Walking with ghosts

So what can you expect to find there? Well, a three-mile long track begins close to the old ruined church of Cill Chriosd on the Broadford to Elgol road in Strath Suardal and goes past the remains of an old marble quarry before settling down to run across the bare and empty moorland above Loch Eishort. Soon it drops down into the peaty glen of the Allt na Pairte, where you might be brought up short by the view of green, corrugated fields, pressed into a bright crescent, dotted here and there with the old walls and gable ends of former homes.

Despite the ruins, the bracken fronds that have swallowed up the fields of barley and oats, and the scrubby sycamores that choke the burn, there is still a lushness about the place. Look closely and you might recognise the remains of runrigs and lazybeds, tilting down towards the shoreline. A single standing stone in the centre of the village bears testament to the antiquity of the place as a centre of habitation, but it’s been many a year since children laughed here.

Those are the things you’ll see at Boreraig today but, if you have a mind to, settle yourself down beside one of the gable walls and let your imagination drift back to the middle of the 19th century, when former clan chiefs realised they had become landowners and landlords. Some continued to have the interest of their clanspeople at heart, but many became convinced that some kind of land reform was necessary and that the land could be made more profitable than by ­renting it out to crofters. There was a demand for wool, and flockmasters from the Borders were looking for new areas to graze. The highlands and islands were ripe grazing lands for the hardy cheviots and blackface, and the landlords could charge much higher rents to the shepherds.

In this area of Skye, Lord Macdonald decided the people could make a better life for themselves abroad, and he could earn more money from sheep grazing. The people were moved on, displaced, cleared. The first group of villagers were sent to Campbeltown, from where they set sail for the new world on the government ship Hercules. Many of them died from smallpox. The news soon got back to Skye and, as you can imagine, the other villages were reluctant to take a similar course. Consequently, Lord Macdonald’s factor and his henchmen decided force would be necessary. The people were burned from their homes and, in a final act of humiliation, the factor doused the flames of the burning cottages with stoups of milk, the precious milk from which the villagers made their butter and crowdie. One old man, aged 86 years, was forced to leave the land that he had paid rents on for 65 years.

A rough path picks it way westwards for a couple of miles through a no-man’s land between the rearing scarps of Beinn Bhuidhe and Carn Dearg on one side, and the salt water of Loch Eishort on the other, and soon the green fields of Suisinish come into view. Suisinish smiles a little more than Boreraig. In a spectacular setting above Rubha Suisnish, where Lochs Eishort and Slapin meet, a leaning plateau of pasture contrasts with the blue of the sea, as delightful a situation as you’ll find in this scenically blessed isle. But beyond the fields, away from the steep cliffs and its salt-laden updraughts, the husks of former homes, the stone shells of the land, cast a shadow across the sparkling seas and verdant smiles.

A track, built by the board of agriculture in a token attempt to try and encourage the re-crofting of Suisnish, now follows the shore of Loch Slapin north to the bay of Camas Malag, where, across the head of the loch, the magnificent outline of Bla Bheinn and Clach Glas rises majestically.

It’s become almost trendy to deny the Highland Clearances, to suggest the landlords really had the welfare of the people at heart. That may be true in some areas of the highlands and islands, but I hope these ruins at Boreraig and Suisinish are preserved as they are as a reminder of the potential of man’s inhumanity to man.