The cache is placed to commemorate the Battle of the Braes.
The Battle of the Braes
On the morning of 17 April 1882, a force of Glasgow constables and others marched on The Braes intent on arresting agitating crofters who had reached boiling point when summonsed for grazing on land that had been theirs for generations. Many of the menfolk were away fishing, but those that remained were joined by the women who ‘fought like Amazons and several of them [were] severely mauled’. In the running battle, waged with truncheons, sticks and stones, many a body was badly bruised before the police succeeded in taking their prisoners away to Portree.
As a result of this turmoil, a Royal Commission was set up by the Gladstone government in 1883 under the chairmanship of Lord Napier, to inquire into the condition of the crofters. Working diligently and unstintingly, the Commission accumulated a mass of evidence and exposed ‘a state of misery, of wrong doing, and of patient long-suffering without parallel in the history of [the] country’. The immediate consequence of the inquiry was the passing of the Crofters’ Holdings Act in 1886, under the provisions of which fair rent and security of tenure were vouchsafed the smallholder.
The cache is located close to a memorial commemorating this historic event. There is adjacent parking.