The Highland Clearances

[ethelfleda]

...my chief difficulty on Ross-shire has been the women. It was the women as you are aware who at Coigach, aided and abetted by the men, twice defeated Sheriff Cameron and the posse comitatus of the county. It was the women who, in the Invergordon riots, when the Military were called in, attacked the soldiers with staves and other missiles, and compelled the officer in command to charge them with the bayonet. It was only after this charge and after some of the women had been wounded with the bayonet that the mob was dispersed. In the present instance it was the women who, according to custom, maltreated the officers sent to execute the summonses by stripping them naked and burning their papers; and who violently obstructed the police in the execution of their duty, as to leave them no alternative but to repel force by force, or allow themselves to be defeated as their predecessors were at Coigach.

Sheriff MacKenzie, writing to the Lord Advocate c1854 about his problems with evictions. Quoted in Eric Richards' The Highland Clearances