For more than a hundred years, the Highland Clearances had emptied the glens and islands of Scotland to make room for sheep and game. The pattern was bitterly familiar. Landowners decided that the meagre rents from crofters were worth less than what sheep farms and sporting estates could pay, and the law gave the lairds nearly unlimited power to remove people from land their families had worked for generations. Tenants had almost no security. The vast majority were illiterate Gaelic speakers. They could be evicted at any time, by any factor. In few places did this provoke organised resistance - Gaelic song and literature lament the clearances at length, but stiff opposition was rare. Bernera was one of the exceptions. Skye, where the Battle of the Braes would come less than a decade later, was another.

Sir James Matheson, who had made his fortune in the opium trade and co-founded Jardine, Matheson and Company in Hong Kong, bought the Isle of Lewis in 1844. With Lewis came Bernera. To manage the estate, Matheson appointed a solicitor named Donald Munro as his factor. Munro became, by all accounts, exactly the kind of agent the system was designed to produce - heavy-handed, sweeping, and feared. In 1850 he stripped the Bernera islanders of their summer grazings on mainland Lewis to make way for a new sporting estate, the Uig deer forest. Worse, he forced the islanders to build the dykes that would mark the new boundary, at their own expense. By 1872 even the reduced grazing area was being taken. Their ancient rights were to be extinguished entirely. The islanders had built the walls of their own dispossession, and now the wall was closing in further.

Munro's response to resistance was eviction notices for 58 families - effectively the population of the island. The notices were greeted in Breaclete with quiet disbelief. But when the sheriff officer and ground officer arrived at Tobson to enforce them, the crowd's mood broke. Clods of earth flew. The sheriff officer's coat was torn. He responded, according to the trial record, with a threat that 'if he had a gun many Bernera mothers would be mourning the loss of their sons.' Three crofters were singled out and arrested. The response was immediate. Hundreds of Bernera men marched on Lews Castle in Stornoway with pipers at their head, demanding to speak with Matheson himself. The aged laird, confronted with the scale of the discontent, disowned his factor. Donald Munro would be dismissed the following year.

The three arrested crofters were tried at Stornoway on 17 and 18 July 1874. Their defence was conducted by Charles Innes, an Inverness lawyer whose name is still revered in Bernera. His most famous passage, addressed to the court, distilled what was at stake: 'Oppressed as they are I, as a stranger, cannot but admire them. Had Mr Munro, instead of being Chamberlain of The Lews, been an Agent in either Connaught or Munster, he would long ago have licked the dust he has for years made the poor men of this island swallow.' The jury acquitted all three. The verdict landed across the Highlands and Islands like a thrown stone in still water. The Bernera case was the first documented victory for Highland crofters, and it became the opening shot of what would later be called the Crofters' War. The Battle of the Braes on Skye followed in 1882. The Napier Commission was established to investigate crofter grievances. The Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act passed in 1886, finally granting security of tenure. Modern land reform in Scotland traces its roots to what happened in that Stornoway courtroom. The Gaelic poet Iain Mac a' Ghobhainn, who lived nearby on Lewis, wrote Spiorad a' Charthannais - Spirit of Charity - in condemnation of the feudal tyranny the trial had exposed.

Bernera was not connected to Lewis by bridge until 1953, and only then because the islanders had threatened to dynamite a hillside and build their own causeway. The original bridge served until 2021, when a new span opened beside it. The old one is now a footpath. Crofting still survives on the island in diminished form, and the village of Breaclete remains the main settlement. The riot is commemorated locally - a memorial stands along the road to Bostadh, near the junction of the lane to Tobson where the clods were thrown. For an island that the 1872 eviction notices intended to empty entirely, Bernera's continued existence is itself a quiet victory.