ABSTRACT
The cheviot sheep had been first introduced into Sutherland in 1794 by a company of southern sheep farmers on the estate of Lord Armadale. The experiment was successful and it was commended because the population of the estate had actually increased and because the people were ‘encouraged … to improve and be industrious seamen’. Other removals were also engineered by neighbouring landowners. Lord Reay marked out forty acres near Sandgoe on the north coast to accommodate twenty families, while on the Strathy estate eighteen families who had paid £185 rent in the high strath were replaced by a sheep fanner paying £400. The sheep population of the county grew rapidly to an estimated 94,750 in 1808 and large numbers of families were pressed out towards the coasts—at Ports-kerra there were twenty-nine families living off twenty-three acres of arable land and the fish they could catch, to which was added a further eleven families of new settlers. In Edderachyllis, fifty families were removed ‘and their places occupied by sheep’; those thus removed seem to have been left to their own devices which meant that the coastal areas were increasingly congested with families living on less than two acres each. 1
