From Sollas, the road that heads toward Bayhead is still called the Committee Road - named for the committee that organised it as famine relief in the 1840s, paying starving crofters to build a road they themselves needed less than they needed wages. The Highland Potato Famine had begun in 1846 when the blight reached Scotland from Ireland, and by 1849 four successive crops had failed. The people of Sollas were already broken before the eviction notices arrived. The notices were served on 15 May 1849. Lord Macdonald intended to clear between 600 and 700 people to make room for sheep. The summer turned to July. The voyage to Canada took weeks. The crofters asked for a delay, knowing that to arrive in Quebec in autumn with no resources was simply to die slower.

Sheriff-Substitute Colquhoun arrived from Inverness with officers and a strong body of police. The work of demolishing the houses began. Walls came down. Furniture was carried out. The crofters - mostly women, children, and old people, since the working-age men were often away at fishing or labour - began throwing stones. The police retreated, regrouped, charged in two divisions. There were cuts and bruises on both sides. An old woman, the historian Alexander Mackenzie recorded, attacked an officer with her stick and knocked his hat off; two policemen carried her out bodily. The demolition continued. Four of the men were later tried at the Inverness Court of Justiciary, convicted of deforcing the officers, and sentenced to four months' imprisonment each.

The following year the whole district was completely cleared. Some families went to Canada. Some scattered to the Lowlands or south of the border. Some persisted within walking distance of their ruined homes and slowly worked their way back. Sollas today is a small crofting township again, with a local supermarket and a community centre - Taigh Sgire Sholais - in the old school building. Every July, the residents host a series of events called Sollas Week. The parish remains almost entirely Protestant. The novel The False Men by Mhairead MacLeod is set here during the Clearances, and Sollas beach features in Peter May's The Chessmen. The Committee Road is still the way to Bayhead.

Traigh Iar and Traigh Ear, the west and east beaches at Sollas, are vast pale arcs of shell-sand backed by machair grassland. In February 1936, Northern & Scottish Airways inaugurated air services to Sollas, laying out two grass runways across the machair with a hangar and a fuel depot. The service continued until British European Airways retired its De Havilland Rapide biplanes in the 1950s. The beach is still used occasionally by light aircraft. Highland Aviation runs its beach landing training course here and at Traigh Mhor on Barra. To stand on the sand and watch a Cessna land where the runway is the tide-line is to see something almost no other place still permits.