Scotland is unfuckable.
Scotland cannot, will not, be fucked. It has always been, and to this day is, in a total and complete lack of having been fucked, fucked up, fucked over, fucked with.
I say this in defiance of a history of its misery and domination, poverty and neglect — though it has been bought and sold and barely any of its land is owned by anyone who really lives there. For certain, Scotland has been fucked on: Robert Burns and Edwin Morgan wrote down, in beautiful detail, the desiring of a woman's and man's body, respectively. But the way that the accepted canon of literary men talks about land, ownership, territory — Scotland is unfuckable because it is inhospitable.
I am become the land I stand on. I cannot remember exactly when the transformation took place. But I would like to tell you about where I realised it had, and the powerful ritual it gave me.
It is the grand masculine colonial tradition to talk about women as if they were a conquerable landscape — from Sir Walter Raleigh's naming of Virginia after a virgin queen, through the way that residents of the Kingdom of Fife adoringly call the Lomond Hills the ‘paps of Fife’, or the ‘breasts of Fife’. In the pale teal mornings I would lie back on my grandmother's cold garden lawn and compare my growing chest bumps to the horizon.
But as I look closer at the history of Scotland, that very early history before and enduring the Ancient Romans, I learn that in the beginning, women were never the tilled, the claimed, the fertile land that the Romantic poets made them. They were wild: the crags, the bursting river; the unpredictable, the dangerous; those who may at any point take it all away. We might one day lash the world like a cat surprised, break the skin of natural order, and have the contents below burst into mess. It was that part of the land metaphor we occupied. We were not known as the passive but the prickly. The spiky. The terrifying. The vicious.
Scotland did not behave. Scotland will not behave.
As Sharon Blackie writes in her book If Women Rose Rooted, Celtic women had social standing that most other contemporaries in the West did not, and Christianity came to change that for the worse. In Ireland and Britain, women could be leaders and were important in political, social, and religious roles. Boudica and Cartimandua, for example, lead their people into battle, and Celtic women have been reported to have been judges, priestesses, lawyers, astronomers, artists, and doctors, often with rights to property, sexual freedom, and recourse to damages if they were physically or sexually assaulted. A Celtic woman was feared and respected. The Romans are on record saying you do not fuck with a Celtic woman.
The whole Celtic world was based on the ordaining of place, of the natural world. What we might now call the ‘femme’ was indivisible from the land on which people lived. This land was not something considered to belong to anyone.
I leaf through the Ulster Cycle of Irish literary tradition, a sort of Marvel Universe of the Dark Ages, the stories Celts constructed together as they cooked and drank and wove and washed and stole each other's sheep. One figure in particular stands out to me: Scáthach, a famous warrior woman and prophet who lived with her daughter on the Isle of Skye. Scáthach taught the Irish heroes how to snatch life from one another and vault ramparts like giants, like gods. There is little centred upon her alone, but she has an easy traversal through the background of stories written down about more famous Irish heroes. She stands, smiling, to the side of gilt Celtic knot lettering, behind the posturing of hundreds of words of male-ingratiated prose.
She gets up every morning to sharpen spears, kick the shins of young Irishmen, wash blood out of undershirts. Her daughter is on the wall watching her, sewing, and spotting selkies in the ocean waves.
There is supposed to be failure in a woman being alone. For years it bothered me that I was not ‘possessed’ by another or ‘attached’ in some way. What are you supposed to do with yourself when the ways in which society is structured make you safe or content only if you are tied, legally or socially, to another, more esteemed gender? It is not that you cannot have it: there are many men who would marry you or would at least treat you kindly. It is that happiness and a steady attention supply are not the same thing. Happiness and a steady attention supply are not the same thing. They are not even related. And the only reason that I thought they were was because very many of my role models were operating under the same delusion.
That you might think they are the same thing is because of magazines, social media, romantic movies, people's fickle approval, the way people talk about weddings and marriage, ‘he'll make you happy’: those are mythology. The only things needed for happiness are a fixed abode, safety, food, water, care, and stories. The care and stories can come from anyone, romantic or otherwise. You do not need daily attention to survive; you merely only need to experience daily care. The care, if it is not forthcoming, can be sought most of the time, but it must be face to face. In person. And the greatest purveyors of it, these days, tend not to be men.
