I always understood that Prebble's history was very black and white and that Eric Richards takes a much more balanced view. With noteable exceptions, such as Ulva, many of the people who left Mull chose to do so in the hope of a better life "far off in sunlit places". That is not to say that they weren't miserably homesick, but economic necessity drove many of them to join schemes like the HIES and as such they weren't necessarily cleared in the dramatic framework of forced evictions suffered in other parts of the Highlands. The first to leave were the tacksmen who had the means to relocate got out early; I think Jo Currie makes this point in "Mull, the Island and its People". If you are looking for stories of brutal landowners who callously destroyed homes and left aged grandmothers lying in the heather then you'll find Prebble has plenty of these, but by and large many of the lairds of Mull were so poor themselves that they reached a point where they could no longer help their people. Prebble and Richards don't dwell on Mull simply because the clearances mostly took part in other parts of the highlands. Jill