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Love Of Country
A Journey through the Hebrides
By Madeleine Bunting The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Madeleine Bunting
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-47173-0
CHAPTER 1
Taking Bearings
I
At my writing desk in east London I look out over a series of back gardens, each separated by high walls. Beyond them lies the back of the parallel terraced street, and in a gap between, I glimpse the tall blocks of the new high-rise developments which have filled these old Victorian streets with newcomers. The neighbours' sycamore trees, heavy with ivy, crowd the sky into a small fragment. Accompanying the intermittent cry of the seagulls is the persistent hum of London's hungry heart, the roar of busyness, the diurnal tragedy of sirens, each a tiny jolt of anxiety. Down below in the house the washing machine whirrs on its frequent family cycles and the dog barks, waiting impatiently for a walk. Next to the kettle sit the insistent lists of shopping, of errands, of doctors to call, letters to schools, appointments: the management of family life.
In this crowded life, I plotted an escape. Beside the writing desk I wallpapered a big map so that my eye could slide from terraced brick to the wide spaces of north-western Scotland. I could trace the intricacies of its coastline, the long slivers of sea which cut into the land mass and, in return, the delicate peninsulas which stretch out into the blue. There were no smooth southern coastlines here of shelving shore and clean chalk cliff. This was hundreds of miles of dramatic volcanic convulsions, a history of forceful geology. My eye could wander over the hundreds of islands which speckled the blue spaces, the offcuts of rock left behind by this violence. Each offers its own character, its distinctive contour: the rounded diamond of Rum, Jura as pendant, odd-shaped Skye like a hand which has been run over, the fat lump of Mull with its long crooked finger pointing at tiny Iona. Beyond the Minch, the sea which separates the Outer Hebrides, this crazy geography of shapes becomes dizzying in a Long Island made up of dozens of islands and hundreds of skerries, where the land is as much of water, speckled with thousands of lochans. When my eye stretched to Harris and Lewis, it already seemed far from home, but there was more. Tiny specks far to the west, the last volcanic remnant before we tip off the continental shelf, leave Europe and head out into open ocean for the Americas. Here my mind landed, on a mark in the blue, and tried to imagine how it might feel to stand there and face out to the ocean, to be on that edge of home.
As I wandered back and forth across my map, skidding from island to island into bays and round headlands, I conceived a journey, or rather a series of journeys, which over several years could link together like worry beads on a thread, and which could carry me right out to the speck in the ocean. Intrigued by these islands and their extraordinary geography, fascinated by their separateness, each a world unto itself, I plotted the sequence of islands I would visit, a zigzag north-west through the Hebrides out into that blue space on the map. Out to the edge.
Many people travel in search of the exotic and the unfamiliar. I was travelling in search of home, in the hope of knowing and understanding where I could call home. Some look for novelty on their travels but I was looking for intimacy. Some look for the distance and space of other continents but I suspected there was plenty of complexity and astonishment under my feet in the damp Atlantic archipelago of the British Isles. This is my home country and it seemed to offer worlds far bigger than one lifetime could ever discover, but I wanted to try to know a few of them.
As I contemplated my map, and plotted my forays to the north-west, squeezed into school holidays, with children or friends cajoled into accompanying me, my personal pilgrimage to know home was overtaken by history, a nice irony for someone who has spent so much time studying the subject. It was no longer clear that I could call this north-west part of home at all. I could be a visitor but no more, I was told by the vibrant Scottish nationalist movement. I had stumbled into an old political quest on these islands to define home and where its boundaries lie. My route followed where my fancy took me and with this idiosyncratic approach I hoped to find an understanding of some of the certainties crowding the debate. I was in company with millions of others who were also – in their different ways – trying to know and understand home. I would listen to their journeys and hope they could help me on mine.
Home has been the most political of ideas: it has unleashed ferocious wars and terrible suffering, yet it is also the most intimate, a place where we find refuge and rest. No part of politics twists its way so deeply into our bone marrow. Everyone brings their own biography to the question of home. To understand why the map inspired my journeys and why these questions of home took me north-west to one particular frontier, the Hebrides, there are a few things in need of explanation, so that it is clear where I am coming from. A phrase which nicely captures how much geography shapes us.
Deep in the Highlands, twenty miles from the nearest town at Tain and sixty miles north of Inverness, two small rivers meet and there is a scattering of crofts. It is called Amatnatua, a Norse word for confluence, Àmait na Tuath in Gaelic, or Amat as it is commonly known. The Carron is a glamorous salmon river which forces its way through slabs of rock, plunging down waterfalls into dark pools flecked with cream foam and with glints of gold in its depths. Its roar reverberates around the valley. The Blackwater in contrast is dark treacle as the peat water meanders quietly between grassy verges.
