The Lordship of the Isles

The Highland Clearances were a sickening and disgraceful part of Gaelic history, the memory of which still resounds across the many ruined towns and wasted moorlands, and can still rally the arms of the more proud amongst the Gael today, no matter where they are in the world.

The severity of the Clearances, when millions were forcibly evicted, having been stripped of their rights, and either put to work or chained and bound onto emigrant ships, is best demonstrated by comparing two things: the number of ethnic Gaels (the rounded average of all estimates I've found, that is), and the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland today.

For the former, the number is an astonishing fifty million. For the latter, the number is sixty thousand. In other words, there are almost ten thousand times as many Gaels, mainly in the Lowlands, England, America, Canada, and Australia, than there are Gaelic speakers.

Even if that average is sliced by almost half of its number by sceptics, it is still a bitter drop to swallow. When I tell you that the Clearances in fact did not end, and that people are still leaving the Highlands in their thousands, and that the laws that allowed such desecration are still the laws of the land, it is almost unbelievable.

But how does all of this effect the Lordship of the Isles, which was forfeited almost half a millenium before the Clearances began? How does it affect the result of the world?

The answer is the salve on Gaelic, and the rest of the British, wounds, and it is as follows.