The Highland Clearances on Mull: The Villages That Disappeared
Across Mull, ruined townships preserve the outlines of communities whose people worked the land, raised families and made lives within the island’s estates. Their disappearance was neither simultaneous nor uniform. Archaeology, relief investigations, newspaper reports and personal testimony reveal how agricultural change and decisions about landholding reshaped the island, and why the fate of its inhabitants cannot be read from the ruins alone.
High
An Island transformed
Across the Isle of Mull, the remains of former townships lie among fields, rough pasture and hillsides that have returned to bracken and grass. Roofless houses stand beside abandoned cultivation ridges. Stone walls mark ground once carefully worked, while corn-drying kilns preserve evidence of communities whose livelihoods depended upon more than sheep and cattle.
These places belong to the history of the Highland Clearances, but their abandonment seldom supplies a simple date or explanation. A township might lose its small tenants while a shepherd or agricultural worker remained. Families could leave their holdings without immediately leaving the island, finding accommodation elsewhere and attempting to live by wages. The clearance of a community and the abandonment of its last house could be separated by decades.
This distinction matters on Mull. Deliberate removal, the consolidation of farms, relocation and migration sometimes formed successive stages of the same history. Elsewhere they occurred in different combinations. To describe every departure as eviction obscures those differences; to explain every deserted settlement as the result of people choosing to leave obscures the decisions that constrained their choices.
The island’s transformation took place through changing relationships between proprietors and occupiers. Famine and economic pressure made those relationships more precarious, but neither determined exactly how an estate would respond. Decisions about rents, the size of holdings, employment and access to productive ground shaped what families could do. Their consequences become clearest when the general history is brought into contact with particular places and identifiable people.
The working townships
The surviving remains at Shiaba, on the southern coast of the Ross of Mull, offer a useful starting point. Historic Environment Scotland records houses, barns, yards, cultivation ridges and two corn-drying kilns. A horizontal watermill survives, with a second considered possible. Later croft boundaries overlie the earlier settlement, preserving successive arrangements for occupying and working the land.[1]
Such a landscape required sustained labour. Ground had to be cultivated, crops harvested and grain dried and processed. Livestock depended upon grazing as well as winter provision. The buildings and fields reveal an agricultural community, although they cannot establish, by themselves, whether every household prospered or how securely its members held their ground.
Rural life also extended beyond cultivation. The 2006 archaeological report on Braigh Cottage at Knocknafenaig draws upon census information recording a turner and spinning-wheel maker in the township in 1861. Houses could accommodate craft work and later become agricultural buildings; a structure’s last use might conceal its earlier purpose.[2]
The distinction between crofters and cottars was consequential. A crofter occupied a holding, however inadequate its produce might be. A cottar might have accommodation without an independent agricultural tenancy and depend heavily upon wages or other households. The loss of employment, or the reorganisation of a farm, could therefore disturb more lives than a list of rent-paying tenants would disclose.
Nor did a cultivated holding necessarily provide an entire living. The evidence collected at Bunessan in 1851 describes households combining crops and livestock with carting, smithing, fishing and other work. Their security depended upon the relationship between these resources. When one failed, the others had to bear more of the household’s needs.[4,6]
Famine and the limits of a livelihood
At Bunessan on 10 February 1851, the Reverend Donald Campbell, minister of Kilfinichen and Kilvickeon, described a decline extending beyond the immediate famine years. He associated deteriorating conditions with the ending of kelp manufacture and identified potato failure since 1846 as the principal recent cause of destitution, aggravated by falling cattle prices. Small crofters had parted with much of their stock and their remaining resources had diminished.[3]
His account helps explain why the failure of a crop could develop into a prolonged crisis. Potatoes had fed households whose land and earnings were already limited. Selling cattle might purchase food or meet a rent demand, but it also reduced the means of surviving another season. A family could retain its tenancy while losing the resources needed to make that tenancy useful.
Charles McQuarrie, a Bunessan merchant involved in distributing relief meal and organising employment, described the position of landless cottars as especially miserable. Small crofters, too, had used up money and stock. Some whose resources had previously kept them above destitution were now approaching it. His evidence describes an economy being depleted over several years, rather than a single failed harvest followed by recovery.[4]
Work was available, but its extent and durability were disputed. McQuarrie had contracted for roads in 1847–48 and sometimes employed more than a hundred men. He also described drainage, quarrying and fishing. These activities offered earnings without necessarily providing sufficient work for everyone who needed it. Having a possible occupation and obtaining a dependable living from it were different matters.[4]
The parish’s formal response exposes another difficulty. At its special meeting on 10 February 1851, the Parochial Board acknowledged that hundreds were suffering want without an entitlement to demand relief under the existing law or employment sufficient to support them. It expected need to increase. Asked what measures it had taken or proposed for that emergency, it answered that it had taken none and proposed none.[3]
That answer does not erase the charitable assistance and estate employment described elsewhere in the evidence. It identifies the gap between recognised need and the arrangements for meeting it. Famine involved the availability of food, but also the means of purchasing it and the terms upon which assistance could be obtained.
