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The Highland Clearances

Hallaig, Raasay


Hallaig, looking south-east towards the mainland.

Hallaig, on the south-east corner of Raasay and looking across the Inner Sound to the Scottish mainland, is perhaps the most famous
individual Clearance site anywhere in the Highlands. It owes its fame to the poem "Hallaig" by Sorley Maclean, who was undisputedly
the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century. He died in 1996. Written in Gaelic, the poem no doubt achieves its greatest force in that
language, but even in English translation it's evocation of the heartbreak and desolation of the Clearances is powerfully and deeply
moving. The township is an easy walk of about an hour from the road at North Fearns, and the remaining houses lie near the top of a
broad grassy glen above a vast stone-built sheep-pen and shepherd's cottage - constructed from the stones of many of the original
houses, after the township was cleared. As with so many other clearance sites, the situation is beautiful, sheltered, fertile; there is
no need to wonder why the people formed such strong attachments to their homes.


The same house, looking east across the Inner Sound.



Hallaig, with northern Raasay (left) and the Applecross peninsula behind.

Hallaig, by Sorley Maclean.


The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,

between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-chuirn:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.

In Screapadal of my people
where Norman and Big Hector were,
their daughters and their sons are a wood
going up beside the stream.

Proud tonight the pine cocks
crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,
straight their backs in the moonlight -
they are not the wood I love.

I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up from the cairn,
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.

if it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,
to the sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.

They are still in Hallaig,
MacLeans and MacLeods,
all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim
the dead have been seen alive.

The men lying on the green
at the end of the house that was,
the girls a wood of birches,
straight their backs, bent their heads.

Between the Leac and Fearns
the road is under mild moss
and the girls in silent bands
go to Clachan as in the beginning.

and return from Clachan
from Suishnish and the land of the living;
each one young and high-stepping,
without the heartbreak of the tale.



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