tapaidh, and Gray of Rogart’

Iain Tapaidh or “Clever John” Sutherland, the schoolmaster andprecentor in Tongue, was Rob Donn’s favorite object of satire;and John Gray of Rogart, a wealthy drover based in Perthshire,was the target of his most vicious satirical elegy. But who were these men, how were they connected, and why did Rob Donn hate them so much? Even Ian Grimble did not answer these questions, and the poems are quite puzzling without their historical context.This paper will establish a rough chronology for the ten Iain Tapaidh poems and the elegy to Gray of Rogart, using historical sources such as a list of SSPCK schoolmasters and the testament of John Gray. It will then discuss the poems themselves, which illustrate Rob Donn’s resentment of the literate, middle-class schoolmaster and the upper-class businessman and landowner, who achieved status and success in their respective occupations despite the shortcomings of theirconduct. It will conclude with a rendition of Rob Donn’s elegy to Gray of Rogart, based on the tune in the Angus FraserCollection.

Margaret McKay: ‘Rob Donn’s World Transformed: Durness, its Land and People 1760-1820’

This paper looks at landholding and the people of Durness during Rob Donn’s lifetime, the remaining years of the

eighteenth century and the clearance period of 1800-1815. Using the technique of family reconstruction based on the Old Parish Register, combined with maps, rentals and other estate papers, I trace what happened to the townships and some families and individuals during these years. Within the context of estate policy in the Reay Country as a whole and its effect on the parish of Durness in particular, the paper will focus on the places where Rob Donn lived: Alt na Cailleach, Mussal, Badnahachlass and Eilean Reir in Strathmore, Freskill on the West Moine, Aultcoirefreskeil and Achumore on the Parph, Sango where his last child was born, Balnakiel where he worked and Nuabeg where he died. The paperwill show what happened to these townships and their inhabitants at the clearances and the creation of sheep-farms and will also reveal what happened to some of Rob Donn’s family and relatives.

Jim A. Johnson: ‘10,000 Years in Bettyhill’

A brief journey from the end of the most recent Ice Age to thepresent day, largely from a human standpoint, but including reference to the manner in which geology and geomorphology have combined to create niches for settlement across the millennia. Illustrated with a wide selection of photographs together with a few maps and diagrams and including reference to individuals who have helped put the area on the map throughthe years for good or ill. It will culminate with a presentation on Strathnaver Museum and its vision for the future of the past in the current millennium.

Keynote Speaker

Eric Richards: ‘Not the Highland Clearances: Other Responsesto the Highland Crisis’

Some historians have criticised the excessive attention that has been devoted to the Clearances in the Highlands in the years 1780 to 1860. Yet this was the most widespread response to the ‘crisis’ overwhelming much of the region. There existedhowever a number of radically different policies implemented

in several parts of the Highlands, new methods which explicitly rejected Clearances. These schemes offer a limited test of such possibilities open to estate proprietors. This paper examines three well documented cases where Clearances were shunned in favour of population retention. But there werealways complicating local circumstances. The significance of these examples is debateable as is the idea of hypothetical alternatives to the dominant large-scale farming models of thetimes.

Panel 2: Agents or Victims of Change?

Malcolm Bangor-Jones: ‘Tacksmen and small tenants: Strathnaverin the 18th century’

In assessing the impact of the Clearances, historians such as Richards have emphasised the importance of establishing the pre-Clearance conditions. This paper seeks, through using a variety of sources, to identify the pattern of landholding in 18th century Strathnaver (the parish of Farr rather than the wider province of Strathnaver). The paper examines how the landholding pattern related to the classic model of Highland society of landlord, tacksman and subtenants, and how it changed in the 18th century. Particular attention will be given to the position of the tacksmen in view of: their importance in the ‘settlement’ of Strathnaver after its acquisition by the Earls of Sutherland (there were dynasties of Gordon tacksmen ‘friendly’ to or followers of the Earls); their involvement in the cattle trade; and their role in the emigration of the early 1770s. The paper will consider the changing relationship between tacksmen and landlord and assessthe extent to which the tacksmen can be viewed as reactionaries as opposed to progressives. Attention will alsobe given to the changing position of the small tenant or subtenant population, the meal trade, the introduction of the potato, and signs of pre-Clearance adjustment such as seasonalmigration.

