Britain has cleared its uplands twice before. We are most of the way through the third, and almost nobody has said the word out loud.
The first was enclosure. Across the 1700s and 1800s, act by act, the common land that ordinary families had grazed for generations was fenced off and signed over to private owners. Millions of acres. A cottager with a pig and a cow on the common went to bed a commoner and woke up a trespasser, his animals grazing land that now belonged to the big house.
The second was the Highland Clearances. Families were burned out of their glens and put on ships, because a hillside of sheep paid the landlord better than a hillside of people. Whole valleys went silent. Walk far enough today and you can still find the rooftrees lying in the heather.
The third is happening now, and it arrives in a green coat. The hill farmer is squeezed out by carbon money, by tree-planting targets, by schemes that pay him to keep fewer animals, by land-use plans that quietly file his fields under surplus. A drinks company buys the glen to cancel out its emissions. The valley empties on schedule. Only the cover story is new.
Enclosure was sold as improvement. The Clearances were sold as progress. This one is sold as saving the planet.
Notice what does not change. The same families lose the land. The same hills fall quiet. The same large interests end up owning the ground, and the same comfortable people, a safe distance away, explain why it was all regrettably necessary.
History rarely repeats itself exactly. It just keeps clearing the uplands, and reaching for the kindest available word to do it.