The impression is given of a hauntingly beautiful but uninhabited wilderness where people can "start again" (to quote the promotional material for the programme). The landscape is presented by the programme makers as a clean slate, uncontaminated by human presence, in which the 23 intrepid volunteers can start from scratch, so that we can observe the outcome.
Of course the place is not uncontaminated by human presence. The people who preceded them were forcibly evicted nearly 200 years ago during the clearances.
There is no apparent awareness on the part of the programme makers of the fact that the place has a long, rich history, and that families hunted, fished, and raised crops and children where they stand, all while speaking a Lochaber dialect of Gaelic now only known to a few descendants in the maritime provinces of Canada whence some of them they were shipped.
The very premise of the show, that this location represents some sort of pristine "Eden", is offensive. The location is a crime scene where acts of ethnic cleansing were committed.
Giving evidence before the Deer Forest Commission of 1892, R. Macdonell of Camusdarroch, Arisaig, stated
"[...] The whole tract of country [Moidart, Arisaig, Ardnamurchan, etc.] seemed to be populated and to have numerous houses on all parts of it [...] Although I am only seventy-two years of age, I am able to speak of thirty years beyond that, from 1794 [...] I am able to speak concerning that period from an old account-book belonging to my grandfather [...] in connection with a very melancholy occasion in which I was unfortunately implicated [...] an emigration from the estate of Loch Sheil in Moidart. In that account-book I found 37 names of individuals [in part of Arisaig] [from] the various families who were paying rent, as sub-tenants [i.e. 37 households]
"[...] These people occupied [an area of Arisaig] as cottars, and they had land for which apparently they paid no rent, but worked the land, of which [the tenant] cropped a portion. They paid rent for grazing, a small nominal sum, and he himself paid a very small rent also to the then proprietor, Macdonald of Clanranald. The rents were paid to the tenants [...] at a very small rate, because they themselves were not highly charged.
"[...] In Lord Cranston's time [the tenant] had to give a large increase of rent, or be quit of it. Well, he could not under the old system on which he held it afford to give more rent [...] The farm was taken over him [...] He was obliged to remove all the sub-tenants upon it who had been there generations before him or his ancestors. The only thing that he could do was to get his brother Macdonald of Loch Sheil to take the people over to Loch Sheil in Moidart. Times grew black, and the potato famine occurred, and the consequence was that there was a redundant population, for Moidart [was already] well inhabitated, and the addition of so many [new] families [...] quite overwhelmed them when the potato famine occurred.
"[...] I was then a young man. I had just passed at the Bar, and I and the late respected James Macgregor of Fort William were appointed trustees to do what was best [...] to assist them to emigrate [...] So many of them went to Australia and a few of them to America. But never shall I forget [it] until my dying day. It is a source of grief to me that I had anything whatsoever to do with that emigration, although, at the same time, God knows I cannot understand how it could have been averted."
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