Two years ago, I stopped being subject to the woodpecker opinions of the internet, stopped reassessing my worth by the comments column, deleted my popular Twitter account, and wandered into the constant dark wilderness of my home country, far away from the cities that require that you sell yourself to keep from suffocating. There, I began to write what I wanted at length in private and work at jobs that required my physical presence. I found people nearby who cared for me and I cared for. I found people who wanted to tell stories with me. This has brought me close to my motherland in a way that I have never been: I have become firm friends with the roiling dark and grey-blue frowns of the unpredictable. In fact, I revel in downpours and thunder and fierce, ripping winds, and when they catch me by surprise, I like to linger in and try to prolong them. I try to think of all the women who knew how to thatch a roof and butcher a pig and find a spring, those who may not have had care like I can have care. Atop my neighbour Calton Hill, men have placed Enlightenment monuments that poke the sky, but when it rains, the clouds envelop and sap their power. Beneath the hill, it is said, the Pale Queen sits ready to impart to local women the gifts of how to survive.
Perhaps I have finally listened.
Perth Railway Station is a Victorian building made of red and white brick triangles and inverted U shapes. If you grew up in the United Kingdom, there's a good chance you think Perth Railway Station looks a bit like a seventies Safeway supermarket. There's nothing particularly mysterious or interesting about its iron girders if what you are seeking is a reclusive martial artist from a Dark Ages tome.
Striding out towards the car park where multi-coloured pansies sit in troughs, I remember an urban childhood spent in and out of Perth and Aberdeen on the east coast of Scotland, only sometimes broken by trips to Balloch, Bennachie, Glenshee. Sometimes I'd see my aunt in Auchtermuchty, something that in proper Scots pronunciation sounds a lot like coughing twice or a compound sneeze, a place that looks like a village from Outlander.
We won't be needing postcard images where we're going. Remove all thoughts of twee Jacobite sex fantasies and Highland Toffee trim and the comfort of Trainspotting's nearby Class A drugs. My mind can't get past the sadness and massacre, old stains of poverty and airborne sea foam that will be at our destination, possible guesthouse fish and chips if we are lucky. We are going to Dun Sgathaich — a ruin named ‘Fortress of Shadows’ in Gaelic, like it might be some sort of Dark Souls level — and I know from thirty-two years' experience there is nothing cute about the ankle-spraining hikes of Caledonian coastal cliffs, and treating them like a lovely little jolly into Highland cow territory is what the Isle of Skye frankly wants from you before it opens up rockpool jaws and consumes you whole.
My friend Cat, whose expertise in both driving and photography I have hired for the weekend, shows me her supplies in the back of the car: wellie boots, waterproof trousers, windbreakers, fleeces. Possible armour for an oncoming storm. Photographers never leave anything to chance — there's a lot of expensive equipment to abandon in a sucking bog. We look at the weather forecast: as usual, the answer comes, ‘Changeable.’ The Isle of Skye is more than five hours' drive away to the north-west, but not on flat, wide straights. After you leave Fort William for the islands, it is a shoulder-wrench on the steering column around steep hills, up and down narrow roads populated with spiteful sheep, the force of the usual angry cloudburst and gale force winds making it likely you will drive into a springy heather trap-ditch. If you consider Scotland an old woman's face turned west towards North America, as my Highland ancestors did, then we are driving to the edge of her bushy eyebrow to try to understand what she is thinking.
In the car, I try not to think about Scáthach. But she is all I can think about.
Scáthach the warrior woman's largest role happens in an Old Irish Gaelic tale called ‘The Wooing of Emer’. In the earliest form of the tale, the Ulster hero Cu Chulainn has to prove himself to the father of his prospective bride Emer. Part of the father's approval depends on Cu Chulainn going to Scotland to train with a great martial artist, our Scáthach, who resides in a place called The Fortress of Shadows. It is such a demanding regime that it is expected that Cu Chulainn will die in training. In fact, Emer's father is counting on it.
