Famine, clearance and the inspiration for a novel

It was over 50 years ago when Willie Orr found the seed of an idea for a novel about the Scottish potato famine and the Highland Clearances. He had a lot of living to do first, and the inspiration took root in a Scottish archive much later. Now the third of his series about Shiaba on the Isle of Mull is about to be published.

A cold, wet morning on a mountain side on the Isle of Mull, 1968. I was a hill shepherd then. Gathering sheep, I took shelter in the ruins of a crofting township. That’s where the novel Shiaba began.

There is no road to Shiaba. A grass track serves the isolated settlement. Just 12 houses, not quite in a row, their drystone walls a yard thick and no higher than a man, corners rounded to spill the storms, base stones bigger than a bullock, they squat on a remote hillside defiantly facing the sea and the twin peaks of Jura.

More than 20 families lived there till the winter of 1846. Now there are none.

Only the stout walls of the houses stand as a monument to the Gaels who built them. Nothing remains of the roofs, and grass grows over the hearth-stones. An air of melancholy pervades the ruins as if the people, when departing, had left their sorrow in the stones.

Then, 10 years later, when I was a postgraduate student, working for Sir Tom Devine, I was engaged in research in the Duke of Argyll’s archive in Inveraray Castle and I discovered letters and papers from the people of Shiaba and those of John Campbell, the factor for the Duke of Argyll, who had them evicted.

When potato blight infected their crop in 1846, turning the tubers to slime, the families in Shiaba faced starvation, disease and even death. The Duke’s solution to their plight was to sweep them off the land and let Shiaba to a single sheep farmer.

True, some families had left before the crisis, their letters begging their neighbours to follow, but the rest were determined to remain. One letter from a man of almost 100 years old, “drawing close to the house appointed for all living”, was sent with a petition to the Duke for help. It was a moving experience to hold that letter, his name marked with an X, and imagine his pain.

There are many stories written of the evictions in the Highlands and Islands but, what is unique about Shiaba is that we can follow the progress of the evicted families who went to Canada through newspaper reports. It is a sad tale, for many died in the bone-chilling cold of their first winter and many of disease on the emigrant ships.

It’s all there in the letters – their misery and their longing for home. Some had taken clods of Shiaba with them so that they could be buried in the soil of their homeland.

Out of that encounter with the papers, I wrote a factual account of Shiaba, which appeared in the Weekend Scotsman in March 1990, and contributed to Sir Tom Devine’s Great Highland Famine in which there is a chapter devoted to the Ross of Mull.

Then came a play, written for Argyll Youth Theatre and staged on a tour of Mull, Appin and Oban. When we staged it in Bunessan, the village nearest to Shiaba, the youngsters visited the ruins and, to this day, talk about it.

It was their enthusiasm that inspired me to take the story further and write the novel, for the story had to be told so that we remember the sorrow of our own people who were forced to leave their native land.

The story of Shiaba now appears as a trilogy, stretching from the potato famine to the Crofters’ Wars and including a slave revolt in Jamaica.