The Highland Clearances - forcible expulsion of Scottish smallholders from their hereditary lands to be replaced by sheepfarming - are usually held to have begun with the activities of Admiral John Ross of Balnagowan in 1762, and to have continued until late into the nineteenth century.

But the Highland Clearances were really only the most extreme, and least excusable, act of the process of Enclosure by which British common-land could be taken into private ownership by the local landlord and given over to pasture (effectively impoverishing and starving local farmers).

Enclosure had begun as early as the Statute of Merton in 1235, but it gathered pace through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until the 1801 Inclosure Consolidation Act all but removed the notion of common grazing rights from British law.

Various experiments with enclosure had been made in Scotland well before 1762, but between the 1770s and the 1840s virtually all of the Highland lifestyle was piecemeal eradicated, together with the Highland identity and the language which supported it.