The Fortress of Shadows has a long precipice to negotiate and a solid door at the entrance. Cu Chulainn walks across the precipice and stabs his spear right through the door of the dun, or fortress. Scáthach's daughter Uathach opens the door, presumably to find out who is damaging the door (no daughter of Scáthach fears mere violence).
Uathach is immediately dumbstruck by how agonisingly hot Cu Chulainn is. (I believe the translation in the Revue Celtique states, ‘She did not speak to him, so much did his shape move her desire.’) Uathach goes upstairs to tell her mother Scáthach about him (I like to imagine he looks like Hot Chris Pratt. Maybe Chris Pratt in The Magnificent Seven, or in that Jurassic Park movie where he seduces a pack of velociraptors).
I ruminate, from time to time, on the conversation that supposedly passed between the two women about Cu Chulainn. Scáthach is a very famous teacher of the fuck ‘em up arts, and she runs what one might consider a sprawling martial arts training ground, the kind that you might see in a Bruce Lee movie, only they're all Scottish and Irish and they really like swords and haft weapons. Scáthach's by no means a stupid woman, and she's a woman who's used to huge strapping Irish heroes turning up at her door, or at least dying on the precipice before it for her entertainment. There's no direct speech suggested for what Uathach says to her about Cu Chulainn, but it's probably something like, ‘Mum, there's an Irish hero at the door and he's so hot my eyes and crotch might have gone on fire.’
Scáthach's reply is something like, ‘Put him in my bed then. I've been bored all this time.’
It is this ability to be completely unimpressed with the world that made Scáthach immediately dear to me.
Generally speaking, Cu Chulainn is one of the worst house guests you could possibly imagine. When he was young, he killed his host Chulainn's guard dog and had to pretend to be a guard dog for Chulainn until a replacement dog was reared, which is how Cu Chulainn got his name. At Scáthach's house, he accidentally breaks Uathach's finger and then kills one of Scáthach's guest champions. Cu Chulainn also goes out to try to slay Aoife, a neighbouring warrior woman said to be the best in the world, against Scáthach's will, and brings her back as prisoner. I imagine Scáthach's carpets, if there are any, are ruined.
Do not have Cu Chulainn round your house. He will do something awful.
And yet Scáthach seems to care about Cu Chulainn, probably because her daughter ends up betrothed to him. (I'm not really versed in Irish marriage laws, but doesn't he want to marry Emer? Doesn't this create some problems? Should it? How many children is this guy supposed to have? Didn't he swear a vow of chastity to Emer that was immediately violated when he met Scáthach? So many questions for the editor.) But she's not even ruffled by his behaviour. When he kills a visiting champion, she's just like: that is inconvenient. What are you going to do about that? It seems that to Scáthach the whole world is just teeming with impetuous young Irish imbeciles who run rampant across the land like kittens might play all over their bored, slightly sleepy mother. It's this quality that I like about her: she's the best at what she does, because she's seen it all. Scáthach is only scared of Aoife, her neighbour, but Scáthach lives in a fortress with all the heroes of the Celtic world. What has she got to worry about, really? She knows all of the secrets of the art of killing others. That's why men come to her.
The five-hour drive to Fort William feels like being in the first season of True Detective, the passing landscape like some ticking timebomb and the serial killer is the weather. The sky quickly blows past grey clouds and covers us in fine mist, then solid rain, then mist again. Most of Scotland's motorways pass by fields of cows or sheep or horses, pine trees, telephone poles, telephone poles, giant mountains, heather and heather and heather, cottages, squat grey villages, and sometimes a couple petrol stations. Cat, a seasoned Highlands driver, has planned to stop at the Fort William Morrison's supermarket to get lunch and a break from looking at the road's white Morse code before she stick shifts around winding single track roads. The hard part. The difficult part. The part where you might fuck it up entirely.
We have been mostly silent. Cat and I don't know each other well, but we are happy in each other's company. Anticipation feels like a person sitting dourly, dark-browed in the back, like a murderer of hopes and dreams. Probably we are both wondering what might go wrong or trying to think about what we might see from that coast. We are definitely thinking about the weather and how it will piss it down the closer we get. We are both thinking about where we will sleep and what we will eat.
