Skye 6

The Crofter who owns the land, but not the house, at Husabost, where we are staying. *Crofting is rarely a viable way of life and his main career is building. Hence the builders bucket being used to feed the pigs.

Extra shot sums up the day.....


*In the early part of 1882, crofters living on the Husabost and Glendale estates in the north-west of Skye were increasingly dissatisfied with their landlords' treatment of them, and petitioned their landlords with their grievances to allow them to increase their common grazings by renting them a sheep farm at Waterstein. When the petitions were rejected, the crofters refused to pay any more rent to the estate owners, and by May 1882 the crofters began to graze their sheep at Waterstein without permission. 

The crofters' campaign intensified in November 1882 when a large group of Glendale men attacked a shepherd who attempted to drive their sheep from Waterstein. In the same month, only five of Glendale's 500 crofters paid rent to their landlord. 

On 16 January 1883, in a bid to regain control of the situation, the authorities attempted to station four more policemen on the Glendale estate. Armed with sticks, a large crowd of Glendale crofters forcefully resisted the policemen's arrival, kicked and beat them, and drove them from the estate. 

On 17 January,  a crowd of Glendale crofters attacked Donald MacTavish, a messenger-at-arms who was attempting to deliver an order of the Court of Session in Edinburgh to five Glendale crofters. The messenger-at-arms, and the Ground Officer that accompanied him, were pushed and shoved, and forced off the estate by the crowd.

Three days later, on 20 January, a crowd of Glendale crofters assembled again, this time forcing policemen stationed at Dunvegan to abandon their posts and flee to Edinbane. 

The situation was to reach a climax when the government sent Malcolm MacNeill, a civil servant, to Glendale on a gunboat, to meet with the Glendale crofters. With the threat of a confrontation with the army hanging over them, the crofters agreed to MacNeill's demand that five of their number would stand trial in Edinburgh. John MacPherson, the leader of the Glendale agitations, and four others, known from then on as the 'Glendale Martyrs', were each imprisoned for two months. 

These events in Glendale formed part of the 'Crofters' War' of 1882-88, a six-year period that saw crofters in the Highlands agitate for a reform of the system of landownership. The campaigns of the crofters, and an increasingly sympathetic press and public, led in May 1883 to the establishment of the Napier Commission, "to inquire into the condition of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland". By 1886 the government had passed the Crofters' Holdings Act, which improved the situation of the crofters to an extent, but did not address their primary concern: the need for more land to be made available to them. 

At the end of the Crofters' War, the land issue in the Highlands was still not resolved, and land agitation flared up again in the Highlands in the 1920s. The fight for reform of the system of landownership continued after that period in the form of non-violent political campaigns.