Everyone Who Ever Mattered Is Dead and Gone
THE UPPER REACHES of Glen Shiel, in the part of the West Highlands called Kintail, are steep and rocky. A road and a river jostle here for elbow-room as they plunge through a series of narrow gorges. Especially in winter, when deep snow drives them down from the high tops, red deer are everywhere. Now and then, in places too precipitous even for deer, you glimpse long-haired, big-horned goats. But there are few other signs of life; certainly no sign of human habitation; not even when you reach the part of the glen where the mountains, as it were, draw back a little to make room for several fields and some small areas of woodland.
This spot, so larger-scale maps tell you, is Achadh nan Seileach, a Gaelic phrase denoting both the relative flatness of the place and the presence here of willow trees. In any broadly similar part of Europe – in Norway, for example – this is where you might expect to find a village. But the Scottish Highlands, though their physical structure and their climate give them something of the appearance of the region to the west and north of Oslo, have had a very different history from Rogaland, Hordaland or Nord Trondelag. There is no settlement to be seen in the vicinity of Achadh nan Seileach. What can be seen, however, and with no great effort on your part, is a good deal of evidence that Achadh nan Seileach was not always the unpopulated locality it so clearly is today.
Leave your car by the roadside. Take a look around the grassy meadows which slope gently towards the River Shiel, its pace a lot less hectic here than further up the glen. On both sides of the river, and especially on its northern bank, you quickly come across the remains of several stone-built homes. The walls of one or two still stand some three, or four, or five feet clear of their surroundings. Others are reduced now to little more than roughly squared-off undulations in the turf.
On a fine summer’s evening, with the sun picking out every detail of peaks like Sgurr an t-Searraich, Sgurr nan Saighead, Sgurr Urain and Sgurr na Càrnaich, this is a most attractive corner. Seating yourself on the ground with your back to what is left of the gable of a long-abandoned house, its stones still retaining a good deal of the day’s heat, it is tempting to speculate – if you know a little of the place’s past – that this might be the very spot once occupied by the only individuals ever to have set down in print some impression of how Achadh nan Seileach seemed before its people were expelled forever from their homes.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell came this way in the course of the trip they made from London to the Hebrides in 1773; leaving Inverness on 30 August; spending that night at Fort Augustus; staying the following night in Glen Moriston; getting to Achadh nan Seileach – with their four horses, their servant and their two guides – on the afternoon of 1 September. An hour or two before, the party having halted to allow their horses to graze for a little, Johnson had spent some moments ‘resting’, as he expressed it, ‘on a bank such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign’. Romance, it should be said, held no appeal for Samuel Johnson – then one of England’s best known literary figures. His, as a modern Scottish writer has remarked, was very much a ‘reasoning mind’. But Johnson, though only three days out from Inverness, was already sufficiently taken with the Highlands to appreciate that his excursion had the makings of a first-rate story. While waiting for his horse to be got ready for the onward trek to Glenelg and the Skye ferry, Samuel Johnson had accordingly ‘conceived the thought’ of the ‘narration’ eventually issued as A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Achadh nan Seileach, reached at the point when the notion of such a publication was thus beginning to take shape, possibly features more than it might otherwise have done in Johnson’s reminiscences of his Highland jauntings. It features also in the separately produced Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides which James Boswell, Johnson’s future biographer, was to bring out some time after his friend had demonstrated the existence of a huge demand for travel books about the Scottish Highlands.1
Auknasheals, Johnson called this ‘village’, which he described as ‘consisting of many huts, perhaps twenty, built all of drystone, that is, stones piled up without mortar’. In Boswell’s account, its author’s Scots tongue being more capable than Samuel Johnson’s English one of getting to grips with Gaelic pronunciation, the place is Auchnasheal – ‘a kind of rural village,’ as Boswell puts it, ‘a number of cottages being built together, as we saw all along the Highlands’.2