The further you get to the edge of the Roman Empire in Britain, the less comfortable everything gets. They used to build us roads, you know. Straight roads Britons still use. But the Romans were not used to the water-based army Scotland kept in the sky, and they didn't care to face the land army either.
I'm telling you this because ancient history has had a direct effect on Scotland and how it works. Inverness, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, we all have what anyone in the United States has in terms of, well, stuff. But sometimes there are places that even Amazon won't go. It doesn't make fiscal sense. The ancient Romans worked this out early. Probably the Romans built the wall against us because they disliked the idea of fighting men and women hardened on the absence of tiled, heated floors and steam rooms, and whose primary idea of intimacy was telling each other the most heart-wrenching stories they could think of, then duelling each other to the death over them. (If you have ever wanted to live in a society entirely made of warrior-poets, this is the logical endpoint of one.)
I always think about a game the Roman soldiers used to play when they kept watch on the ramparts of Vindolanda at Hadrian's Wall. They would throw a red ball over the wall into Scotland, and every soldier would try to throw their ball closest to it. The closest ball to the red ball would win. The ball furthest away from the red ball would lose: the owner would be lowered into Scotland to pick all the balls up. I laugh to myself, every time, at the idea of a Roman soldier, in full leather armour regalia and winter fur, running about the bushes, frantic, before the Scots arrive to pick him off. Probably this was the main entertainment of the game for the not-losers, like Ancient Roman Takeshi's Castle. Only if you fell, a Scot jumped out and stabbed you.
Cat and I sit in the cafe of Morrison's over mugs of lukewarm brown coffee with that thin layer of milk fat glinting on the top of it, looking out past the last vestiges of what one might call ‘urban’ life on our way. Next to us are the bright yellow arches of a McDonald's restaurant, strangely not that far from the actual Clan MacDonald outposts. Scots like to brag about what we gave the world, but sometimes it bites us in the arse.
We're going to Lord of the Isles territory. (If these terms seem familiar, George R. R. Martin has probably borrowed them.) The Gallowglass come from these islands. They were a breed of Viking that settled with the Gaels as early as the mid-thirteenth century and became so good at fucking people up that the Irish, the French, and even the English hired them as mercenaries for their own private battles. People were scared of them. They were in awe of them. They carried a Sparth Axe, a long haft weapon with an axe blade that often curved around to meet the pole it sat on, and a broadsword or claymore (Scots for ‘very large sword’). If you faced them, they did not have to be very close to you to put a lot of metal through you like butter. Alongside they would bring two boys, like squires, to hold other implements of war: throwing spears for those pesky ones who run away, and a snack, for after the spear has landed in the enemy's back.
Was the character of Scáthach based on these terrifying mercenaries? The more bleak purple mountains we encounter on the drive towards her reputed fortress, the more real she becomes to me. The more the rain threatens to bash through the windscreen, the more I think I know how she thinks. The closer we get to a place named after her, the less fictional she becomes.
My day job is to write stories. To make people up. Being the creator of a story world is difficult because one particular question sits on the shoulders all day: are you imitating the world or shaping it? Is this something that must correspond to your own experience, or can you write what you imagine, what you wish something to be, what should be? If you are writing something down, are you responsible for what it does to people? Are you responsible for the reaction when it hits someone? How responsible?
Scotland is covered in these anxious questions. The central rail station in Edinburgh is called ‘Waverley’ after Sir Walter Scott's novels about a village of the same name. The place name ‘Waverley’ was made up for the book. But now it is a place. It is a real place in lowland Scotland, and Sir Walter Scott is responsible for imagining it, and by his influence, he made it. By writing it down, he asked for it to come into being. People believed ‘Waverley’ should exist so much that it now exists. Shakespeare made up places in Verona that now exist: Juliet's Tomb is a sarcophagus you may visit in Verona with no one buried in it. Shakespeare had never been to Verona.
