Highland Clearances on Skye, Scotland: Crofts and Clans

Drive along Skye’s western coastline today and you’ll pass field after field of low grassy mounds — the outlines of houses that stood empty within a generation. These are the traces of the Highland Clearances, one of the most consequential upheavals in Scottish history, and nowhere is their legacy written more plainly into the land than on this island. Skye’s crofting townships, clan estates, and depopulated glens tell a story that goes well beyond the dramatic scenery most visitors come for. Travellers who join Odyssey Traveller’s Scottish Isles small group tour spend two days on Skye tracing this history in the landscape, from abandoned crofts to the halls of Clan Donald.

The story of the Clearances did not begin on Skye, and it did not end there either — but the island’s experience of it was among the most sustained and best documented in the Highlands and Islands. Understanding what happened here, and why, adds a layer of meaning to a landscape that can otherwise read simply as empty and beautiful.

What Were the Highland Clearances?

The Highland Clearances refers to the eviction of tenant farmers from Highland and island estates, mostly between the 1750s and the 1880s, as landowners restructured their land for more profitable use. In the first phase, many clan chiefs converted their estates to large-scale sheep farming, since wool and mutton fetched far better returns than the rents paid by small tenant farmers. In the second phase, from around 1815, the collapse of the kelp industry — burned seaweed had briefly been valuable for making soap and glass — removed one of the few cash incomes available to coastal crofting families, leaving many landlords viewing their tenants as a liability rather than an asset.

What made the Clearances so disruptive was not eviction alone, but the wholesale replacement of a settlement pattern. Families who had farmed the same in-bye land and shared hill grazing for generations were relocated — often to poorer coastal plots, sometimes overseas — while the land they had worked was consolidated into a single sheep farm run by one shepherd and his dogs. On Skye, this process intensified through the 1840s and 1850s, compounded by the failure of the potato crop, which had become the staple food of crofting households and on which many families depended entirely.

Why Skye Was Hit Particularly Hard

Skye’s landowning families — principally the MacDonalds of Sleat and the MacLeods of Dunvegan — faced mounting debts by the mid-nineteenth century, partly a legacy of the same kelp-industry collapse that had undercut their tenants’ incomes. Rather than absorbing the loss, several estates pursued clearance and, in some cases, assisted emigration as a way of reducing the number of dependent tenants on the books. The famine years of the late 1840s, when the potato blight reached Scotland shortly after its devastating effect on Ireland, removed any remaining room for negotiation between landlord and crofter.

The clearances at Boreraig and Suisnish in the south of Skye, carried out in 1853, are among the best recorded in the Highlands, largely because eyewitnesses, among them the young geologist Archibald Geikie, who watched the clearance of Suisnish, wrote about them, and because the emigration records survive. Families who had lived in these townships for generations were removed within days, their homes pulled down to prevent resettlement, and many emigrated to Australia through the Highland and Island Emigration Society. The scale of documentation from Skye — estate correspondence, court records, and press coverage — means the island offers an unusually clear window into how the Clearances actually unfolded on the ground.

Reading the Landscape: Abandoned Crofts and Townships

For a visitor today, the most direct evidence of the Clearances is topographical rather than architectural. Look for the long, low rectangular outlines of former longhouses, often traceable only by lines of tumbled stone half-covered in bracken and moss. Around them, the rig-and-furrow pattern of old cultivation strips can still be read in the turf on a clear day, evidence of intensive small-scale farming that stopped abruptly. These sites sit quietly across the south and west of the island, and walking among them gives a far more immediate sense of the Clearances than any museum display.

What’s striking is the contrast with the land use that replaced these communities: wide, largely unpopulated hillside given over to sheep and, later, to sporting estates and deer forests. The emptiness that many visitors find so appealing about Skye’s landscape is, in a real sense, the direct visual legacy of the Clearances — a depopulation that has never fully reversed in the century and a half since.

Clan Donald and Armadale Castle

Armadale Castle, on the Sleat peninsula in the south of Skye, was the seat of the MacDonalds of Sleat and is now home to the Clan Donald Centre. The estate’s own history is closely bound up with the Clearances it presided over, and the centre does not shy away from this — its exhibitions cover clan history, the wider Highland diaspora, and the emigration that followed eviction, alongside the more traditional material on clan heraldry and genealogy. Walking the castle’s restored gardens, with views out over the Sound of Sleat, is a useful counterpoint to the deserted townships elsewhere on the island: two sides of the same estate history, one built up and one pulled down.

The MacDonald name also connects Skye to an earlier chapter of upheaval. It was to Skye that Bonnie Prince Charlie fled after the defeat at Culloden in 1746, guided across from the Outer Hebrides with the help of Flora MacDonald — an episode that, in retrospect, marked the beginning of the end for the clan system the Clearances would later dismantle from within.

Further north, the MacLeods of Dunvegan pursued much the same course as their MacDonald neighbours in Sleat. Dunvegan Castle, their seat for centuries and reputedly the oldest continuously inhabited castle in Scotland, sits on a rocky promontory above its own loch, and the clan’s estate around it saw clearance and emigration on a similar scale through the same decades. Visiting Dunvegan alongside Armadale makes clear that the Clearances were not the work of one particular landlord but a pattern followed, with local variations, across almost every estate on the island.

Crofting Today: Community Land Ownership

The story does not end with the nineteenth century. Crofting survived on Skye in modified form under the crofting law reforms of the 1880s, which followed sustained agitation by tenants — the Highland Land League and the “Crofters’ War” of resistance to further clearance — and gave crofters legal security of tenure for the first time. In recent decades, several Skye estates have passed into community ownership, with crofters and residents buying out landlords through Scotland’s community right-to-buy legislation. It is a slow but deliberate reversal of the landlord-tenant relationship that produced the Clearances in the first place, and it shapes how the island’s land is managed today.

This modern context matters for understanding the sites you’ll visit. A working croft today is a small, often part-time agricultural holding — a few sheep, some hay, a kitchen garden — very different in scale from the farms that replaced cleared communities in the nineteenth century, but directly descended from the same legal category of tenancy that the Clearances tried to sweep away.

Visiting Skye’s Clearance Sites Today

The clearance sites at Boreraig and Suisnish are reached on foot on a circular walk of about ten miles (16 kilometres) from Cill Chrìosd (Kilchrist), on the road between Broadford and Elgol, which passes both ruined townships. Armadale Castle and the Clan Donald Centre are easily accessible by road and make a good half-day visit combining castle, gardens, and museum. For a broader sense of crofting life as it was lived — rather than as it was ended — the Museum of Island Life near Kilmuir in the north of Skye preserves a cluster of restored thatched cottages. On the tour, the same story is told on Lewis at the Arnol Blackhouse, a fully furnished thatched crofting home.

Skye’s story connects naturally to the wider island-hopping route through Scotland’s west and north — from the castle and stone circles of Arran in the south, by way of Mull and Iona Abbey, to the ancient stone circles of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, further along the same tour itinerary. For a broader introduction to the island beyond its clearance history, our complete guide to the Isle of Skye covers its geology, clan castles, and Atlantic trading history in more depth. You can also see how Skye fits into the full journey in our complete Scottish island-hopping guide and our guide to the Scottish islands.

Few landscapes reward a second look quite like Skye’s. Beneath the dramatic ridgelines and sea lochs that draw photographers from around the world lies a much quieter record of loss, resilience, and, eventually, a measure of restitution. Seeing the cleared townships alongside Armadale Castle, with a tour leader who can point out what the eye might miss, turns a scenic drive into something closer to reading a history book written in stone and turf.