Precisely how many people lived in Achadh nan Seileach in 1773 there is now no way of knowing; perhaps a hundred; perhaps half as many again; certainly ‘considerable numbers’, according to Johnson’s description of the crowd which promptly surrounded him and his companions. But irrespective of its exact size, this, as Boswell comments, was clearly both a welcoming and a hospitable community:
At Auchnasheal we sat down on a green turf-seat at the end of a house; they brought us out two wooden dishes of milk which we tasted. One of them was frothed like a syllabub. I saw a woman preparing it with such a stick as is used for chocolate, and in the same manner.3
Achadh nan Seileach would survive for some years yet. As Johnson and Boswell were quickly to learn in the course of their 1773 travels, however, the wider Highland society to which the people of Achadh nan Seileach belonged was starting to be radically reconstructed. Not least among the causes of this reconstruction was the transformation of the Highland aristocracy – the clan chieftains of earlier times – into landowning magnates on the long-established southern model. This particular metamorphosis was greatly pleasing to the British government – its ministers being understandably anxious to integrate into the United Kingdom a still largely tribal region which, as recently as the 1740s, had been in a state of armed rebellion. But the social revolution precipitated by their traditional leadership’s adoption of an openly commercial approach to land management was one which benefited very few folk of the sort who turned out to receive Samuel Johnson and James Boswell that September afternoon at Achadh nan Seileach. As chieftains-turned-landlords cast about for the revenues needed to finance the lavish lifestyles deemed appropriate to their new status, the rents which these men levied were ruthlessly jacked up. And when age-old communities like Achadh nan Seileach proved incapable of yielding the desired return, as many of them shortly did, most such communities were simply obliterated with a view to their lands being released for alternative, and much more profitable, uses.
The beginnings of these upheavals were observed with deep disgust by Samuel Johnson. Despite his having nothing but contempt for other people’s attempts to portray Highlanders as having traditionally lived in a state of primeval virtue and simplicity, Johnson was enough of an old-fashioned Tory, even a Jacobite, to have hoped that the Highlands might have preserved at least a little of the pre-capitalist order. Here, he fondly believed, something other than the cash nexus – already the dominating social fact in so much of the rest of Britain – would connect folk of higher rank with those of lesser fortune. Such indeed had been the case in the era of clanship. But that era, Samuel Johnson now reported sadly, had passed into history. And all sorts of ancient ties and obligations had been discarded in the process. ‘Their chiefs,’ Johnson wrote of Highlanders, ‘have already lost much of their influence; and as they gradually degenerate from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords, they will divest themselves of the little that remains.’4
One of Johnson’s Highland contemporaries, the North Uist poet, Iain MacCodrum, made the same point still more bitterly:
Dh’fhalbh na ceannardan mìleant’
Dh’an robh sannt air an fhìrinn,
Dh’an robh geall air an dìlsean . . .
Seallaidh mun cuairt duibh
Is faicibh na h-uaislean
Gun iochd annt’ ri truaghain;
Gun sunirceas ri dàimhich;
’S ann a tha iad am barail
Nach buin sibh do ’n talamh,
’S ged dh’fhàg iad sibh falamh
Chan fhaic iad mar chall e.
The warrior chiefs are gone
who had a yearning for the truth,
who had regard for their faithful followers . . .
Look around you
and see the nobility
without pity for poor folk,
without kindness to friends;
they are of the opinion
that you do not belong to the soil,
and though they have left you destitute
they cannot see it as a loss.5
MacCodrum urged Highlanders to emigrate to North America – ‘to the country of milk, to the country of honey, to a country where you may buy land to your will’ – rather than submit to the tyrannical exactions of their landlords. John MacRae, a Kintail poet of the same period and a man who was himself to settle in North Carolina, was equally insistent on the need to get away:
Falbhamaid ’s bitheadh beannachd Dhè leinn;
Triallamaid ’s riadhamaid barca.
B’fheàrr na bhi fuireach fo uachdarain
Nach fhuiling tuath a bhi aca;
A ghabhàdh an t-òr an àite ’n t-seòid.
Let us go and may God’s blessing be with us.
Let us go and charter a vessel.
