Sutherland, historic county, northern Scotland. It faces the North Sea on the east and the Atlantic Ocean on the north and northwest, where Cape Wrath, with its magnificent cliffs, is mainland Great Britain’s northwestern extremity. It lies entirely within the Highland council area.
Chambered cairns, standing stones and stone rows, hill forts, settlements, and brochs (round towers) are among the prehistoric remains of Sutherland. Successively settled by Picts, Scots, and Norsemen, Sutherland and Caithness (a neighbouring county) were held in the first half of the 11th century by Thorfinn (died c. 1065), the Norse jarl of Orkney, whose mother was a daughter of the Scottish king Malcolm II. The Norse named the area Suðrland (“Southern Land”) in relation to their settlements in Orkney and Shetland. After conquering the region, William I of Scotland (reigned 1165–1214) seems to have granted land in Sutherland to a Hugh Freskin, whose son William was probably designated earl in 1235.
George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758–1833), who had married (1785) Elizabeth (countess of Sutherland in her own right), succeeded his father as marquess of Stafford (1803) and was named duke of Sutherland (1833). He was responsible for road building and for the notorious “Highland clearances” (c. 1810–20). Advised that the interior of Sutherland was best suited for sheep raising and little fit for human habitation, he evicted thousands of families, burning their cottages and establishing large sheep farms. The evicted tenants were resettled in small coastal crofts (small tenant farms), where they were forced to depend on fishing and the collection and burning of kelp (a source of potash and iodine). The Highland clearances initiated a pattern of rural depopulation in which economic hardship drove many of the crofters to migrate to the Scottish Lowlands or to Canada, the United States, or Australia. The pattern of depopulation continued through much of the 20th century.