It would be called, she had been told, Bliadhna Nan Caorach – ‘The years of the sheep’.
When she was in Edinburgh, she learnt that successful, sheep farming in the far North had resulted first in large scale emigration to Canada and how when other Highlanders refused to emigrate they were evicted.
News travelled slowly.
In Edinburgh, Society had not been alerted to what was happening in Sutherland until after Clola had come to live with her grandmother.
Then people talked of little else and every day brought further tales of crofts being burnt over defenceless heads, of cruelties which lost nothing in the telling, and the determination of many Highland Chiefs to follow the lead set by the Marquis of Stafford in Sutherland.
Riots followed the evictions in Ross and the more people talke