Better that than to remain under landlords
who will not tolerate tenantry;
who would prefer gold to a brave man.6
Johnson and Boswell had heard something of such discontents even before they reached Achadh nan Seileach. ‘Of the farm which he himself occupied,’ Glen Moriston’s innkeeper had informed them, ‘the rent had, in twenty-five years, been advanced from five to twenty pounds, which he found himself so little able to pay that he would be glad to try his fortune in some other place.’ This was bad enough. What was much worse, from the standpoint of the resident population anyway, was the eventual discovery by Highland landlords that not even rent rises on such a scale were capable of producing anything like the returns to be got from the sheep farmers who began to move into the Highlands during the couple of decades following the excursion made here by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell.7
Immediately to the south of Glen Shiel is Glen Garry, where sheep were displacing people as early as the 1780s. A ‘triple rent’, observed a local clergyman of the time, was then on offer for much of Kintail also. But the numerous MacLennans and MacRaes whose names are entered in Glen Shiel’s eighteenth-century rentals were, for the moment, spared evictions of the kind occurring in Glen Garry. Kintail’s proprietor, MacKenzie of Seaforth, according to this same parish minister, ‘absolutely refused’ the threefold rent increase so temptingly held out to him – ‘declaring,’ or so the minister continued, ‘that he would never prefer sheep to men’.8
Such attitudes, however laudable, were not destined to endure. The Seaforth MacKenzies, being ultimately no more immune to the charms of southern money than others of their class, were soon playing their own prominent part in the events which became known as the Highland Clearances. Sheep farmers accordingly began arriving in Kintail in the early nineteenth century. To start with, admittedly, they did not have things all their own way – David Dick, who took over the lower part of Glen Shiel during this period, being the understandably outraged victim of repeated attacks on both his stock and property. ‘I have had another proof of the savage brutality and barbarous ferocity of the people here in deliberately killing three of my horses this morning,’ Dick wrote to MacKenzie of Seaforth on 25 June 1820. ‘The fourth and only remaining one escaped alive with a fractured skull.’ But David Dick was clearly not to be intimidated by Glen Shiel’s original occupants, however much they tried to frighten him away. ‘The question,’ he commented of the people causing him so much trouble, ‘seems now to be whether the property of this country is to belong to them or the lawful owners.’ As to how that question would eventually be answered, there was never any doubt.9
So total and far-reaching were the clearances now set in train that, by the time evictions ceased, no more than fourteen of Glen Shiel’s thousands and thousands of acres remained in the occupancy of descendants of the people living here at the point when Samuel Johnson and James Boswell had put in their brief appearance. Hundreds of people, one Kintail man commented in the 1840s, had been ‘entirely swept away’. Many had left, in altogether desperate circumstances, for North America. Others had been ‘crowded’, as a further account puts it, on to minuscule crofts or smallholdings by the shores of Loch Duich – the fiord-like Atlantic inlet you come upon when driving onwards from Glen Shiel to the Skye Bridge. Since it was invariably characteristic of nineteenth-century crofts that they were utterly incapable of providing their occupants with anything approximating to a worthwhile livelihood, the Loch Duich people – excluded now from the much more spacious lands their ancestors had worked for generations – were ‘dependent for subsistence upon the laborious and uncertain pursuit of the herring fishery’. As for Achadh nan Seileach, where Johnson and Boswell had sat drinking milk in the September sun, its pastures had been given over completely to sheep and its ruins quarried for the materials that Glen Shiel’s south country shepherds used to construct the many field boundary walls still to be seen by visitors to this part of the Highlands.10
Among the many people who emigrated from Kintail to North America in the 1830s was a man called Neil MacLennan. Neil’s son, Duncan, became a tailor in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Duncan’s son, named Sam, was a doctor in the Cape Breton mining township of Glace Bay. And Sam’s son, Hugh, developed into one of twentieth-century Canada’s more challenging, more thoughtful novelists. This latest MacLennan was to make his fiction the vehicle for several determined efforts to delineate a Canadian national identity. But he was also to remain intensely conscious of his Scottish Highland origins:
Whenever I stop to think about it, the knowledge that I am three-quarters Scotch, and Highland at that, seems like a kind of doom from which I am too Scotch even to think of praying for deliverance. I can thank my father for this last-ditch neurosis. He was entirely Scotch; he was a living specimen of a most curious heritage. In spite of his medical knowledge, which was large; in spite of his quick, nervous vitality and tireless energy, he was never able to lay to rest the beasties which went bump in his mind at three o’clock in the morning. It mattered nothing that he was a third-generation Canadian who had never seen the Highlands before he visited them on leave in the First World War. He never needed to go there to understand whence he came or what he was. He was neither a Scot nor was he Scottish; he never used these genteel appellations which now are supposed to be de rigeur. He was simply Scotch. All the perplexity and doggedness of the race was in him, its loneliness, tenderness and affection, its deceptive vitality, its quick flashes of violence, its dog-whistle sensitivity to sounds to which Anglo-Saxons are stone deaf, its incapacity to tell its heart to foreigners save in terms which foreigners do not comprehend, its resigned indifference to whether they comprehend or not. It’s not easy being Scotch, he told me once. To which, I suppose, another Scotchman might say, It wasn’t meant to be.11
