Highland Clearances

British  

plural noun

1. Also called: the Clearances.  in Scotland, the removal, often by force, of the people from some parts of the Highlands to make way for sheep, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

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Example Sentences

HPMAs have been likened to the Highland Clearances, with some suggesting they will devastate many areas.

From BBC • May 30, 2023

Sinclair’s discursive, intensely literate prose knits together time and place, drawing parallels between stolen Indigenous land and the Highland Clearances that left his own Scottish forebears dispossessed.

From Washington Post • Nov. 4, 2021

The period of the Highland Clearances on the mainland had largely missed Lewis but after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 some of the better lands for sheep-grazing on the island were cleared of tenants.

From BBC • Jan. 18, 2017

Starting as a trickle, the migration rose to a torrent amid the Highland Clearances, in which tenant farmers in Scotland were evicted from their lands by property owners.

From New York Times • Nov. 10, 2016

Not just the forgetting-to-mow-the-lawn sort but a more radical rethink – repopulating the forgotten corners with wolves or elk or Dalmatian pelicans, undoing the agricultural subsidy system, reversing the Highland Clearances.

From The Guardian • Jun. 3, 2013