Hunting for the Clearances

My current “major project” is chasing down the sites associated with the Highland Clearances and portraying them through photography, I want to capture the essence of the place, it’s beauty and the underlying sorrow, as part of this.

Today I found myself about a third of the way to my southern boundary for the project and decided that since I was finished by 10am I would go and have a bit of a scout into Strathconnon, technically in Easter Ross rather than Sutherland, but it was under the ownership of the Duke of Sutherland and is heavily associated with the attrocities perpetuated by him.

My eventual destination was Croick Church, a place where the congregation droped from 200 to 10 in the course of a year or so, the displaced and disposessed gathered in the church yard and made an encampment of 80 or so and left their messages of despair and betrayal etched into the windows of the white building. It’s quite a place, particularly when the sky is heavy as it was today.

I took a few additional photographs in the area too, but it is somewhere that I need to return soon - and I need to venture up into the glens, beyond the road end, and to the old settlements that were emptied in the persuit of sheep farming.

9th February 2026