The word is Gaelic for a small settlement, and most of the ones in the Highlands were emptied on purpose
The Clachan on Kingly Street holds a 4.4 from three thousand five hundred and fifty-six people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and is a very good Victorian pub with a Gaelic name.
The word
A clachan is a small settlement – a hamlet, a cluster of houses, a few families and their fields.
It is the basic unit of settlement in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands, and it is not a village in the English sense. There was no green, no manor, no single landlord’s house at the centre.
It was a group of households working land in common, in a system called runrig, where the strips were periodically redistributed so that nobody was permanently stuck with the bad ground.
And almost all of them are gone.
The Clearances
Between roughly 1750 and 1860, the population of the Highlands was moved.
The landlords – many of them Highland chiefs who had become, in a single generation, landlords in the commercial English sense – discovered that sheep were worth more than tenants.
A clachan supporting forty people generated a certain rent. The same ground under sheep, run by one shepherd, generated considerably more.
So the people were removed. Sometimes by negotiation. Sometimes by eviction. And in a number of well-documented cases, by burning the roofs off the houses while the families were still standing outside them.
They went to the coast, to marginal land where they were expected to live off kelp and fishing. Or they went to Glasgow. Or they went to Canada, and to Nova Scotia, and to Australia.
The Gaelic language went with them, and it has never recovered.
Enclosure, again
Which we wrote about at Brook Green in Notting Hill, and which is the same mechanism in a different accent.
Between 1750 and 1850, several thousand Acts of Parliament extinguished common rights across England and handed the land to private owners. The rhyme about it is four lines long and it has outlived every one of those Acts.
The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common, but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from the goose.
England had enclosure. Scotland had the Clearances. And Thomas More had already said it in 1516, about the English sheep: that they had become so greedy and fierce that they were eating the men.
The pub
Genuinely lovely – a proper Victorian interior, high ceilings, decent beer, and one of the better Soho pubs to actually sit in.
Nobody in it knows what the word means. Three and a half thousand people have reviewed it and not one has asked.
Verdict
Excellent pub. Go, and know that the name over the door is a kind of settlement that this country deliberately emptied.
Where they went
Nova Scotia, which means New Scotland, and where Gaelic was spoken as a community language into living memory and is now being deliberately revived.
Cape Breton. The Carolinas. Otago in New Zealand, which has a Dunedin – which is Dun Eideann, which is Edinburgh.
And Glasgow, in enormous numbers, into tenements, to work in the yards.
The Highland surnames are now spread across the entire English-speaking world – MacDonald, MacLeod, Cameron, Fraser, Campbell – and a very substantial proportion of the people carrying them are descended from somebody who did not leave voluntarily.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about watching bureaucracy destroy everything in real-time is you realize it’s not incompetence, it’s intentional design. The system works perfectly at preventing outcomes.