Decisions about land and employment
Contemporaries disagreed about the scope for supporting the population through agricultural improvement. Donald Campbell believed the parish’s production could be increased and that the greater part, or all, of its people might be employed profitably on improvements for some years. John Campbell, the Duke of Argyll’s chamberlain, did not believe a large proportion of the unemployed could be employed on improvements to the Duke’s property in the parish at a profit to the proprietor. He concluded that the population of that property needed to fall by at least half.[3,5]
The proposals were not identical. The minister spoke of work for a period of years; the chamberlain addressed the profitability of employment on a particular proprietor’s land. Neither statement supplies a fully costed alternative. Their disagreement nevertheless shows that the possibilities were being judged and contested at the time. The response to hardship was not simply dictated by the presence of potato blight.
McQuarrie’s evidence is particularly instructive. He connected some alleged indolence with insecure tenure and observed that tenants with leases worked diligently at improving their holdings. Yet he also advocated emigration and the consolidation of small crofts. He could recognise the effects of insecurity while believing that many people still had to leave.[4]
The crofters brought their own calculations to the inquiry. Donald Maclachlan of Creich described bringing a hundred cartloads of shell-sand onto his holding, then ceasing improvements because he feared removal. With a lease and more ground on affordable terms, he believed he could improve his circumstances. He wished to remain if he could live there, while acknowledging that neighbours wanted to emigrate and lacked the means.[6]
Donald MacGillvray, another Creich crofter, thought a holding twice the size at his existing rent, with assistance during the first year, could support his family. He recognised the difficulty: enlarging holdings meant removing some occupiers unless additional ground could be made available. His proposal concerned the distribution of land and the resources needed to work it, rather than a belief that any small croft could sustain a household under any conditions.[6]
These accounts give substance to the question of choice. Families considered leaving, but they also described changes that might allow them to remain. Their willingness to emigrate cannot be understood apart from the conditions under which they were trying to live.
Removal and relocation across the estates
An earlier investigation reveals what could happen when loss of a holding was followed by relocation. In 1849, Dr Robert MacGregor and Charles R. Baird visited Mull and neighbouring islands for the Glasgow Highland Relief Board. Alexander Mackenzie later reproduced extracts from their report in his history of the Clearances.[7]
For Kilfinichen, those extracts describe crofters and cottars warned to leave, departures to America and movement to Kinloch, where poverty was reported. They also record the sequestration and sale of some Kinloch crofters’ possessions in 1848. The events cannot all be assigned to the date of the investigation.[7]
On neighbouring Ulva, the report associated conversion to a sheep farm under Mr Clark with warnings to small occupiers to leave. Tobermory received displaced people from surrounding estates. At Gribun, by contrast, employment provided by Colonel Macdonald of Inchkenneth was described as enabling people to support themselves without charitable relief.[7]
The Gribun example does not establish that every proprietor had identical resources or opportunities. It records a different response to hardship. The accounts together also expose the limitation of relocation as a remedy: another roof did not necessarily replace crops, grazing or earnings. The Clearances could redistribute poverty as readily as they redistributed people.
At Tavool on Ardmeanach, the change took another form. Research compiled by Pennyghael in the Past describes the former joint tenancy becoming a single farm after sale out of the Lochbuie estate in the 1840s. Later workers’ houses preserve a different organisation of settlement and employment. The old township and the buildings subsequently occupied by agricultural workers should not be treated as one unchanged community.[8]
Shiaba’s history likewise separates removal from final abandonment. Historic Environment Scotland dates its conversion into crofts to 1804 and its clearance to 1847. The Mull Historical & Archaeological Society records continued occupation by shepherds and their families, with the last family leaving Shiaba Cottage in 1937.[1,9] The clearance transformed the community long before its last occupied house became a ruin.
