On the Crofter's Trail

Tracing the legacies of the small farmers displaced and scattered in nineteenth-century Scotland, this is “a powerful, poetic, personal Highland Odyssey” ( Times Literary Supplement ). In the Clearances of the nineteenth century, crofts—once the mainstay of Highland life in Scotland—were swept away as the land was put over to sheep grazing. Many of the people of the Highlands and islands of Scotland were forced from their homes by landowners in the Clearances. Some fled to Nova Scotia and beyond