Long before it had its present name, this was Pictish country, part of a kingdom known as Cat, and the Gaelic name for Sutherland, Cataibh, may still carry its memory. In the 9th century it was conquered by Sigurd Eysteinsson, the Norse earl of Orkney. The Norse left their mark all over the map. Tongue comes from tunga, a tongue of land, and Smoo probably from smuga, a hiding place. Sutherland itself comes from Suðrland, the southern land, which is how it looked from Orkney. In the early 13th century the bishops of Caithness moved their seat south to Dornoch, where Bishop Gilbert de Moravia began the cathedral in the 1220s. Around the same time, a new earldom of Sutherland was carved out of the old Norse lands. The event that shaped modern Sutherland came in the early 1800s. Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, and her husband, the Marquess of Stafford, set out to turn the inland straths over to large sheep farms. Between about 1807 and 1821, thousands of people were moved out of the glens. The estate's factor Patrick Sellar was tried for culpable homicide over evictions in Strathnaver in 1814, and acquitted in 1816. Many families were resettled in new coastal villages such as Helmsdale, laid out in 1814 for fishing, and Bettyhill, while others emigrated. Some resisted, as at Durness in 1841. The county's population peaked at just under 26,000 in 1851, and today it is less than half that.
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