The Highland Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the expulsion of the Gael) was the forced displacement of a significant number of people in the Scottish Highlands during the 18th and 19th century, as a result of an agricultural revolution (also known as enclosure) carried out by hereditary aristocratic landowners, such as the Duke of Sutherland. The changes were seen to be supported by the government, who gave financial aid for roads and bridges to assist the new sheep-based agriculture and trade..

There was mass forced emigration to the sea coast, the Scottish Lowlands, and the North American colonies. The clearances were particularly notorious as a result of the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scots law, the abruptness of the change from the traditional clan system, and the brutality of many evictions.

The enclosures that depopulated rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started much earlier, during the Tudor period, and similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances by historians such as Tom Devine. But in the Highlands the impact on a Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic)-speaking semi-feudal culture that still expected obligations of a chief to his clan led to vocal campaigning and a lingering bitterness among the descendants of those forced to emigrate or to remain in crofting townships on very small areas of poor farming land. Crofters became a source of virtually free labour to their landlords, being forced to work long hours in such work as harvesting and processing of kelp.^[when?]

Alastair McDonald (born 1941) is a Scottish banjo-playing folk/jazz musician, probably most famous for his recordings of Jim MacLean's folk songs, such as The Barras and The massacre of Glencoe, but also for some humorous songs, such as the jazz comedy song Sam the skull, about a Glasgow cat.

McDonald has mainly recorded songs written by other songwriters, for example Robert Burns and Jim MacLean, but has also written songs himself (Culloden's Harvest, The Village Green at Gretna), and reworked traditional songs (The Bell Rock Light, Mingulay Boat Song). Though quite well known - he has toured US (every state except Hawaii and Alaska), Canada, Israel, Denmark, Thailand and several more countries - not much is spoken of him in media.

He lives in Netherlee, East Renfrewshire.