Badbea Highland Clearance Village and Memorial is just a couple of miles north of Helmsdale, on the A9. There’s a road sign on the left and a small car park on the right, with a storyboard and a gate.
It’s so easy to reach, and the village is only a few minutes walk away. Badbea is a must see history site when visiting the Scottish Highlands.
In the 1840s a whole community was ejected from its farms. With nowhere to go they found a piece of ground they could settle. It was on a steep hillside above sheer cliffs and open to the North Sea weather, which can be truly foul.
More than 60 people formed the original community in the 1840s. They farmed a few animals, some of the men took to fishing and others took day wages, building a wall on the hill to keep in the sheep. They’d been ejected from their homes to make way for those sheep.
Within 60 years they’d all left – mostly emigrated to the new world. The son of one of them returned from New Zealand to build the monument which today tells us the names of the families, and in some cases what happened to them.
The rest of the story is told by the excellent storyboards you see in the video. Apart from the memorial and the boards all we can see today is piles of stones which were once walls to their cottages.
Up on the hill we can see the wall they built to protect the sheep and in contrast, out to sea, we can catch an oil platform. Look closely, there are also two of the biggest wind turbines in Europe out there.
The final scene is the Memorial Park in Helmsdale built so we wouldn’t forget the injustice of the Highland Clearances.
The sign in the car park warns visitors about the steep, rough path to the site. Don’t be put off, but don’t try it in fashion shoes either. Anybody reasonably fit with decent footwear should be fine unless the weather is so bad you wouldn’t want to be outdoors.
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- Sutherland, Scotland: the perfect break (telegraph.co.uk)
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