Burg’s continued occupation provides a further warning against treating the present landscape as the aftermath of one departure. The Tavool research draws upon Chrissie MacGillivray of Burg for information about former occupants and local buildings. Such recollections preserve knowledge that documents may omit, while requiring their own distinction between remembered experience and the earlier history of a site.[8]
Knocknafenaig and the removal of six crofters
At Knocknafenaig, near Bunessan, surviving buildings and agricultural remains can be considered alongside the account of a man who said he had been dispossessed there. The combination makes this township particularly valuable for understanding how a decision about landholding affected an individual household.
The site’s material history extends beyond the clearance period. The archaeological investigation at Braigh Cottage recorded houses and other agricultural structures, including a corn-drying kiln, and examined later alteration and reoccupation. These remains provide the setting for the documentary account; they cannot identify every occupant or date every departure.[2]
On 8 August 1883, Duncan Campbell appeared before the Napier Commission at Bunessan. Described as a labourer living in Oban, aged 69, he had not been chosen as a delegate. He came to state a personal grievance.[10]
Campbell said he had undertaken improvements at Knocknafenaig between 1843 and 1846 under the Duke of Argyll’s directions and had built a house at his own expense. In 1854, he testified, six crofters were dispossessed and their holdings given to one incoming tenant, Mr McNiven. Campbell was among those removed.[10]
His father obtained accommodation through Mr McIntyre. Duncan went to Colonsay, where he secured six years’ employment. He later returned to the Argyll estate but spent four years there without land. The evidence gives stages of displacement and work without supplying a complete dated itinerary.[10]
Campbell denied that he had owed rent when removed. He believed the Duke had not known the circumstances and suggested that the factor had reported arrears. His account distinguishes what he knew about his own position from what he thought might have been represented to the proprietor. The testimony does not independently establish the estate’s accounting or the Duke’s knowledge.[10]
Asked why he had been displaced in favour of McNiven, Campbell answered that he did not know. His request was clearer: he wanted the land his ancestors had occupied, or another holding on the estate, and expressed willingness to pay the rent McNiven was paying.[10]
Nearly thirty years separated the removal from this evidence. Campbell’s testimony is therefore a retrospective account by someone directly affected, given in the setting of a public inquiry into crofting conditions. Its value is considerable without making it carry questions it cannot answer. It identifies the alleged consolidation, its date and participants, the improvements Campbell said he had made and some consequences for his family. Estate rentals and correspondence would be needed to reconstruct the administrative decision in full.
The distinction between an incomplete explanation and an absence of evidence is important. Campbell’s account gives a specific reason for examining dispossession at Knocknafenaig. The township’s decline cannot adequately be described as the unconnected departures of households that simply elected to leave. Equally, the removal of six crofters does not explain every building’s subsequent history.
Braigh Cottage was reoccupied and substantially altered. The archaeological report records the story of Donald ‘the Joiner’ MacGillivray rebuilding it in 1906 as a local account, rather than as a fact established by the building survey alone.[2] The survival or renewed use of one house does not mean that the former community survived unchanged.
The proprietor’s explanation
The Duke of Argyll offered his own account in Crofts and Farms in the Hebrides, published in 1883 and addressed to Lord Napier. Although much of the pamphlet concerns Tiree, its discussion of Mull and Iona is explicit. It allows the proprietor’s explanation to be read alongside the evidence of those who occupied his land.[11]
For the Ross of Mull, the Duke described the consolidation of small holdings as an improvement in the condition of the people. He emphasised drainage, enclosure and expenditure, and said he had been reluctant to hasten consolidation by dispossessing crofters who could meet their obligations. These were his claims about policy and its results.[11]
His explanation of rent exposes a significant part of the economic reasoning. If fewer families occupied the same ground, he argued, more of its produce could remain after meeting their subsistence, allowing a greater rental surplus even without a large increase in production. He associated consolidation with better management, but recognised that fewer households themselves changed the calculation.[11]
A higher rental could therefore reflect increased output, a changed distribution of existing output, or both. The financial result did not, by itself, measure the consequences for families no longer supported on the holding. Those consequences required following the people who left, as well as examining the farms that remained.
The Duke also used a falling poor rate as evidence against claims of increasing poverty. That was a measure of particular importance to those paying it, but it could not alone establish the welfare of former inhabitants who had moved elsewhere. His account directs attention towards a recurring question in the history of improvement: whose circumstances were being measured, and over what ground?[11]
Agricultural activity continued within the changing estates. In April 1857 the Glasgow Herald reported fourteen ploughs competing at the Ross Agricultural Society’s second annual match, held at Suie near Bunessan under the patronage of the chamberlain and other local gentlemen. The report celebrated management, improvement and cooperation, giving a view of the district through the values of those praising the occasion.[12]
In March 1858 the newspaper advertised Fidden as a farm of about 1,600 acres, nearly 300 of them arable and green pasture. Suitability for black cattle, supplies of shell-sand and seaweed, and potential for further improvement were selling points. Applications for a nineteen-year lease, or another agreed term, were directed to John Campbell, the Duke’s chamberlain.[13]
The advertisement establishes what was offered, rather than how the farm acquired its boundaries. It also shows why the reorganisation of Mull cannot be reduced entirely to sheep farming. The estate economy being promoted included cultivation and cattle, alongside the concentration of land in holdings that required capital and labour to work.
