DAVID Mitchell's credentials as a well-spoken middle-class Englishman are sound. He was born in Salisbury to hotel manager parents and educated at the independent Abingdon School in Oxfordshire, and is a graduate of Cambridge.
But dig deeper into the family tree – as he has done – and you will find roots in the Highlands and a link to one of the most notorious periods of its history from which the Mitchells may have been beneficiaries.
The actor and comedian, known for
hit series Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, has discovered his Scottish ancestry after taking part in the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are? which researches family trees.
He already knew he was partly Scottish on his father's side and that the Mitchells were wealthy sheep farmers. For almost a hundred years, three generations of the family held the same farm, Ribigill, in Tongue, Sutherland.
However, they mysteriously gave up the farm in 1933 and in the show, to be screened on 5 August, Mitchell seeks to find out why and whether they were involved in the Clearances.
During the Clearances in the late 18th century and into the 19th, crofters were cleared off land to make way for large-scale sheep farming, which was more profitable for landowners.
Sutherland was one of the areas of the Highlands hardest hit by the Clearances – the first Duke of Sutherland, George Granville Leveson-Gower, had families moved from his land. Tens of thousands of people were evicted over many years.
Mitchell also investigated another branch of his Scottish ancestry, the Forbes family. Using a book written by his great-great-grandfather Alexander Forbes as the starting point for his investigation, he travelled to Skye to look further into his past.
The trail led to Alexander's father John Forbes, a Church of Scotland minister on the island in the 19th century.
The comedian discovered his ancestor was something of a local hero. John Forbes worked tirelessly on behalf of his parishioners, and also became involved in rescuing some girls from the parish who had been trafficked to work in a mill in Manchester.
The series has shown several other celebrities' Scottish roots. Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman famously broke down in tears when he realised the unremitting poverty of his Glaswegian great-grandmother.
Ian Hislop, star of Have I Got News For You and editor of Private Eye, found that his paternal grandfather, David Murdoch Hislop, who died just before Hislop was born, was Scottish and a Presbyterian deacon and headteacher at Newton Academy in Ayr.
Former newsreader Moira Stuart discovered the story of how her grandfather Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon met his wife Clara Christian while both were studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
Impressionist Alistair McGowan found that his father George was of Indian and Irish ancestry, from Calcutta.
Although knowing of the India link, McGowan said he was unaware of his father's ethnicity until after his death in 2003, and had assumed that his paternal ancestry was Scottish.
The full article contains 509 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