Alison McCall: ‘“The Woman MacKay” - Politics and Protest in Helmsdale and Brora in the wake of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872’

The Education (Scotland) Act 1872 took education out of churchcontrol. Instead, education was to be administered by newly formed School Boards, which were elected by ratepayers in eacharea. This created tension in both Brora and Helmsdale where there was popular opposition to the decrease of Free Church influence. In Brora, the former headmaster of the Church of Scotland School was promoted to overall headmaster, whilst theformer headmaster of the Free Church School was demoted to assistant headmaster. This triggered a series of events, including children being withdrawn from school, and culminating in a court case. Helmsdale also experienced popular unrest and tension over the choice of headmaster. This paper will examine the impact of increasing crofter agitation on the education system in Brora and Helmsdale. Each School Board was elected for three years and the composition of the School Boards changed dramatically over time, with increasing representation of crofters. The impact of the conflict on the education of children in these areas will also be examined.

Iain MacKinnon: ‘To bridge the great divide – transcending historiographic division over how to interpret the 18thand 19th century Highlands and Islands.’ Historiography of the Highlands and Islands in the modern period has been dominated by two ideas sometimes considered tobe rivals: ‘Clearance’ and ‘Improvement’. Tom Devine has described as “a historical conundrum” the fact that, although all Scotland was affected by dramatic social and economic changes led by the landlord class in the 18th and 19thcenturies,these changes are associated with “failure, famine and clearance” in the Highlands and Islands while they are remembered as a period of “improvement” in the Lowlands. This presentation offers a third way of understanding the period which, although less examined than the two aforementioned, mayin fact encompass and unite them. It is now commonplace amongearly modern Scottish historians to describe the Highlands and

Islands in that era as being subject to ‘internal colonialism’. This presentation will develop and apply the ‘internal colonial’ thesis to the area’s subsequent history. Both keynote speakers to this conference have described developments in the Highlands and Islands in the modern periodas if they were instances of colonisation. This presentation will suggest that the ‘as if’ is not required.

 Panel 3: Governing the Land

Annie Tindley: ‘Castle Government: the psychologies of land ownership and management in north Sutherland, c. 1860-1911’

By 1861, the Sutherland estates were the largest landed estates in western Europe. Covering over one million acres in the county of Sutherland and bolstered by a private family fortune, the Sutherland estates and the ducal family that owned them were one of the great patrician establishments of Victorian Britain. They were, however, haunted by their reputation as clearance landlords, a reputation that intruded on their rarefied London existence, and more pressingly, on relations between them, their estate managers and the croftingand cottar population in the north of Scotland.

This paper will explore a number of key themes in relation to the drivers and philosophies of estate ownership and management in post-clearance Sutherland. These will include:

Definitions and approaches to ‘Improvement’ in the post-clearance Highlands

Attitudes to crofting on the part of estate managers Responses to poverty and radicalism The wider context surrounding managers and owners of

land: British, Irish and imperial

Ben Thomas: ‘“The Clach” – The Life and Times of Alexander MacKenzie’

When examining the Crofters’ War of the late 19th century a number of names tend to be writ large in the literature, no more so than radicals such as John Murdoch or the Rev. Donald

MacCallum. These men have interested scholars not just because of their pioneering role in creating the cultural conditions necessary for popular agitation, but also because Murdoch in particular possessed a subtle and sophisticated interpretation of the land question that marked him out from many of his contemporaries. However, in giving so much focus to such individuals, scholarship on the Highlands in this period has arguably both mythologized such men and neglected those other members of the land reform movement who possessed less interesting ideas, but who perhaps played equally important roles in the wider picture. This paper therefore looks at one particularly neglected figure, Alexander MacKenzie, author of the 1883 History of the Highland Clearances, to ask how important we might consider the less radical members of the land reform movement to have been. Too often describedmerely as a ‘toady’ or ‘lackey’ of the crofting M.P. Charles Fraser-MacKintosh, an investigation of MacKenzie’s life paintsa picture of a more politically realistic reformer than Murdoch, and a reformer whose politics were very much shaped by his identity as a crofters’ son from Gairloch. In this wayMacKenzie can be said to encapsulate a different relationship between the land and the people of the Northern Highlands as has usually been given focus, and one, it will be argued, thatdeserves better focus.