Leaving Mull
Departure from a holding did not necessarily mean immediate emigration. Campbell’s own account describes employment elsewhere and a return without land. Other families moved into villages or between estates, while overseas migration could follow a period of trying to maintain a livelihood closer to home.
The terms of assisted emigration are recorded from the estate’s perspective in John Campbell’s evidence to McNeill. The chamberlain said that people could sign a petition for assistance and withdraw before departure if they returned clothing supplied by the Duke. He described the valuation of stock and crops, deduction of rent arrears and provision of passages. These statements explain the arrangements as he presented them; they do not establish how practicable it was for each household to remain.[5]
Accounts of the journey’s consequences also differed. Mackenzie reproduced the Relief Board’s report of assistance for 243 emigrants from the Ross and Iona, followed by distressing news of cholera and hardship in Canada. The passage records what the investigators were told and subsequently reported, rather than tracing the experience of every person in the group.[14]
An Iodhlann preserves Inverness Advertiser clippings catalogued to November 1849. One, headed ‘A Voice from Canada’, explicitly concerns emigrants from Tiree and Mull and describes hardship at Hamilton and Fergus through correspondence from Canada. Its forceful editorial language makes the newspaper’s position plain. These clippings add contemporary reporting, although they cannot yet be identified with the whole of the particular group described by the Relief Board.[15]
Other newspapers offered a more favourable account of assisted emigration. In October 1853 the Glasgow Herald praised the Highland and Island Emigration Society and presented departure as beneficial to emigrants and the country they left. The party immediately described came from Lochiel, not Mull. Its relevance here is the language through which such schemes were commended to the public, rather than evidence about a Mull household.[16]
Neither reassurance nor condemnation can substitute for tracing particular emigrants. Their letters, passenger records and experiences after arrival are needed to assess what a departure made possible and what it cost. A wish to leave could coexist with reluctance, and a chosen passage could follow the loss of tolerable alternatives.
What the deserted townships preserve
Shiaba, Tavool, Burg and Knocknafenaig and others preserve different combinations of agricultural reorganisation, removal and continued occupation. Their histories caution against imagining Mull becoming empty through one uniform event. Communities changed at different times, and the people affected did not all follow the same route.
The land question continued beyond the main famine decades. In May 1890 the North British Daily Mail reported substantial Crofter Commission rent reductions on Mull, including eight applications on the Kinloch estate. This belongs to the later history of tenancy and its regulation, rather than providing retrospective proof of the circumstances of an earlier eviction.[17]
The surviving townships make the earlier changes visible, but their buildings must be read alongside documents. A house can preserve the labour of its builders without recording the terms on which they occupied it. A rental can name a tenant while saying little about cottars or dependent households. Testimony can disclose a grievance without explaining everything that passed between proprietor and factor.
Considered together, these sources allow a more exact account. The Clearances on Mull involved genuine economic distress, but also decisions about the use of land and the people who would continue to occupy it. The expansion of a holding could improve one family’s prospects while ending another’s agricultural livelihood. Relief might sustain a household without restoring its independence. Emigration could offer a future that had become difficult to imagine at home, while exposing the emigrants to further hardship.
Campbell came back to Bunessan in 1883 seeking land. He had found employment elsewhere and lived for years beyond Knocknafenaig, but neither time nor distance had settled his grievance. His testimony leaves a particular claim to be examined beside the remains of a particular place. It is through such connections that the deserted townships become more than a general image of loss, and the history of their inhabitants can be recovered with greater precision.
About this Highland Clearance research
The research underpinning this essay developed during the writing of my historical novels, Echoes of the Clearances and Dispossessed, as I investigated the experiences of Mull families affected by clearance and emigration. The essay examines that history through documentary and archaeological evidence, with references provided for readers wishing to explore the sources.
Notes and sources
Place-name and surname spellings vary between records. This essay generally uses familiar modern place-names while retaining distinctive spellings in source titles. The Napier evidence is retrospective testimony; Argyll’s pamphlet is a proprietor’s retrospective account; the 1849 Relief Board extracts are cited through Mackenzie’s later publication. These sources are identified separately because their dates, purposes and relationships matter to their interpretation. Online sources consulted 18 October 2026.
