The journey begins in Bettyhill, on the most northerly coast of Britain, where Michie meets Elliot Rudie who runs the Strathnaver Museum in a long-unused local church. We learn more of the great Cheviot sheep, brought in to make vast profits from the land previously worked on by the tenant crofters. Rudie takes Michie a few miles south to Achanlochy, a village that was cleared at the beginning of the 19th century. It sits at the head of Loch Naver, in the strath that was once home to thousands of people, in over twenty townships, and is now a bleak and empty valley.

Michie then travels south to Strathcarron, the sight of some of the most brutal and best-documented clearances. We meet James Hunter who describes the appalling conditions of poverty and famine faced by the Highlanders.

In 1854 the Greenyards were cleared in an event now known as the Massacre of the Rosses. Michie visits one of the most emotive sites of this period of Highland history at Criock Church, where the people forced off their land took shelter in the churchyard. In an emotional trip, borne out of Michie’s initial visit there twenty years earlier, he reads the phrases that these people etched in the panes of the church windows and is still shocked by the emptiness of the surrounding glen.

One of the most well known figures from this time was the Marquis of Sutherland. Along with his wife, the Countess of Sutherland, he was the largest landowner in Britain in the early 19th century and it was their plans of ‘Improvements’ that were one of the main causes of the Clearances. These were sweeping economic changes to life in this part of the world, which also included the establishment of fishing villages and alternative offers of land to the crofters.

High on the hills overlooking the coastal town of Golspie and the family estate at Dunrobin castle, Michie visits the imposing and still controversial statue of the Marquis, erected by the Duchess.

Travelling a little north up this eastern coast of Scotland, Michie meets Jackie Aitken of the Timespan Museum in Helmsdale. She tells of how the village was established by the Marquis and Duchess; of the fishing industry boom; and of the feelings of some of the cleared crofters’ descendents.

Michie visits Helmsdale to meet the First Minister Alex Salmond as he unveils a new statue in tribute to the thousands of Highlanders who left Scotland for distant shores. This is a very moving ceremony, which includes the raising of the flags of some of the nations to which the Highlanders emigrated.