Iain Robertson: ‘Landscape, environment and protest: the land wars in the north after 1914’

The study of rural social protest is currently experiencing a vibrant and creative reinvigoration. Scholars have introducednew and exciting perspectives and challenged and re-worked established paradigms. The old shibboleth of class and class consciousness may not have been laid entirely to rest but is now reintegrated into an exciting plurality of explanation which pays much closer attention to the local, contingent and everyday. This, however, is not the case for the Highland Land Wars. Here notions of class and hegemonic conflict remain dominant, not least because authors continue to treat the region and its conflicts as if there was no differentiation between its constituent parts. The view takenhere, however, is that if we are to pay closer attention to

the everyday and contingent then we must do so from the perspective of the local. We must look to the north, in otherwords, as much as we look to the outer and inner Hebrides. This paper therefore seeks to explore the little-studied, but nevertheless critically important events of protest after World War One from a comparative perspective. The aim is to investigate causation, chronology and typology of events in the north, to see if region-wide patterns do exist or if the more convincing explanations are to be found at this importantsub-regional level.

Panel 4: Northern Emigrants

Marjory Harper: ‘From the Northern Highlands to the ‘Great White North’: The Perception and Practice of Emigration from Sutherland and Caithness since 1774’

In summer 1773 280 would-be emigrants from Sutherland and Caithness gathered in Thurso in order to embark for North Carolina. Most of them got no further than the Northern Isles, in a venture that rapidly degenerated into farce and litigation. Highland emigration, not least from the northernmost counties, continued to be painted in sombre hues for the next 200 years, as a bedfellow and consequence of clearance, and a demonstration of the pessimistic belief that the region had only a past and not a future. Through the written and oral testimony of participants, sponsors, activists and observers, as well as through the lens of fictional writings, this paper offers an overview of the causes and consequences of emigration from the Northern Highlands, particularly to Canada, from the abortive voyage ofthe Bachelor in 1773-4 until the mid-twentieth century. Were emigrants invariably passive victims in the decision-making process, or did they have agency, ambition and agendas of their own? What was the nature and impact of propaganda from proponents and opponents of emigration? Why did some emigrants return home, and with what repercussions?

Pamela Sharpe: ‘The Highland Clearances and Emigration to Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s: Dissecting the Details of a Case Study’

Research on my own house in Hobart first prompted my research on James Clarke and Jane Mackenzie, who owned 'Royston Cottage' (named due to the Mackenzie connection with Royston House, Edinburgh) for ten years from 1834 having emigrated to Van Diemen's Land several years earlier. Unlike many Scots who emigrated to Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s, the Clarkes were not typical, wealthy or prominent. While James Clarke may have had lowland ancestry, at the time of moving to the Australian colonies his family were certainly established in the north-west Highlands whereas migrants more usually came from cities or the south-east of Scotland. The Clarkes lackedresources, family members arrived separately, and James Clarkedid not have the backing to be immediately given a land grant.The Clarkes emigrated from Assynt and their story is undoubtedly intertwined with clearances and patronage links inthat area. Aided by genealogical research, we can consider what the Clarke story has to tell us about the history of emigration from the far north of Scotland to early Tasmania. 

Biographies of Speakers

Malcolm Bangor-JonesEmployment: civil servantResearch interests: economic and social history of the Northern Highlands since c1600.Publications:‘From Clanship to Crofting: Landownership, Economy and the Church in the Province of Strathnaver’, in John R Baldwin (ed), The Province of Strathnaver, Scottish Society for Northern Studies, Edinburgh, 2000‘Sheep farming in Sutherland in the eighteenth century’, Agricultural History Review 2002‘Settlement, Society and Field Systems in the ImprovementEra’, Farming and the Land, Scottish Life and Society: ACompendium of Scottish Ethnology Volume 2, 2011Recent papers:

