The Highland Potato Famine was a famine caused by potato blight that struck the Scottish Highlands in the 1840s. While the mortality rate was less than other Scottish famines in the 1690s, and 1780, the Highland potato famine caused over 1.7 million people to leave Scotland during the period 1846–52. The Highland Potato Famine is now in widespread use as a name for a period of 19th century Highland and Scottish history. Famine was a real prospect throughout the period, and certainly it was one of severe malnutrition, serious disease, crippling financial hardship and traumatic disruption to essentially agrarian communities. The causes of the crisis were similar to those of the Great Irish Famine and both famines were part of the wider food crisis facing Northern Europe caused by potato blight during the mid-1840s.
Read more about Highland Potato Famine: History
Famous quotes containing the words highland, potato and/or famine:
“If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, in Truro.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)