And so: if you invent a warrior woman of the Gallowglass ilk and place her in the wilderness of Skye, in a place called The Fortress of Shadows, will she eventually arrive? How much of this was based on a real person? Or a real idea? Was it based on a real place? Did it come into being because people believed it into being, or did someone build a castle, name it after her, and claim that it was once hers? I can't find any historical records to explain it, and it's unlikely there is anything much that has survived. What came first? Did she come first, or did the land? Did the stories come first, or did some role model, some leader? She was never real, but then, when you look out of your car window at the gathering storm, when you are winding round and round, past angry sheep with those eyes like the insides of razor blades, you think: There must have been some basis in fact. There must have been someone.
We arrive at Dun Sgathaich, the fifteenth-century castle named after Scáthach, said, by local legend, to be built on the foundations of Scáthach's fortress itself. It is battering rain. We get out of the car at the edge of Skye's coast and look over an unruly field of sheep towards a small hump on the horizon. The air in the remote parts of Scotland is sharp and fresh, always so full of petrichor and the taste of wild green leaves. Sometimes breathing it feels like drinking iced water on a hot day.
We trudge through springy, soggy peat bog and up over hills until it winds into view, a grey mouth crouching on a small mound, gnarled, snarling.
‘That's it!’ I say to Cat, holding my waterproof's hood over my glasses. ‘That's it! We found it.’ There's a weird feeling in the bottom of my stomach.
Pounded by waves over the years, it has no walls, but the foundations and what look like steps are still visible on the other side, overgrown with grass and some sort of vegetation in the middle up by where the ground floor of the hall used to be.
‘Do you think we can get in?’ Cat asks. I don't know. We have to get closer.
We trudge towards it as the rain spatters into our eyes. Horizontal rain blinds us as we arrive at a square hole.
‘There's no drawbridge,’ I say. This is a stupid statement, because of course there isn't. Instead there is a huge gaping drop onto rocks below that look like jagged teeth. A thin line of slidy stones reach across it at either side, where the drawbridge once rested when it was down.
‘Can you get across?’ Cat says. I test a stone underneath my green wellies. The wellies are massive and they don't have very good grip. In good weather, a careful and dainty explorer might be able to edge across one of the drawbridge supports and into the castle itself. But today I'm certain trying to do this in the rain will result in my smashed corpse in the rocky moat below.
I lie awake that night in a cheap hotel bed and think about the stories of Scáthach. Even if Dun Sgathaich was opportunistically named after Scáthach in order to maximise its fearsome reputation, I wonder if in some manner the actual act of believing that a fictional figure might have lived there gives her a better chance of slipping into existence. It's a well-known story Scottish grandmothers tell that sometimes, where the forest has a cold spot, that is a thin place, a place where the boundary between this world and the Other World of spirits, fairies, and pixies is worn. I wonder if thin place magic has somehow worked its stuff on the castle and the weird feeling I have around it is just excess belief turning into the real.
When I was young, I was particularly enamoured with the Terry Pratchett book Hogfather, a comedic fantasy book about a parallel medieval world to ours, where a man analogous to Father Christmas goes missing and Death himself has to take over the job. In the book, Pratchett describes a world in which strong belief in a particular mythical figure can pop that figure into existence: the Tooth Fairy, for example, starts to exist in a physical form simply because enough children believe in her.
I always think about this book as a powerful reminder that perhaps it doesn't even matter that the Tooth Fairy does not exist: sometimes pretending that something exists, even as a symbol, is necessary, so that losing a tooth might seem like a less gruesome or painful experience.
Doesn't all fiction function this way?
The next day, I run full pelt towards Dun Sgathaich for the second time. Cat has parked and left me alone. It is drier now, but the wind is up. My hair whorls around me. The springy moss rises up to meet my Doc Martens. I put Grimes up very loud in my headphones and look searchingly at the looming grey walls as they near. It is the last chance I will have to really find her. I have an hour until the rain comes and makes my task impossible.
I'll do it, I think. This time, I'll do it.
In the stories, Irish heroes have to make it through a number of trials and over a dangerous precipice to get to the door of The Fortress of Shadows and greet Scáthach.