Hugh MacLennan made his own journey to Kintail in the 1950s, driving north across the English-Scottish border in an aged Vauxhall:
Next day I was in the true north of Scotland among the sheep, the heather, the whin, the mists, and the homes of the vanished races. Such sweeps of emptiness I never saw in Canada before I went to the Mackenzie River later in the same summer. But this Highland emptiness, only a few hundred miles above the massed population of England, is a far different thing from the emptiness of our own North West Territories. Above the sixtieth parallel in Canada you feel that nobody but God has ever been there before you, but in a deserted Highland glen you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone.12
So accustomed are we to the notion that the literary and artistic imagination should warm automatically to the Scottish Highlands, should find places like Kintail a source of aesthetic – even spiritual – satisfaction, that it comes as something of a shock to discover that Hugh MacLennan reacted very differently to what he saw of Glen Shiel; that he was glad, in the end, to be out of Scotland; pleased to be on his way back to Canada. What, then, differentiated this North American novelist from all those other visitors who, for the last two hundred years or more, have revelled in the undoubted beauty of our Highland landscape? The answer, of course, is to be found in Glen Shiel’s history and in Hugh MacLennan’s deep awareness of it. His response to Kintail was conditioned by his knowledge of what clearance and eviction had done both to his family and to the community of which his family had been part. Although this twentieth-century writer had been raised in a home which was separated from the Highlands by several thousand miles, as well as by three generations, he harboured what one critic has called ‘a sense of belonging to a wronged people’. In Hugh MacLennan’s novels this bitter inheritance is partly assuaged by the way in which the Highland-descended North Americans among his characters find a forward-looking basis for their lives in the task of constructing a new nation. But for all his pride in Canada, for all his feeling for that country, there was enough of the Highlander in Hugh MacLennan to make the actuality of a depopulated Scottish glen a desperately hard thing to accept.13
How to make clear the way in which our people’s historical experiences continue to shape Highland sensibilities? How to explain the complex of emotions which are bound up with those landscapes where, as Hugh MacLennan wrote, you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone? Historians of the Highlands, and there have been a lot of them of late, are seldom very good on issues of this kind. Emotions of the sort revealed by Hugh MacLennan seem to make historians terribly uneasy. This is because historians, most academically-inclined historians of Scotland anyway, tend to eschew both folk tradition and imaginative literature as guides to understanding. Such historians like to focus on what seems self-evidently ‘factual’; preferring to deal with the economic circumstances surrounding the Highland Clearances rather than with the not-so-measurable impact of these events on the attitudes and on the outlook of the people who were most affected by them.
The twentieth-century Highland poet and novelist, Iain Crichton Smith, translator of Duncan MacIntyre’s great poem on Ben Dorain, was once asked for his opinions about historians and history. He replied:
What many people do, if they are not inside a particular culture, is choose certain facts out of an enormous number of facts and put them together in a historical fashion. And Scotland has suffered from bad history of this kind. But what I like to think about is a kind of history lived on the bone rather than an intellectual creation, which is why I think that poets and writers are better historians, often, than the professionals.14
Crichton Smith went on to acknowledge that we need to have historians as well as makers of poetry and fiction. And so we do. But his underlying point, that works of literature can be better guides to the past than works of history, is one which – as indicated earlier – is particularly valid in relation to this book’s central theme. The way people feel about our Highland landscape, about our natural environment, depends very largely on the mental baggage, so to speak, that they haul around with them. A great deal of that baggage, as can be seen from Hugh MacLennan’s response to Glen Shiel, has been carried forward from the past. But the particular past from which it derives, whether in MacLennan’s case or in the case of Highlanders more generally, is one better accessed by way of poems, songs and novels than by way of histories of the sort that Crichton Smith had in mind – those laborious exercises in ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’ which, though wholly meritorious in their own terms, fail miserably to explain passions of the sort so strongly evident in Hugh MacLennan’s comments on Kintail.
