Knoydart History

without myth and missing decades

Many online websites relating to Knoydart felt the need to provide a short history of the peninsula, to complement their main content, which is often an almost direct lift from other web sites, leading to the perpetuation of both popular myth and the empty decades of missing history.

“When history fails to shed light on the truth, myth creates its own.”
Samantha Shannon

Much of Knoydart’s history has been recorded in a number of first-class journals and I only want to provide the reader with a brief summary, while endeavouring to maintain a level of accuracy that is sometimes missing from many of the more romantic accounts.

There is also a part of Knoydart’s history which is regularly avoided, for whatever reason, between the end of the Clearances in the late 1850s and the middle of the twentieth century.

To gain a deeper understanding of  Knoydart’s history and the Clearances dip into the following excellent books:

‘Knoydart: A History’, Denis Rixon

‘The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed’,

Tom Devine

‘The Highland Clearances’, Eric Richards

‘Glencoe and Beyond, The Sheep-Farming Years: 1780 - 1830'

Iain S MacDonald

“Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost."

Galadriel