At this confluence the dramatic contours of the north-west Highlands soften, opening out to the gentle undulations of Scotland's east coast. Here is the borderland between the two. The strath runs from east to west and the vegetation shifts in imperceptible degrees from luxuriant arable fecundity – wheat fields brimming in midsummer, verges thick with hogweed, willow bay and foxgloves – towards the rough harshness of the land in the west. Amat is a confluence of ecologies as well as rivers. Sheep graze in the green fields of the strath. Trees border the river Carron and cluster round the big houses on the shooting estates. But above the fields bracken and reeds take over, and up on the hills, bare of trees, rough boulders of ancient stone erupt from the heather. All the while the eye is drawn further west along the valley's single-track road towards the hills which rise in the distance. Every mile west takes you deeper into an emptied wilderness of ancient forest, a landscape of heather dotted by fir and birch where the timber of old trees has been whitened by sun and rain.
A compass is a tool used for navigation, but it is also much used for metaphor. Each point of the compass accumulates a weight of meanings, both cultural and personal. As a country, we attach significance to certain compass points: the south- west, the south-east, the north-east, the north-west. A compass point has even defined a political entity, in Northern Ireland. They can exert a compelling magnetism, so that one direction draws us back, again and again. They can become projects which we – sometimes unwittingly – pursue, and which can arrange our lives. From my father I inherited a legacy of the mid-twentieth century, when the North took a particular hold on the British imagination: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and George Orwell all headed north. J. R. R. Tolkien was reviving the study of the northern mythological sagas in Oxford, and published The Hobbit, perhaps the most famous export of Britain's fascination with the North. The writer John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, perceptively commented on the vogue: 'The North was where a man can make his soul or where the man who knows too many secrets can make his escape.' An apt assessment of a generation, burdened by the trauma of their fathers' war. Auden, who travelled in northern England and then further north to Iceland in the 1930s, wrote, 'One must have a proper moral sense about the points of the compass; North must seem the "good" direction, the way towards heroic adventures, South the way to ignoble ease and decadence. My feelings have been oriented by the compass as far back as I can remember. Norse mythology has always appealed to me infinitely more than Greek.'
On another occasion, the poet, raised in Birmingham, returned to the theme: 'Years before I ever went there, the North of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams. Nor did these feelings disappear when I finally did; to this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.'
In my family – and this personal geography sets in early – we also went north. Both born in London, my parents set up home in northern England, in Yorkshire, and every summer holidays we headed further north, as far north as my father could get. That still was not enough; once at Amat, there was another point further on, beyond our reach: the north-west, which lay beyond those hills on the horizon at the end of Amat's strath. This was where the road became a track and then dwindled to a path, which, with the aid of a compass and good map, took you thirty or so miles over the watershed to the west coast. Beyond that lay the Outer Hebrides, the furthest point of Britain's north-west. It seemed impossibly distant, and after I had discovered a tattered paperback of James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon in my early teens, his strange concoction of myth and fantasy transferred in my imagination onto those mysterious islands beyond the west coast. This became, in Auden's phrase, my 'Never-Never Land'.
Hilton had a shrewd insight into the emotional power of geography, how isolation has a dangerous romantic appeal, how horizons – which by definition we can never reach – both inspire and become the object of our most intense and unrealizable longings, whether for immortality, utopia or refuge from the world. Ridiculed as a deluded search for perfection, the prevalence of references to Shangri La in pop songs, hotels and tourist branding speak to the accuracy of Hilton's insight: that the twentieth century bred an intense but wildly ungrounded desire to find escape.
Every year the family van was loaded with a fortnight's worth of food and we drove through the night to get to Amat. My mother made beds for us five children in the back, and we slept as my father drove. We woke as the dawn broke over the Scottish Lowlands, and nothing else matched this intense childhood excitement of going north, certainly not Christmas or birthdays. We were heading to the Promised Land.
The experience of knowing a place as a child on holiday confers an astonishing power, quite disproportionate to the amount of time spent there. Our annual visit to Amat over the best part of ten years ensured it had a place in our family history as significant as our family home. We spilled out of the tiny two-up two-down croft. Five children ran barefoot across the fields and over the heather moors. Every day we swam in the icy-cold river Carron, gasping and shrieking in its small waterfalls and stumbling over the rocky boulders of the riverbed. The brave would dive and jump from the rocks. We knew the shape of that thirty-metre stretch of river intimately: every rock and patch of bank, the small island and the swinging suspension footbridge furred with pale-green lichen.
