The Highland Clearances and Clan Ross: How a People Were Scattered
The Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries were particularly devastating in Ross-shire. Tens of thousands of people were displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for sheep. Here's the story of how the Ross diaspora was created — and where they went.
James Ross Jr.
Author of The Forge of Tongues — 22,000 Years of Migration, Mutation, and Memory
The Scattering
The Ross clan's territory — Ross-shire in the northern Scottish Highlands — was settled by the ancestors of the clan for at least 800 years of documented history and, by the genetic record, for very much longer. The earls of Ross held the territory from 1215 until the earldom lapsed in the late fifteenth century. The chiefs of Clan Ross maintained connection to the land through centuries of change: the Reformation, the Jacobite risings, the transformation of the Highland economy.
Then, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the land itself was effectively cleared of its people.
The Highland Clearances — the forced displacement of Highland and Island communities from their agricultural lands to make way for commercial sheep farming and deer forests — was one of the most traumatic events in Scottish history. It was not a sudden catastrophe but a sustained process, extending from the 1760s through the 1880s, driven by the economics of post-Union Britain and carried out by landlords who often included the traditional clan chiefs themselves.
In Ross-shire, the Clearances were among the worst in the Highlands. The population of the interior glens — communities that had farmed the same land for generations — was displaced to the coastal margins or removed entirely, with evictions often carried out with casual brutality. Tens of thousands of people left Ross-shire within a century, many of them involuntarily.
The result was a diaspora spread across the English-speaking world. The scattering of the Ross name from Ross-shire to Nova Scotia, North Carolina, and beyond.
The Economic Logic of Displacement
The Clearances were driven by a specific economic calculation: sheep are more profitable than people.
After the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746, the British government systematically dismantled the Highland clan system — banning Highland dress, disarming the clans, abolishing the hereditary jurisdictions that gave clan chiefs legal authority over their territories. What remained to the chiefs was their role as landlords. And as landlords, they faced the same economic pressures as any other British property-owners in the industrial era.
The sheep factor: Blackface and Cheviot sheep could graze the interior Highland glens far more profitably than the traditional mixed farming communities of small tenants (crofters). A single sheep run on a cleared estate could generate rental income many times what the same land produced under traditional agriculture.
The improvement ideology: The language of the Clearances was often framed in terms of "improvement" — modernising backward Highland communities, replacing subsistence agriculture with productive commercial farming. The ideology of agricultural improvement provided moral cover for what was, in practice, mass eviction.
The collapse of the kelp industry: In the early nineteenth century, the kelp industry — harvesting and burning seaweed for alkaline ash used in glass and soap manufacture — employed thousands of Highlanders. When synthetic alternatives arrived in the 1820s, the industry collapsed overnight, removing the economic justification landlords had used for keeping large coastal populations.
The timing of the Ross-shire Clearances coincided with these economic shifts. The great inland glens — Strathconon, Glenstrathfarrar, Strathbran — were cleared through the first half of the nineteenth century. The communities that had farmed them were pushed to the coast or onto emigrant ships.
The Ross-shire Clearances: Specific Events
The Clearances in Ross-shire were extensive and, in several cases, notorious.
Strathconon — the glen running west from Marybank toward the western Highlands — was cleared in multiple waves from the 1840s through the 1860s. Thousands of people were displaced from the interior to make way for sheep and deer. The glen that once supported a significant agricultural population became, within a generation, a sporting estate.
The Glens of the Black Isle — the peninsula between the Cromarty Firth and the Beauly Firth — saw displacement of small tenants as larger farms consolidated and the improving landlords reorganised their estates.
Greenyards, Strathcarron (1854) — one of the most notorious incidents of the Ross-shire Clearances. Sheriff officers attempting to serve eviction notices were met with resistance from local women. A police force was called in, and the confrontation turned violent. The Greenyards incident became a cause célèbre in the anti-Clearance press.
The Leckmelm Clearance (1879–1880) — a farm on Loch Broom, where a new landlord evicted all the crofting tenants on arrival, demolished their houses to prevent reoccupation, and converted the land to a private estate. The incident contributed to the political agitation that eventually produced the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 — the first significant legal protection for Highland tenants.
Where the Ross Diaspora Went
The cleared communities left for destinations across the English-speaking world, driven by the dual pressures of eviction and economic destitution.
