William Ross

William Ross was a Sheriff's Officer.  In Tain.  In the early 1800s.

This can only mean one thing.  He was involved in the Highland Clearances.

He was born the son of a Kirk officer, also known as a beadle, the man who assists the minister with administrative work, in essence a janitor.  It did mean though that he was brought up in a strict Presbyterian manner one would have thought, with a premium on obediance and observation of the rules, just the right sort of background for a law-enforcement officer.

Sadly, anyone who knows anything about the Clearances will know that the enforcement of these laws did not conform to "Christian values".  Whatever you think of the justification for the clearances, and there are some who say that the Highland way of subdividing the land between all sons was a recipe for a catastrophe on the Irish scale, it was the methods of enforcing the removal of the people from the land which made the Sheriff Officers so reviled.  There are many tales of burned cottages, death by exposure and so on and much of it emotive but there is no doubt that the landowners made the decisions and left the Sheriff Officers and other enforcers to do the dirty work.  It seems that William Ross was one of them.

It was from Tain that the expedition to the "Massacre of the Ross Women" left and returned.  It was an atrocity but William can be excused as he would have been 71 and not a combatant.  He would have been active in the 1810s and 1820s though when the bulk of the Clearances in his patch took place. Paragraph 7 of the above link could concern our man although it seems that the military had been called in at this stage.

I found an interesting article which includes a paragraph illustrating what a Tain Sheriff Officer meant to the Highlanders.

The Northern Ensign, referring to the same case, says "One day lately a preventive officer with two cutter men made their appearance on the boundaries of the estate and were taken for Tain Sheriff-officers. The signals were at once given, and in course of half-an-hour the poor gauger and his men were surrounded by 300 men and women, who would not be remonstrated with either in English or Gaelic; the poor fellows were taken and denuded of their clothing, all papers and documents were extracted and burnt, amongst which was a purse with a considerable quantity of money. In this state they were carried shoulder-high off the estate, and left at the braes of Downie, where the great Culrain riot took place thirty years ago."

The Clearances are too big a subject to be covered here fully so we'll leave it at that.  Let's just say we know who the Black Sheep of the Family is.