ABSTRACT
If the legacy of the clearances is writ large in the landscape and population distribution of the highlands and islands and, not least in the label ‘crofting districts’, in scottish cultural heritage, the clearances are inscribed as a national trauma, their resonance extending far beyond their regional confnes owing to their continuous multi-faceted reconstruction or re-enactment over time and, in social and geographical terms, to the waves of expatriates that clearing policies produced. as illustrated in chapter 2, their collective memory, embedded in oral tradition and given offcial recognition by the Napier Commission, has been strengthened by artistic creations, not least literary narratives (among which modern poetry in both gaelic and english which space has not allowed to treat in this study), and by their use as a rallying and symbolic tool in political discourse. from the nineteenth century, the clearances became politicised, notably used by Marx, and subsequently recurrently inserted in discourses attacking property and landownership, striking a chord in both urban and rural scotland. gradually their memory has become a collective and somewhat festering wound – frequently reopened with the scalpel of contest and controversy.