The origins of the manifestly gaping chasm between ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ interpretations of the Highland past can perhaps be traced, as Iain Crichton Smith suggested, to the fact that very little Highland history has been written from ‘inside’ the culture with which it purports to deal. The academic perspective on the Scottish Highlands is typically external. Being external, and making a positive virtue of a neutrality which verges at times on the amoral, most academic histories of the clearances seem either uncomprehending or insulting to Highlanders whose feelings about these events are fuelled principally by folk memory and by the various cultural expressions to which folk memory has given rise. There is nothing that is at all inevitable about this state of affairs, however. It is a function of the strangely unambitious character of most recent renderings of the Highland past. It is a function, in particular, of an apparent reluctance on the part of Scottish academics to take on board the findings of those other scholars who have attempted to get to grips with what has been done to the numerous societies elsewhere on our planet which have more recently undergone experiences similar to those which once affected the northern half of Scotland. Turn, even for a moment, to books of the type produced by a commentator like Edward Said – a man whose work dealt enormously illuminatingly with what is involved in the reconstruction of personal and group identity in colonialism’s psychologically shattering aftermath – and you become immediately aware of just how impoverished, by comparison, is much of our approach to Highland history. Said aspired to move from an analysis of events to an understanding of people’s intellectual and emotional responses to events. And his principal guide to such responses was imaginative literature.15
The academic historians of the Highlands, in stark contrast, generally disregard the insights which such literature can provide. One of the most impressive and productive of such historians mentions the ‘theatrical works’ and other literary forms which have been inspired by the Highland Clearances only as a prelude to dismissing such manifestations of human creativity as irrelevant to his concerns. All ‘popular’ interpretations of the Highland past are similarly cast into outer darkness by this same authority to whom ‘academic writing’ is invariably a better guide to a community’s historical experiences than such a community’s own collective memory as expressed in song or story.16
By such means is the university-based study of Highland history disconnected from what is actually going on in the Highlands, where, on those numerous occasions when ‘popular’ conceptions of Highland history impact on contemporary decisions about nature conservation and associated matters, it is rather less than helpful simply to assert that Highlanders have got their own past badly wrong. So much more constructive is analysis of the sort in which Edward Said so fascinatingly specialised; analysis which, far from leaving such matters out of account, actually tries to make sense of what the generality of people feel to be significant about the means by which their communities came to be as they now are; analysis which consequently gives due weight to all the varied ways in which human beings have reacted to the destruction of community and culture in those parts of the world subjected, in the course of the last two centuries, to imperial conquest and subordination of one kind or another.
To look to former colonies for enlightenment on the Highlands, it should be stressed at this point, is not to say that northern Scotland was colonised in the way that Africa, for example, was colonised. Such was clearly not the case. It is, all the same, a highly suggestive circumstance that the British variety of imperialism, even the very vocabulary of this country’s particular brand of racism and colonialism, owes a good deal of its early development to the political requirement to rationalise and justify central authority’s efforts to impose its will on Scottish Highlanders – or, if not on Highlanders, then on the Irish with whom, as this book will several times repeat, Highlanders have long had much in common.
Underpinning the destruction of the largely self-governing Lordship of the Isles in the 1490s; underpinning the Statutes of Iona, the Massacre of Glencoe and other seventeenth-century attempts to break the Highland clans; underpinning the final assault on clanship in Culloden’s brutal aftermath; underpinning every effort to subvert and eliminate those features of their traditional society which gave Highlanders some degree of independence and autonomy: underpinning all of this was a profound conviction, held in Edinburgh every bit as much as it was held in London, that the people thus being brought to heel were an irredeemably inferior set of human beings.
