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

The duke was a controversial figure in the Highland Clearances.

From BBC • Jan. 24, 2024

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

But the idea of bringing together the Highland Clearances and chattel slavery - where humans were legally owned as property - in one institution has its critics.

From BBC • Aug. 29, 2020

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