‘Commercial activity and trade in seventeenth century Sutherland’, UHI symposium, ‘Reappraising the Seventeenth Century in the Highlands’, 2010‘Prelude to the Crofters' War: the north west Highlands of Scotland in the mid-19th century’, Scottish Studies Annual Fall Colloquium, Guelph 2012‘Growing old in 19th century Sutherland’, Scottish Local History Forum conference on welfare: Perth, 2012‘The establishment of the crofting system in Sutherland’, Malcolm Gray Conference, Inverness, 2013

Ellen BeardEllen Beard, a retired American lawyer, is a PhD student in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of her research is to explore the musical world of Rob Donn — identifying his musical sources, matching the texts and tunes of his songs, and analyzing how he worked as a composer in theoral tradition. She has now assembled texts, translations andmusical settings for about half of his 220 published poems, most of which had never been translated into English. Ultimately, she hopes to contribute to a new scholarly editionof Rob Donn’s work and to restore more of his songs to the repertoire of Gaelic singers. Ellen’s interest in Rob Donn isbased on a remote family connection; she is a descendant of the bard through a great-grandmother who emigrated from Sangobeg to Chicago in the 1880s. Before beginning her PhD, she obtained a diploma in Gaelic and Related Studies at SabhalMòr Ostaig in 2008, and an MSc in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 2011.

Marjory Harper Marjory Harper is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen, and for three years enjoyed a part-time secondment to the UHI Centre for History. She has published widely on thehistory of emigration, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and she makes extensive use of oral testimony in her research and publications. Her most recent book, Scotland No More? The Scots who left Scotland in the twentieth century (Edinburgh, 2013), was awarded the Frank Watson Prize by the University of Guelph and her previous monograph, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003), won the Saltire Prize in 2004. She co-authored (with Stephen Constantine) Migration and

Empire (Oxford, 2010), a Companion Volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire. She is currently working on a monographof Scots in New Zealand, as well as developing a new line of research in migration and mental health.

James HunterNow Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Jim was the first Director of the Centre for History and was instrumental in its establishment in 2005. The author of eleven books about the Highlands and Islands, Jim Hunter has also been active in the public life ofthe area. In the mid-1980s, he became the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union, now the Scottish Crofting Federation. Between 1998 and 2004 he was chairman of Highlandsand Islands Enterprise, the north of Scotland’s development agency. In the course of a varied career, Jim Hunter has also been an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. His latest book, From the Low Tide of the Sea to the Highest Mountain Tops, an account of the development of community ownership in the Highlands andIslands, was published in March 2012. He is also working on a book about the Highland Clearances as they affected Sutherland. Jim Hunter’s first book, The Making of the Crofting Community, described by a contributor to Scottish Historical Review as‘one of the most significant books of its generation’, has been in print for more than 35 years. His other books include A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada (1994), Last of the Free: A History of the Highlands and Islands (1999) and Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan (2005). Professor Hunter was made a CBE in 2001. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007.

Jim A. JohnstonBorn and brought up on the West Side of Shetland in the crofting township of Twatt. Educated at Aith Junior Secondary followed by the Anderson Educational Institute in Lerwick. Studied English and Geography at Aberdeen University before teaching both in Farr High School, Bettyhill where he was Headfor 22 years. Writing in local newspapers since 1977 and author of several booklets including A Future for Peat, Tongue and Farr(3 editions) and The Strathnaver Trail. Married in to the Mackay clan in 1973 and has been resident in Bettyhill ever since. One wife, one daughter, one granddaughter and one small cat.

Community Council secretary and Company Secretary of the Tongue and Farr Sports Association.

Alison McCallAlison T. McCall has recently completed a PhD at the University of Dundee. She is convenor of Women’s History Scotland. She is particularly interested in female education and in the teaching profession in Victorian Scotland.

Margaret M McKayUniversity of Edinburgh MA in History 1962University of London BD 1990 University of London M.Th in 20th Century Systematic Theology 1991

1962-1966 History and English teaching 1977-1987 Independent research on the Island of Coll: Land, People, Clearance and Emigration 1991-2003 Minister of the United Reformed Church and the Church of Scotland Current research project with W R McKay into the Reay Country 17th– mid 19th century. I have been focussing on estate policy,people/land, clearance and emigration.