In one of those ‘theatrical works’ which the historian quoted earlier was so anxious to disparage, John McGrath’s 1973 musical, The Cheviot,the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, Lord Cask and Lady Phosphate, owners of one of the many sporting estates which have flourished in the Highlands since the nineteenth century, point their shotguns in the direction of their tenantry and sing:
You had better learn your place,
You’re a low and servile race.17
Similarly disparaging refrains have echoed around the north of Scotland for at least six hundred years – ever since the Kincardineshire chronicler, John of Fordoun, writing in the 1380s, set out to differentiate ‘domesticated and cultured’ Lowlanders like himself from the ‘wild and untamed’ folk who lived beyond the Highland Line.18
Fourteenth-century Highlanders were thought merely ‘wicked’ by their critics. Sixteenth-century Highlanders were ‘barbarous’ as well. And much stronger language would soon follow. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, Highlanders are routinely described in the records of successive Scottish governments as ‘void of all religion and humanity’; ‘given . . . over to all kinds of barbarity’; ‘void of all fear and knowledge of God’; collectively responsible, in one especially comprehensive indictment, for ‘most detestable, damnable and odious murders, fires, ravishing of women, witchcraft and depredations’. Such labels – as is, of course, their purpose – serve quickly to dehumanise those to whom they are attached. And such dehumanisation, in its turn, serves to render acceptable, even admirable, oppression of a kind that otherwise would tend to be regarded as quite wrong.19
The MacDonalds of Glencoe, to the politicians who ordered their slaughter, were a ‘mere sept of thieves’ – people not to be seen as inhabiting the same moral and ethical universe as their persecutors. Those other Highlanders who rallied to the Jacobite cause in 1745 seemed, to most southerners, to be similarly beyond the pale. They were ‘wild and barbarous beyond expression’, ‘uncouth savages’, ‘robbers’, ‘hungry wolves’, ‘bare-arsed banditti’; a people who, as was remarked by one cabinet minister, the Duke of Newcastle, deserved only to be ‘absolutely reduced’. And absolutely reduced Highlanders duly were – their failure to qualify as ‘civilised’ rendering them liable to treatment of a kind that eighteenth-century Britain would never have considered meting out to any of the several European nations with which the country was so frequently at war.20
His troops, one English officer reported from the north of Scotland in the summer following Culloden, were ‘carrying fire and destruction as they passed, shooting the vagrant Highlanders that they meet in the mountains and driving off their cattle’. This was to treat Highlanders as Afghans and Zulus would one day be treated. It was to do so with the same ostensible justification – that justification, being, of course, the lowly racial status which all such peoples were allocated by their imperial masters. Nor did such stereotyping cease, in the Highland case, with the elimination of the military threat which the clans had long posed to their southern neighbours. By the later part of the eighteenth century, when the Highlands had become peaceable enough to be attracting their first tourists in the shape of travellers like Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, racist characterisations of the region’s indigenous inhabitants remained as common as ever. ‘The Lowlanders,’ commented one Scottish writer, John Pinkerton, in the 1780s, ‘are acute, industrious, sensible, erect, free; the Highlanders indolent, slavish, strangers to industry.’ This distinction was to be attributed, Pinkerton thought, to the ‘Gothic’ origin of Lowland Scots – Goths, or Saxons, being of self-evidently finer stock than the Celts from whom Highlanders, like the Highland population’s Irish counterparts, were unfortunate enough to be descended.21
The ‘notions of racial superiority’ which were thus developed by the United Kingdom’s ruling orders in the course of their dealings with Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, one historian of empire has remarked, ‘would easily be adapted to justify the enslavement of Africans and the conquest of the Indian subcontinent’. Nor was this a wholly one-way traffic. Just as racist gibes which were originally hurled against Celts could afterwards be directed against Africans and Asians, so new and improved taunts were increasingly imported from overseas colonies to be targeted on Celts. Such practices are particularly evident, as far as the Highlands are concerned, in the career of Patrick Sellar – the sheep farmer and estate manager who was almost singlehandedly responsible for the enforced removal of many hundreds, possibly thousands, of people from Strathnaver, the Strath of Kildonan and other parts of Sutherland in the course of the nineteenth century’s second decade. To Sellar, Sutherland people seemed merely ‘a parcel of beggars with no stock but cunning and laziness’. Like Highlanders generally, they were ‘barbarous hordes’ and ‘aborigines’ whose position ‘in relation to the enlightened nations of Europe’ was ‘not very different from that betwixt the American colonists and the aborigines of that country’.22
In light of Sellar’s thinking, so redolent of the colonialist mentality, it becomes easier to see the relevance to Highland circumstances of Edward Said’s musings on the nature of imperialism. Said, whose Palestinian origins were evident in his strong sympathy for peoples who have undergone external domination, wrote thus about the general phenomenon of which the fate of the Scottish Highlands was merely one very local aspect:
Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and peoples require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperialism is plentiful with such words and concepts as ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’, ‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ‘expansion’ and ‘authority’.23
These remarks have obvious resonances in a Highland context. So do the very similar observations made in the 1930s by an Irish writer, Daniel Corkery, whose primary target, needless to say, was the British ruling-class or ‘ascendancy’ which had so long governed his country:
The first article in an ascendancy’s creed is, and always has been, that the natives are a lesser breed and that everything that is theirs (except their land and their gold) is therefore of little value. If they have had a language . . . it cannot have been a civilised language, cannot have been anything but a patois used by the hillmen among themselves; and as for their literature, the less said about it the better.24
This was certainly the case with regard to the Highlands. No aspect of Highland life was more consistently derided and despised, over the centuries, than the Gaelic language which Highlanders shared with the Irish and which the Scottish and English politicians who aspired to rule both Ireland and the Highlands clearly considered, quite correctly, to be a serious obstacle in the way of their plans for these places.
