Alexander McKenzie: An overview of the Clearances (1881)

"The motives of the landlords, generally led by southern factors worse than themselves, were, in most cases, pure self-interest. They pursued their policy of extermination with a recklessness and remorselessness unparalleled anywhere else where the Gospel of peace and charity was preached--except, perhaps, unhappy Ireland. Every conceivable means, short of the musket and the sword, were used to drive the natives from the land they loved, and to force them to exchange their crofts and homes--brought originally into cultivation and built by themselves, or by their forefathers--for wretched patches along the barren rocks on the sea-shore. They had to depend, after losing their cattle and their sheep, and after having their houses burnt about their ears or razed to the ground, on the uncertain produce of the sea for subsistence. The people, in many instances, and especially in Sutherlandshire, were totally unacquainted with a seafaring life, and quite unfitted to contend with its perils.

"When they took shelter in the graveyard at Croick, some of the people scratched their names and brief messages on the diamond-paned windows of the church. They wrote in English, as if acknowledging that their own tongue would pass with them and would not be understood in time. The words they wrote are still there:

'Glencalvie people was in the church here May 24, 1845 ...'

'Glencalvie people, the wicked generation ...'

'John Ross shepherd ...'

'Glencalvie people was here ...'

'Amy Ross ...'

'Glencalvie is a wilderness blow ship them to the colony ...'

'The Glencalvie Rosses ...'"

Donald MacLeod, Gloomy Memories: An account of an eviction (1857)

"The old people, women, and others, then began to try and preserve the timber which they were entitled to consider as their own. But the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all before them, and when they had overthrown the houses in a large tract of the country, they ultimately set fire to the wreck -- so that timber, furniture, and every other article that could not be instantly removed, was consumed by fire, or otherwise utterly destroyed. Many deaths ensued from alarm, from fatigue, and cold; the people being instantly deprived of shelter, and left to the mercy of the elements."

Sir John Sinclair: An "Improvement" account of the Clearances (1825)

"The alteration of the [Highland land] system had certainly the appearance of great rigour, and was frequently attended with much private distress; but it turned out, on the whole, much to the advantage of the tenantry, who, retiring to towns, and applying themselves to various branches of industry, not only improved their mode of living, but were enabled to give education to their children, and to breed them to trades and professions, by which they earned so much, as to have it in their power, to send their parents grateful remittances, sometimes from distant climes."

James Loch, factor of the Sutherland estate: On the failures of the Gaelic language (1820)

"The youth [of the Highlands] who has been taught to read, will never confine himself to the knowledge of a language [Gaelic] in which no book was ever written, and which has never served the purposes of commerce, or of government; and the publication of a dictionary, though it may facilitate the Highlanders in the acquisition of English, will never induce a Saxon to learn the language of the Gael. It requires no gift of prophecy, to be able to pronounce that many years have not run when the Celtic tongue, upon the main land of Scotland at least, will cease to a living language; and that this will happen without the country losing any of those distinctive nationalities, which nurture and preserve a generous rivalship in the great interests of national policy."