Initially there were five families living there and later only one family was left. There are other stories from these times that say that there was some sort of clearance which is about the Cnocbreac eviction in the 1840s. ‘Not one single family was ever evicted from their dwelling’ she said, ‘and those who left did so voluntarily, because they preferred to go.’ Was Jura ‘cleared’ of people to make way for sheep and deer, and to allow the landowners to gain bigger incomes than those supplied by the rents of the settled tenants? Miss Campbell insisted to the Commission that nothing of the kind ever took place on the island. We must now see whether this description applies to Jura. Much of the period during which this exodus took place is give the term ‘The Clearances’, in the Highlands and Islands at large. We know tha tmany families left the island, both to emigrate and to settle on the mainland. We studied the population if Jura during the second half of the nineteenth century through the records provided by the national censuses and watched it drop from 1158 to 614 during the fifty years from 1841 to 1891. The situation on Jura regarding these clearances were very different from the mainland and the following paragraph from the book ‘Island of Deer’ written by Peter Youngsten shows what happened on Jura: This was a time of huge depopulation in the Scottish higlands and islands, also on the Isle of Jura. This forced movement of people is known as “The Clearances” because the land they lived and farmed on was needed by the estate owners for sheep, a real money maker in those days, and deer, for sports. For some reason, not known to me, many people that migrated from Jura ended up in North Carolina.
Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries many crofters in the Scottish Highlands were forced to continue crofting on inferior lands and many of them chose to emigrate, often to countries such as the US and Canada.
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