This image remains a potent aspect of Scottish national identity to this day (e.g. Bryden & Hart 2000; McCrone 2001). The Clearances, for example, have become much more than an element of Highland history. They have been recast as a ‘national wound’; as the event which signaled the end of an ancient and deep-rooted community ethos whose characteristic settlement form was the traditional farming township. For many people today, the Clearances are held to have finally dispensed with the ‘ancient nuclear community [of the township] whose form may well have evolved from settlement patterns of the Iron Age’ (Ascherson 2002, 199).