Some of the greatest pleasures to be had were visiting Willie and his sister Mary, who lived on the neighbouring croft. Neither had married, and we loved them for their gentle kindness and warmth. Willie had devoted accomplices on all the crofting tasks for the duration of our stay. We were there for milking in the early morning, fascinated by the rhythmic sound of the jet of milk hitting the pail and the slow accumulation of the steaming frothy milk. It looked so easy and yet when our fingers found the rubbery teats, our foreheads pressed on the cow's warm side, the jet of milk became no more than an intermittent dribble. We rode behind Willie on the tractor to turn the hay and then helped load the sweet-smelling bales onto the truck. It was unlikely that we younger ones were much help, but Willie seemed to enjoy our company, and we loved his. We would collect milk from Mary; she would take down the big jug from a shelf, remove the beaded lace covering which protected it from flies, and fill our jug. Later at home we would drink the strange-tasting unpasteurized milk, rich and creamy.
Every year Mary would invite us for tea and we sat in their sitting room – it was where I first learnt the word 'antimacassar' – in front of the lightest sponge cake I had ever tasted, hoping for a second slice. The highlight of the holiday was when Willie took out his fiddle for the ceilidh in the barn and we danced and sang with more enthusiasm than expertise. I went back in my early twenties when Mary had long since died and Willie was ageing. He no longer grew many crops, and most of his fields were turned over to sheep, but he was as warm-hearted as ever. When he saw me out walking in the early morning, he insisted on tumblers of whisky for breakfast. The ceilidh had become a regular occurrence and the family at the big house now came down to hear Willie's playing.
Even as a ten-year-old child, I sensed the tragedy of the history which lay around us. We scrambled over the ruins of old crofts, and could see how the presence of community on this land was retreating. Willie and Mary were the last heirs of an old tradition, since neither had children to pass it on to. A few miles from our croft was the church of Croick. We often ended up there on our rambles. I loved the smell of wood polish and I was fascinated by the collection plate, full of coins, which sat in the unlocked church waiting for donations. 'The Scottish are very honest,' my mother said to me in a voice of deep admiration. An empty strath, a large, empty church and a collection plate full of money; to a child this was deeply confusing.
Croick's handsome church told an old story eloquently. Built to a design of the great engineer Thomas Telford in 1827, it was a gesture of appreciation for the military service of the strath's many sons in the defeat of Napoleon. A large building with big windows looking over the valley, the long pews could seat a hundred people. Today there is one croft nearby and the old manse has been turned into a shooting lodge. Croick became famous in 1845, when the people of this area of Glencalvie were evicted to make way for sheep farms, less than twenty years after the church had been built for them by a grateful nation. A group took shelter in the churchyard and, to bear witness to their plight, they scratched their names and dates in the diamond panes of window glass. A reporter from The Times was with them and their story was carried in newspaper reports across the country.
Towards the end of my research for this book and the many journeys to the Hebrides it entailed, I took a detour and returned to Amat. I wanted to arrive where I had started all those years before. Memory proved a fickle friend. The hills had shrunk and the paths had disappeared. The single-track roads were better maintained, but the footbridges were ageing, long beards of lichen hung from their rusty wires. I was with my daughter, who was much older than I had been on those family holidays. We floundered through bracken and across sphagnum moss, brilliantly coloured blood red and lemon yellow. The light rain and summer warmth unleashed clouds of soft, vicious midges. We sweltered on in search of burns where I had once swum and bridges I vaguely remembered, accompanied by crowns of flies circling round our heads. The breath of the land hung heavy on this July day, pungent with peat and the scent of sun-baked rocks. Lingering over it all was its distinctive smell of rushing water, powerfully familiar despite the decades of absence. It brought back the memory of other smells long since gone: the honeysuckle which used to hang over the croft's front door, the sweet exotic scent of lilies in the porch of the big estate house (the first I had ever seen), the rich milk, the dead salmon we once found in the river, the clover in the hay and the diesel in Willie's tractor.
Amat had planted a sense of home and, in doing so, it satisfied the family desire to be north and held out a further dream of the west: it set the course. It was a meeting point of rivers and landscapes, a borderland where farmland met open moorland. It was not uncomplicated – what home is? It appeared to be a Promised Land, and yet was mute with trauma. It was riddled with contradictions I did not understand.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Love Of Country by Madeleine Bunting. Copyright © 2017 Madeleine Bunting. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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