In 1616, when legislating for the establishment of schools in Highland parishes, the Scottish Privy Council took the opportunity to underline its position on the language issue. The ‘English tongue’ was everywhere to be the medium of instruction, the privy council insisted. Gaelic, being ‘one of the chief and principal causes of the . . . barbarity and incivility’ for which the Highlands were now a byword, was to be ‘abolished and removed’. Those provisions, like lots of others couched in similar vein, were most seriously intended. Gaelic was ideally to be made extinct. And if the language has survived into modern times, as somehow it has contrived to do, this is certainly not due to any lack of commitment to its extirpation on the part of the various external authorities to whom Highlanders have been subject. The Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, an educational organisation which took over in the eighteenth century where the Scottish Privy Council had earlier left off, was committed to ‘rooting out’ Gaelic. One wholly representative observer of the early nineteenth-century Highland scene considered it ‘vain to attempt to change the current of thought and action in the Highlands while the language is allowed to remain’. And there was nothing that was unique about the Kintyre teacher who commented a little wanly in the 1880s: ‘I do wish Gaelic were an unknown language.’25
Officially inspired hostility towards those things which were distinctively Highland did not stop, of course, with attacks on Gaelic. ‘Since one of the purposes of colonial education,’ Edward Said remarked of the policies pursued by the French and the British in their many overseas territories, ‘was to promote the history of France or Britain, the same education also demoted the native history.’ That the Highland experience was virtually identical is implicit in many comments made by Highlanders about their schooling. An especially memorable illustration of the point – and one that is particularly relevant to this book’s purposes – can be found in a semi-autobiographical novel, Highland River. The novel’s author was Neil Gunn. Gunn’s subject was a north of Scotland childhood at the beginning of the twentieth century. And what is striking about that childhood is the contrast Gunn makes between the different types of knowledge available to Kenn, his novel’s hero.26
From his family, from his community and from his natural surroundings, especially from the river of the novel’s title, Kenn absorbs much that Gunn presents as rich and real and meaningful. The ambience of Kenn’s school, in contrast, is both alien and threatening. There ‘the master was a roaring lion in a cage’:
Nor had any of the things the master taught any joy in them. History and geography were both taken that day. The history was concerned with English kings and queens and the dates of battles. There had been Plantaganets. Now there were the Tudors. That Henry VIII had six wives did not really interest the children. They would have gaped in the same way if he had had six hundred. What was important was the exact number six. A near shot, such as seven or eight, would have made the lion roar.
The geography was an even worse ordeal because, as it happened, they were dealing with that portion of the British Isles that contains a great number of towns, each with its ‘most important industry’. Some of the towns, like Birmingham or Nottingham, had several industries. Kenn’s memory was his weakest part and he was capable of transposing small arms and lace with an air of innocent calm.
He got thrashed twice.27
In such a setting, as Said and others point out, to attempt to recover and reinterpret sympathetically the much-derided ‘native’ past is to engage in an act of protest, even of rebellion. So it was in African and Asian colonies where the beginnings of the independence struggle were necessarily bound up with efforts to rehabilitate those cultures and histories which the imperialist schools had ignored or suppressed. So it was in Ireland where the intellectual origins both of Sinn Fein and of the Easter Rising – the one a party seeking political autonomy and the other an armed insurrection which helped secure eventual self-government – are to be found in that country’s growing interest, from the later nineteenth century onwards, in its ancient Gaelic heritage.
