TO some there is beauty in the emptiness of a Highland landscape where the human voice is rarely heard, others are only reminded of a history that is still with us.

Indeed 200 years ago this week a woman in her 90s died in what was effectively a shed in Sutherland during a brutal phase of the Highland Clearances, one of the most controversial episodes in Scotland's history.

Now Highland historian Professor Jim Hunter is suggesting something needs to be done to mark the spot where Margaret MacKay lived and died in Badinloskin, about two miles east of Strathnaver.

Today all that is to be seen there are stones.

Mrs MacKay died six days after the destruction of the home she shared with her two daughters, the husband of one of those daughters, and her grand-daughter, aged 11.

It was destroyed on the orders of Sutherland Estate factor Patrick Sellar who was accompanied to Badinloskin by a posse of sheriff officers, policemen and shepherds. What caused particular anger was the fact that the house was set on fire - at a point, said witnesses, when Margaret MacKay, who had been bedridden for years, was still inside. On being rescued from the blaze by one of her daughters, it was said, Mrs MacKay was carried to the surviving outbuilding where she later died.

Her family was one of many then being ejected from a newly-established sheep farm called Rhiloisk. The creation of such farms, some of them carrying as many as 20,000 sheep, was part of a programme of agricultural 'improvements' being forced through by the Sutherland Estate's owner, the Marquis of Stafford, who in 1833 was to be created Duke of Sutherland.

Other houses were knocked down at Rhiloisk, but Prof Hunter argues: "It was the use of fire at Badinloskin, along with Margaret MacKay's subsequent death, that gave events there their particular resonance.

"There was huge controversy and press publicity - in London newspapers as well as Scottish ones. Patrick Sellar was eventually tried in the High Court in Inverness on culpable homicide charges arising principally from this episode.

"He was acquitted, but the story of the Badinloskin burning did more than anything to ensure that the land-use changes then being imposed on the Sutherland Estate became synonymous, not with improvement but with suffering and brutality."

Prof Hunter points out that since Badinloskin, the clearances have been portrayed in poetry, song, drama and novels in an unrelentingly negative way.

Indeed he says there is a sense in which the reputation of Highland landowners as a class has never recovered from what was done in the name of one of the most powerful of them.

Today the sheep have gone and all that is to be seen there, says Prof Hunter who visited the area this week, are a few deer.

"On the 200th anniversary of Margaret MacKay's death, maybe something needs to be done, even if only by way of a marker where the path to Badinloskin leaves the public road, to let people know they're in the vicinity of a spot which is historically significant," he said.

Ewen Cameron, Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at Edinburgh University agrees: "This is an iconic site as far as the history of the clearances is concerned."