PublicationsJohn Walker’s Report on the Hebrides (editor) 1980A United Parish (Auchaber) with W R McKay 2001John McKay McInlay in Am BratachMackays and Slavery in the Northern Times 2014

Book in preparation: Mackays and the Founding of Georgia

William MacKayUniversity of Edinburgh, MA in history 1961. Department of the Clerk of the House of Commons 1961-98; Clerk of the House 1998-2002. Author/editor of:Parliament: Editor Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice 2004 and Joint editor 1997;(With Charles Johnson) Parliament and Congress 2010; Clerks in the House of Commons 1366-2002, a biographical study (2002);‘Observations, Rules and Orders’: an early procedural collection (1989);

Secretaries to Mr Speaker (1986); andErskine May’s Private Journal 1883-1886 (1984).Local history Author (with M M McKay): A United Parish (Auchaber) 2001.Articles in –Records of the Scottish Church Hist Soc 1996: Early evangelical religion in the far north: a Kulturkampf; and Parliamentary History Yearbook 2010: ‘Nothing could exceed the badnessof his character, even in this bad age’: Some British and US Speakers compared Current research project with M.M. McKay into the Reay country17th to mid 19th century. So far I have done work on the Church, estate policy, the Reay family, the poor law, and education.

Iain MacKinnon Iain MacKinnon belongs to the parish of Sleat on the Isle of Skye. His PhD thesis examined the Highlands and Islands as a site of colonisation. He carried out the research for his thesis at the University of Ulster. Since completing the PhD he has been working for the Scottish Crofting Federation and ProSpecieRara, a Swiss organisation which works to promote agricultural biodiversity.

Eric RichardsEric Richards was born in North Wales, educated at the University of Nottingham and has lived in Australia since the 1960s. He is Emeritus Professor of History at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, and previously taught at the University of Adelaide and Stirling University. He has held visiting positions at the Australian National University and in several universities in Britain and the United States. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and also of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1986. He publishes widely on British history, and his books on the Highland Clearances have won prizes in Scotland. He is also author and editor of a range of books on migration history, notably his broad survey: Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (2004). His Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901 (UNSW Press, Sydney,2008 ), won a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, 2009.

His recent publications include: The Highland Clearances; People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2013) and an editedcollection, On the Wing: Mobility before and after Emigration to Australia, (Sydney, Anchor Press, 2013). He is currently working on the genesis of modern international migration and on Highland history. He is a keen tennis player and cyclist. He is currently Carnegie Trust Centenary Professor at the Universityof the Highlands and Islands. Some of the funding for the professorship has been used to pay for this conference.

Iain Robertson Reader in Historical Geography at the University of Gloucestershire. He has published widely on events of social protest, in the Scottish Highlands in particular, and on the commemoration of those events as forms of ‘heritage from below’. Iain’s latest book, Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands after 1914: the later Highland Land Wars, was published by Ashgate in November 2103.

Pamela SharpePam Sharpe FAHA is Professor of History at the University of Tasmania; a University Associate in the School of Architecture, UTAS and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Queensland. She has previously researched and taught at University of Western Australia, Bristol University and University of Essex. She received her doctorate at the Cambridge Group for Population and Social Structure and has published widely in British social and economic history c.1650-1850. She was an undergraduate in Economic History at the University of Edinburgh which provided a sound background to her current research! She will be in the UK from September to December 2014 as Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Ben Thomas Ben Thomas is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Aberdeen, whose thesis explores popular imperialism in the Scottish Highlands at the end of the 19th century. He holds anMA (hons) in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews and an MA in War Studies from King’s College London.

Annie Tindley Annie Tindley completed her MA (2001), MSc by Research (2002) and PhD (2006) at the University of Edinburgh. After a short spell at the University of Aberdeen as a temporary lecturer, she worked from 2006 to 2013 at Glasgow Caledonian University as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer, joining the University of Dundee in August 2013. Her particular research interest has been in landed estates and their aristocratic owners and management, especially when faced with the challenges of land reform from the 1870s.  Her book, The Sutherland Estate, 1850-1920 came out in 2010. Her current major research project is to examine the imperial dimension of Scottish and Irish landed aristocrats, their estate management, responses to land reformand the nature of imperial governance, through the life and career of Lord Dufferin and Ava.