ABSTRACT
The Dowager Duchess/Countess, on the death of her husband, told her agents that she considered the common people of Sutherland under her special care; all their little disputes were to be listened to. They were to be treated with the greatest kindness. ‘Recollect how a person in the Duchess's position is watched as to her treatment of the people’, wrote Loch. None the less, further removals occurred in the years 1833–4, and, in one instance, the common people had to be threatened against being ‘foolish enough to use violence’. The Temovees were usually given timber for their new houses, some old potato land for their immediate support and a period of rent-free occupation. But there were problems in the older reception areas— at Oldshores on the west coast there was overcrowding which Loch attributed to ‘natural causes and produced by the people themselves’, and he believed that the inconvenience would help ‘to compel them either to depend entirely upon fishing or emigrate to the colonies’. Loch's attitude to emigration was changing—in 1833 he wrote that, ‘even at the risk of our losing occasionally some of the best settlers, the advantages which are derived by the withdrawal of the surplus population are very great not only to those who go but to those who stay.’ 1
