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The remains of Helmsdale Castle were demolished in the 1970s in order to build the new A9 road bridge.
The castle was the location of the murder of the 11th Earl of Sutherland and his Countess, Marion Seton, in 1567. They were poisoned by Isobel Sinclair, the wife of Gordon of Gartly. Isobel Sinclair's own son also died, but the fifteen-year-old heir of Sutherland, Alexander, was unharmed. He was made to marry the 4th Earl of Caithness’s daughter, Lady Barbara Sinclair. In 1569 he escaped from the Sinclairs to Huntly Castle.
The previous road bridge, which still stands, was designed by Thomas Telford and completed in 1811.
Highland Clearances[edit]
Further information: Highland Clearances
Helmsdale was a planned community to receive run rig tenant farmers (crofters) displaced from the Strath of Kildonan by Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Countess of Sutherland, with the Kildonan clearances of 1813–1819 leading to riots, where an angry mob drove out of the valley the prospective sheep farmers who had been invited by the countess to view the land; a situation of confrontation existed for more than six weeks, with factor Patrick Sellar and estate staff being deputised as special constables and military assistance being sent from Fort George. Eventual concessions included favourable prices paid for cattle and an organised party of 94 people emigrating with the assistance of Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk to his Red River Colony, via a hard journey and a bitter winter in Hudson Bay, eventually helping found the city of Winnipeg and contributing to a Gaelic speaking culture in Manitoba for some time. The crofters' resistance to the Clearances was to the shock of the countess and her advisers, who were, in the words of historian Eric Richards, "genuinely astonished at this response to plans which they regarded as wise and benevolent". Crofter settlements were burned and abandoned ruins can still be seen in the 21st century, though descendants of the cleared crofters were looking to repurchase the lands from the Sutherlands' descendants in 2017.
The statue The Emigrants commemorates the flight of Highlanders during the Clearances, but it is also a testament to their accomplishments in the places they settled. Located at the foot of the Highland Mountains in Helmsdale.
On 23 July 2007, the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond unveiled a three-metre-high (10-foot) bronze statue, The Emigrants (Scottish Gaelic: Na h-Eilthirich) by Gerald Laing, in Helmsdale, which commemorates the people who were cleared from the area by landowners and left their homeland to begin new lives overseas. The statue, which depicts a family leaving their home, stands at the mouth of the Strath of Kildonan and was funded by Dennis Macleod, a Scottish-Canadian mining millionaire who also attended the ceremony. An identical three-metre-high bronze Exiles statue has also been set up on the banks of the Red River in Winnipeg.
Gold rush[edit]
Two tributaries of the river were the scene of the Kildonan Gold Rush in 1869. The history of Kildonan's gold started in 1818, when a single nugget of gold was found near the Suisgill and Kildonan burns.
Late in 1868, a brief announcement in a local newspaper stated that gold had been discovered at Kildonan in the county of Sutherland. The credit for the discovery goes to Robert Nelson Gilchrist, a native of Kildonan, who had spent 17 years in the goldfields of Australia. On his return home, the Duke of Sutherland gave him permission to pan the gravels of the Helmsdale River, and he prospected all the burns and tributaries.
