Langwell: the History of a Caithness Estate

In the 1830s, the Rev. Donald Sage, a towering figure in northern Scotland in the early nineteenth century and a fierce critic of the new model of commercial sheep farming he witnessed rolling into the area wrote of James Sutherland of Langwell in Caithness, his ideal of a Highland laird:[He] lived on his property, at the beautiful and romantic place of Langwell, on terms of amity and friendship with all his relatives and fellow-proprietors, and in the exercise of an unbounded hospitality.His estate furnished him with the choicest of luxuries of the table, such as mutton, beef, salmon, venison and game of every variety, while, from a well-stocked garden, he had the best fruits and vegetables … (p30).We are perhaps now less likely to see Caithness as a kind of Garden of Eden or Highland landlords as benign and paternalistic figures.