Our first night on Skye, we arrived much too late and crossed the bridge through a tiny, sleeping village onto a narrow one-lane road we hoped would lead us to the pub we’d called the day before. With no moon and no artificial lights, we plowed on blindly, growing less certain by the mile. It was the dead of winter, off the bitterly cold west coast of Scotland. We’d been caught like this before, but on a balmy volcanic island off the coast of Sicily with friendly Italians slumbering nearby. We were just beginning to calculate the hours back to civilization (or at least to Glasgow), when off to the left, we spotted a flickering light over a distant door...
In 1832, the McCaskills of the Scottish Isle of Skye collided with their dreary niche in history, when they were evicted from their island village, Rubha an Dùnain, and booted off, eventually (in our case) to North Carolina. Their removal was designed to make way for flocks of much more docile and profitable sheep. Thus arrived on Skye the historic outrage known as the Highland Clearances. Over the next several decades, the island would witness the wealthier landowners deliberately depopulating their own country in order to increase their personal fortunes.
For centuries, the Isle of Skye had borne the brunt of the vicious warfare between the MacLeod and MacDonald clans. In one episode, the MacLeods caught 395 MacDonalds in a cave on the nearby island of Eigg and burned them to death. The MacDonalds retaliated by trapping the MacLeods at worship on a Sunday morning, barring the doors to Trumpan Church, and burning the lot to the ground.
In this mess, Mom's McCaskills had hired out to the MacLeods as a form of coast guard, warning them whenever the MacDonald boats approached. Yet by the late 18th century, the clan system and all of its nastier rivalries had been swept away. The eagle-eyed McCaskills of Rubha an Dùnain were rendered superfluous.
It baffles the imagination that the Highland clans proved so utterly ungovernable, yet with the breakdown of the clan system after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, they passed so meekly into the night. But they did, more or less, and Scotland lost hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the best educated proletariat in Europe. Even today, the Highlands are one of the least populated areas in the world, with 500 individuals owning more than 90% of the land.
One odd twist of this history occurred when the Highlanders who declined to emigrate took their native ferocity into service in the British Army. Regiments like the Black Watch became the shock troops of the British Empire, as feared in the 19th century as any SS Panzer or Special Forces unit of the 20th. From Waterloo to Lucknow to Magersfontein, the human wave attack known as the Highland Charge swept all before it.
Meanwhile, the Removals continued. Usually, this involved burning the roof timbers of a cottage to prevent the tenants from reoccupying it. In a few instances, the landlords forgot to remove a sick and elderly grandmother from her bed before burning her house down around her. Eventually, the sight of entire villages in flames, their citizens left to fend for themselves in the bitter Scottish weather, proved too much even for the 19th century Victorian stomach. But by the time Her Majesty's Government stepped in, an entire way of life had vanished.
Today, the once impoverished village of Rubha an Dùnain is a ruin at the tip of a barren peninsula, a rough three-mile trek over private MacLeod land from an end-of-the world campsite in nearby Glenbrittle. The locals all remember the McCaskills from the stories handed down through the ages. Yet as nasty as our clan’s Scottish finale might have been, it's hard to feel sorry today for the Americans who emerged from the ashes.
Our favorite branch farmed tobacco in the Carolinas and corn in Tennessee, then joined the northward migration of the 1930s Depression to work in the rubber factories of Akron, Ohio. Decades later, these prosperous descendants returned full circle via Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Bruxelles, to lodge in a local pub and gaze out over the water and smugly wonder at the vagaries of history.
Some small justice in that?