1. Historic Environment Scotland, Shiaba, deserted township, Mull, Scheduled Monument SM5634, description and statement of national importance. Online source
2. George Geddes, Braigh Cottage, Kilfinichen and Kilvickeon, Island of Mull: Historic Building Recording and Archaeological Evaluation (Headland Archaeology Ltd, project BCB06, 13 November 2006), pp. 3 and 7–8. The account of rebuilding in 1906 is explicitly presented as a local story. Online source
3. Sir John M’Neill, Report to the Board of Supervision … on the Western Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh: Murray and Gibb for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1851), Appendix A, p. 1: minute of the Parochial Board of Kilfinichen and Kilvickeon and evidence of the Reverend Donald Campbell, 10 February 1851. Online source
4. M’Neill, Report, Appendix A, pp. 3–4: evidence of Charles M’Quarrie, 11 February 1851. His comments on tenure should be read together with his advocacy of emigration and consolidation.
5. M’Neill, Report, Appendix A, pp. 4–5: evidence of John Campbell, chamberlain to the Duke of Argyll; continuation dated 12 February 1851.
6. M’Neill, Report, Appendix A, p. 7: statements of Donald Maclachlan and Donald M’Gillvray, crofters at Creich. Maclachlan’s surname appears in variant forms within the printed record. No family relationship is inferred from the names.
7. Alexander Mackenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances, second edition, altered and revised (Glasgow: P. J. O’Callaghan, 1914), pp. 228–229: extracts attributed to the Glasgow Highland Relief Board’s 1849 deputation, with Mackenzie’s surrounding commentary. Online source
8. Pennyghael in the Past Historical Archive, account compiled in 2008 and published by the Mull Historical & Archaeological Society, ‘Tavool Workers’ Houses’. Online source
9. Mull Historical & Archaeological Society, ‘Shiaba’, including its account of occupation after the principal clearance. Online source
10. Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands, evidence at Bunessan, 8 August 1883, Duncan Campbell, qq. 35259–35276. Improvements and removal: q. 35260; accommodation and employment: qq. 35261–35263; incoming tenant and arrears: qq. 35267–35271; request for land and willingness to pay rent: qq. 35272–35274; explanation of removal: qq. 35275–35276. Transcription: Online source. Digitised Commission volumes: Online source
11. George Douglas Campbell, eighth Duke of Argyll, Crofts and Farms in the Hebrides: Being an Account of the Management of an Island Estate for 130 Years (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1883), pp. 48–52 and 73–74. The discussion of rental surplus is on p. 51. The pamphlet’s earlier claim concerning a single sheriff-warrant eviction relates to Tiree and is not used here as a statement about Mull. Online source
12. ‘Ross of Mull Ploughing March’ [heading as printed], Glasgow Herald, 13 April 1857, p. 5. The report describes a ploughing match. Online source
13. ‘To Let, In the Island of Mull, Argyllshire, The Farm of Fidden’, Glasgow Herald, 29 March 1858, p. 2. Acreage, agricultural suitability and improvement potential are the advertiser’s statements. Online source
14. Mackenzie, History, pp. 229–230, ‘Bunessan’: the Relief Board account of assistance for emigrants from the Ross of Mull and Iona and subsequent reports from Canada.
15. Inverness Advertiser, clippings catalogued to November 1849, An Iodhlann, item 2013.135.1, including ‘A Voice from Canada. Story and Fate of the Tyree Emigrants’. Full issue dates and page numbers are not preserved in the accessible clipping compilation. Its separately headed letter ‘The Tyree Emigrants’ is dated 30 October 1849; that is a letter date, not an established publication date. Catalogue: Online source. Scanned clippings: Online source
16. ‘Highland Emigration’, Glasgow Herald, 28 October 1853, p. 5. The departure described at the opening concerns Lochiel; the adjacent ‘More Evictions’ item concerns Skye. Online source
17. ‘Crofter Commission Decisions. Sweeping Reductions in Mull’, North British Daily Mail, 15 May 1890, p. 4; catalogued by Newspapers.com as Glasgow Daily Mail. Online source
Further reading
T. M. Devine, The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988; subsequently reissued).
About the author
William A. Allan is an independent researcher of Mull and MacGillivray family history, a historical novelist and a public speaker on Highland history, migration and family heritage. He founded the Mull MacGillivray Heritage Project and Eagle’s Rest Press.
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