Canada: Nova Scotia and Cape Breton
Nova Scotia — literally "New Scotland" — was the primary destination for many Highland emigrants from the late eighteenth century onward. The province was settled with enough Highland Scots that Scottish Gaelic was spoken there until the twentieth century. Cape Breton Island, the northern part of Nova Scotia, received particularly large numbers of Highland emigrants, including many from Ross-shire.
The Ross surname is common in Cape Breton. The communities they established maintained Gaelic culture — Gaelic song, Gaelic stories, Gaelic worship — long after it had declined in the homeland. The Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts in St. Ann's Bay, Cape Breton, was founded in 1938 and continues to maintain Highland traditions.
Ontario and Prince Edward Island also received significant Ross-shire emigrant communities during the clearance era.
United States: The Earlier Wave
The American emigration preceded the mass Clearances. North Carolina's Cape Fear Valley — settled by Highland Scots from the 1730s onward — included Ross families who emigrated before the American Revolution. The Flora MacDonald connection — the woman famous for helping Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after Culloden who later emigrated to North Carolina — illustrates the scale of Highland emigration to the American south in the mid-18th century.
After the Revolution, the Great Lakes region, the Prairie states, and eventually every part of the United States received Highland Scottish emigrants. The Ross surname spread with the emigration. Today, Ross is among the more common Scottish-origin surnames in the American South and Midwest.
Australia
Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land) and Victoria received Highland emigrants, some displaced by the Clearances, some transported as convicts for offences connected to the resistance to eviction. South Australia and New Zealand also received Highland communities.
The 1851 gold rush brought Scottish emigrants to Victoria in large numbers. The Highland communities of Australia maintained clan associations and cultural connections to the homeland through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Irony of the Ross Chiefs
Among the most painful aspects of the Clearances in Ross-shire is the role of the Ross chiefs themselves. By the nineteenth century, the Balnagown estate — the ancestral seat of the Ross chiefs, held by the clan from the medieval period — had passed out of direct Ross family control in 1672. Subsequent proprietors of the Balnagown lands included various improving landlords who carried out their own clearances without the connection to the clan tradition that had shaped the earlier chiefs' relationship with their tenants.
This is the brutal arithmetic of the Clearances: the ideology of improvement, the cash economy of post-Union Britain, and the legal transformation of clan chiefs into mere landlords combined to sever the relationship between the great families and the communities they had once led in a different kind of compact.
The earldom of Ross had lapsed in 1476. The last earl — John of Islay, who forfeited the earldom for treasonous dealings with England — was also the last holder of the title. Subsequent Ross chiefs held their position through clan tradition rather than legal title, and by the nineteenth century, that tradition had been substantially eroded by the commercial pressures of the era.
The Crofters' Holdings Act and After
The political resistance to the Clearances eventually produced results. The Napier Commission (1883) — established by Gladstone's government to investigate the condition of crofters — heard extensive testimony about the conditions in the Highlands, including Ross-shire. Its report led directly to the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886, which gave crofters security of tenure, fair rent, and the right to pass on their holdings to family members.
The Act did not reverse the Clearances — the people who had been removed were gone, and their descendants were in Cape Breton, North Carolina, and Melbourne. But it ended the era of arbitrary eviction that had defined the clearance period and gave the remaining Highland communities a degree of protection they had never previously possessed under Scottish law.
Tracing Your Ross Clearance Heritage
If your family carries the Ross name and emigrated from Scotland in the 1800s, there is a reasonable probability that the emigration was connected — directly or indirectly — to the Clearances.
Resources for tracing Ross-shire ancestry include:
- ScotlandsPeople — digitised Scottish civil records (from 1855), church records (OPRs from before 1855), and census records
- Am Baile — Highland history and culture digital archive with Ross-shire material
- Highland Archive Centre, Inverness — holds county records, estate papers, and genealogical collections for Ross-shire and surrounding areas
- FamilyTreeDNA Ross Surname Project — aggregates Y-DNA results from Ross men worldwide; useful for identifying which genetic cluster your line belongs to
The DNA can take you back before the records run out. The clearance-era emigrants left a genetic legacy in Nova Scotia and the American South that can be connected to the Highland Ross lines through Y-chromosome testing.