James Campbell, Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1984)

Baxter's Mills, Princes Street, Dundee (abandoned Jute factory)

"George Kinloch knew the risks he was running when he agreed to deliver a speech on the subject [suffrage reform] on Dundee's Magdalene Yard Green late in 1819. At first he hesitated over accepting the invitation, but the event which made up his mind was the Peterloo Massacre which took place in August of that year, when Manchester Yeomanry charged a crowd of working people with bayonet, resulting in eleven deaths and countless injuries."

(p. 46)

"Scott [Sir Walter], of course, was smacking his lips in anticipation of a conviction." [Kinlock was given 3 years exile.] (p. 47)

In 1813 about eighty people, Polsons, Gunns and Sutherlands, in eleven or twelve families out of thousands evicted from the Strath of Kildonan, came to live here [Badbea]. In the strath, they had survived mainly by farming and by distilling whisky, an illicit occupation which violated the excise laws but carried the blessing of centuries. However, their landlady, the Countess of Sutherland, demurred; in a letter she commented on the `refractory' nature of the people of Clan Gunn who were `unwilling to quit that occupation for a life of industry of a different sort which was proposed to them'. (p. 81)

The misery of the Clearances involved not only the suffering of hardship, bullying and death, but the most terrible of all tragedies, the destruction of a people. It was the completion of the process begun at Culloden to undermine the Highlander's way of life and the ways he had of interpreting it: his customs and culture. That is why the Highland Clearances is Scotland's most forceful, clear and valuable myth. Throughout the entire country there is the sense that what took place in the Highlands during the earlier part of last century is a clue to what has happened to modern Scotland. (p. 83)

Mention of a museum in Bettyhill that has something on the Clearances

Gloomy Memories by Donald Macleod (eyewitness account of a Sutherland Clearance)

It is quite easy to spend a week on an estate somewhere in the Highlands and never see a single Scot, far less talk to one--except of course the gillie, a pet name for a gamekeeper which derives from the Gaelic gille, meaning `boy'. Anyone seeking an answer to why the Scots continue to resent the English in the traditional manner need look no further than this bizarre equation. (p. 99)

The total land area of the county of Sutherland is 1,297,803 acres, out of which the present Countess own 123,500 (as Mrs Janson she owns a further 34,500 acres. Compared with the 1,201,000 acres which the Sutherland family owned in 1874, this is a big drop but, as John McEwen, the author of Who Owns Scotland says, `still comfortable'. (p. 100)

Tenement: a four or five-storey walk-up building with two or three flats on each floor, possessing a common toilet, stairway and close. (p. 145 -- not a quotation here)

[In 1695] In Edinburgh the shops were empty of goods and there were frequent outbreaks of disease--which is not surprising when the general poverty of the nation is considered, together with the unsanitary habits of townspeople of all classes. Until well into the eighteenth century, visitors complained of foul smells in the streets arising from the heaps of excrement lying around. It was necessary to look to one's feet and head at the same time, as the pots were emptied each night from above (upon the given signal of a bell and the cry of `Gardey loo!') to supplement the piles which already stocked the gutters. In the houses themselves, master, mistress, family and servants all slept on the floor, in rooms unadorned by pictures on the wall or carpets on the floor: only the largest houses in Edinburgh had carpets, and then only in the most important rooms; and in the smaller towns there might be no carpets at all. (pp. 151-152)

[Campbell goes on to talk about how crowded Edinburgh was then.]

Quoting a Scottish playwright: "It's a strange state of affairs when even in Scotland the use of Scots is taken by audiences as a signal to laugh." (p. 154)

The story in question was the theft of the Stone of Destiny on Christmas Eve 1950, from beneath the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, where it had been since it was removed from Scone Abbey in 1296 in the raids preceding Scotland's successful War of Independence." (p. 159)

Once in Edinburgh, I contacted the politician Jim Sillars. Although he had once been a Labour MP, Sillars was now an avowed Scottish Nationalist. Together with another Labour member, he had broken away from the Labour Party in 1975 to form the Scottish Labour Party, which collapsed ignominiously one year later, ejecting Sillars into the Scottish National Party, an organization he had once said he `could not stomach". (p. 159)

[unemployment]

[Note: Campbell, pp. 95-96, notes that MacLeod's Gloomy Memories was explicitly intended as a rebuttal to Harriet Beecher Stowe who had written a rosy picture of the Duchess of Sutherland.]