I edge out onto the little ledge, no more than a couple of inches in width, and grab onto the remaining mortar beside it to steady myself. The grips on my Doc Martens hold me there as I look down at the drop and my stomach flips. The wind slaps my hair on my cheek. I try to look straight out at the view of the coast instead: stark claws slung with striped tides of blue and green seaweed, the rocky beach curving away, purple heather playing on the cliffs above.
I take a deep breath, and agonising, gripping the side, I take baby steps all the way along towards the landing. I step onto the other side into a sandy pathway. Underfoot, I feel what were probably once perfectly flat flagstones, and I look up a winding staircase that leads steeply up the hill. Warriors had used these once for real. They had climbed the steps in sopping armour with food and fur and those little round shields.
Suddenly I run all the way up the winding steps up into the castle feeling my whole body grin: fuck you fuck you fuck you I MADE IT. And run straight into a sea of nettles at the top, a massive lake of them surrounding me. Some childhood instinct makes me hold my hands up high to avoid the stinging barbs on the leaves and I gasp.
A laugh so loud comes out of me as I look around this final trial, surrounded, surrounded, a whole swathe of nettles up to the waist. But I'm wearing waterproofs as armour. Scáthach cannot beat me this way. I wade through the giant nettle field until I come out of the other side into the clearing where the main hall used to be. It is grassy, some foundation walls still visible in the ground.
The heroes of Ulster left the carpet neat after all.
Then I notice there is a small hole right in the centre of the ground with very clear water in it. I scoop some into my mouth messily: fresh. The remains of the castle well. The castle is siege-proof.
At the edge of Dun Sgathaich, the remains of the walls give way to a sheer drop into the sea below. The wind pushes at my shoulders and sucks at my elbows as I look at the waves smashing the pebbles and rocks.
It is breathtakingly beautiful from here. White-speckled tidal islands are little humps out in the Irish Sea; there is nothing but grey rippling waves and those roiling rolling layers of blue-orange cloud cover. It is like looking at an animated painting where all of the rippling brushstrokes and layers are visible.
I find a place on the castle edge to sit and do nothing but look at the grass carpet and stare out over the coast, watching the birds play by a cliff lip.
This is what it would be like to have a castle of your own, I think. To live by yourself. To be self-sufficient. To need nothing and want nothing. To be contented.
‘I don't fucking need you,’ I blurt out.
I hardly hear it the first time: I realise I have said it and then I frown at myself. Who am I talking to? What am I talking about? I don't know. It could be anyone, anything. But it seems so fitting I say it again: ‘I don't fucking need you. I don't. Fucking. Need you! I DON'T FUCKING NEED YOU!’ I lose my breath and I laugh and it feels like everything, every weight I ever had comes out of me. The stones and hills and sea are the only witnesses. I can't help myself: I whisper at the well in the centre of the castle as if it is in on the secret. ‘I don't fucking need you,’ I say, under my breath, quietly, like it is a spell that only works on me. ‘I don't. Fucking. Need you.’
I sit there silently for an hour, my mind completely blank, devoid of wanting or needing anything at all but to sit and look. I just look at Scotland and feel like I am part of it. Scotland continues. It is fine.
Slowly, as the rain sweeps in, I walk down the steps of the castle, edge out over the precipice, and walk back to the car where Cat is packing up.
I say: ‘I got inside. It had a well. It was beautiful.’
‘I saw you sitting on the edge,’ she said. And I wonder if she saw me laughing.
I don't know what came first: the fortress or the story. In many ways, the place is more important than the story. It is evocative of stories. When I need to be calm, I say the mantra: I don't. Fucking. Need you. It is part of how Scáthach functions in ‘The Wooing of Emer’, and it is part of me now.
When I say it, all the world's insidious systems and oppressions and dark, spirit-voiding animosity recoil from my vicinity temporarily, wash back into a yonder where they cannot hurt me. I have become like the Fortress. I am the rock by the ocean, under the lashing rain, raking sun, banshee wind, shadow, hail, and that thin, consistent spitting mist Scots call ‘smirr’, and I am wild, and you cannot mark something that is so profoundly marked. To Scotland, all happenings, all happenings, are mere exfoliation. And I have become like Scotland, the woman who is the landscape.
You cannot fuck with that kind of woman.