Date of walk: 12/8/2019

Badbea is a former clearance village settled in the 18th and 19th centuries by families evicted from their homes when the straths (broad valleys) of Langwell, Ousdale and Berriedale were cleared to establish sheep farms. Ousdale is where landowner Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, whose ruined house featured in yesterday’s walk, evicted people from their crofts. From 1792 onwards, displaced families arrived in Badbea, a small area of rough, steeply sloping land, squeezed between the high drystone wall of the sheep enclosures and the precipitous cliffs of Berriedale above the North Sea. Sixty-one people lived in the village in 1841. The last resident left the village in 1911.

The plots of land, or crofts, had room for a longhouse with a byre at one end, outbuildings, and a kitchen garden or kailyard. The rest of the available land could only support some small vegetable plots and a few cows, pigs and chickens for each family; freshwater came from a nearby spring. There was only one horse in the village and no plough, so a chaib (a kind of spade) was used to plough the soil, and a man pulled the harrow. Each house had its own spinning wheel, and all the women learned to spin and card. The men mainly worked as herring fishermen from nearby Berriedale, and the women gutted the caught fish. While the women worked, their livestock, and even their children, were tethered to rocks or posts to prevent them from being blown over the cliffs or into the sea by the fierce winds.

The contrast and iniquity between Badbea and the wealth and power manifested in The 1st Duke of Sutherland’s Dunrobin Castle (Walk day 337) was one of the most eye-opening of The Perimeter as the Duke was responsible for thousands of people being cleared from their homes into clearance villages like this. The defining architectural character of the last few months walking the highland coast has been the ruined croft and the clearance village, which made the comparison seem even more acute.