Irish developments had their parallels in Scotland, especially northern Scotland. John Murdoch, a Highland land reformer who knew Ireland well and who kept in close touch with a number of leading Irish nationalists, made this comment to a royal commission which was established in 1883 to look into the causes of crofting discontents:
The language and lore of the Highlanders being treated with despite has tended to crush their self-respect and to repress that self-reliance without which no people can advance. When a man was convinced that his language was a barbarism, his lore as filthy rags, and that the only good thing about him – his land – was, because of his general worthlessness, to go to a man of another race, what remained . . . that he should fight for?28
It thus seemed obvious to John Murdoch – just as it gradually came to seem obvious to those men and women who would one day rid Africa and Asia of their colonial regimes – that any set of people, if they were to be ‘prosperous, comfortable and independent’, must ‘respect themselves’ and ‘must set full value on what belongs to them’. The state schools established in the Highlands and Islands in the wake of the Scottish Education Act of 1872, in Murdoch’s opinion, were of no help in this connection. It was bad enough that they were ‘imparting instruction in a foreign language’. It was still more deplorable that, as a result of their neglecting both Gaelic and the cultural heritage to which Gaelic gave access, these same schools were ‘inspiring’ Highland children ‘with respect and love for any place but their own’. What was needed, Murdoch thought, was something entirely different. Highlanders had to be made to feel that ‘they themselves, and the things which belong to them, are of greater value in the world than they have for some time been taught to regard them’.29
At the end of the twentieth century, when Gaelic-medium primary schools are proliferating across the Scottish Highlands, this seems comparatively uncontroversial. But such was not at all the case in Murdoch’s lifetime. Then the Irish, with whom this Highland radical so warmly identified, were routinely depicted as apes and chimpanzees in a British pictorial press – which had eagerly gulped down, if it had not fully digested, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Then newspaper editorials dealt habitually in the notion that Highlanders, just like the Irish, were a less-developed species whose many difficulties were to be attributed, for the most part, to their own innate failings. Then the idea that Gaelic-speakers possessed a worthwhile history was one that, from a southern perspective, seemed very little short of an absurdity.30
Change was a long time coming. The school Neil Gunn depicts in Highland River was probably not untypical of the early twentieth-century Highlands. It was to have its mid-twentieth-century counterparts also. In a poem significantly entitled Oideachadh Ceart or A Proper Schooling, the Skye-born poet, Aonghas MacNeacail, precisely delineates – and angrily protests against – the way in which the Scottish education system, even in the 1950s, made a clear distinction between his own people’s past and the other, allegedly more important, pasts which dominated his school’s history syllabus:
cha b’ eachdraidh ach cuimhne
an latha bhaist ciorstaidh am bàillidh
le mun à poit a thug i bhon chùlaist
dhan choinneamh am bràighe nan crait
gun bhraon a dhòrtadh
cha b’ eachdraidh ach cuimhne
an latha sheas gaisgich a’ bhaile
bruach abhainn a’ ghlinne
an aghaidh feachd ghruamach an t-siorraidh
a thàinig air mhàrsail, ’s a thill gun òrdag a bhogadh,
le sanasan fuadaich nan dùirn
it wasn’t history but memory
the day kirsty baptised the factor
with piss from a pot she took from the backroom
to the meeting up in the brae of the croft
not spilling a single drop
it wasn’t history but memory
the day the township’s warriors stood
on the banks of the glen river
confronting the sheriff’s surly troops
who marched that far, then returned without dipping a toe,
clutching their wads of eviction orders31
Aonghas MacNeacail’s ‘memories’ concern, as it happens, the land agitation which John Murdoch did so much to promote – that protracted battle for security of tenure which, when it was finally won by crofters in 1886, brought clearance and eviction to an end. These were momentous times in the Highlands. And MacNeacail – who has written elsewhere that it took him ‘many years . . . to put together fragments of the myth and lore which underlay my language and my being’ – is here explicitly seeking to incorporate into ‘history’ his own Skye community’s collective experience of a crofting campaign which was decisively and permanently to curtail the power of landlords. That campaign, from Aonghas MacNeacail’s standpoint, is every bit as important a part of the past as the English history forced on Kenn in Highland River. Indeed it is much more important. For if today’s Highlanders are made fully aware of what was accomplished by their ancestors, so MacNeacail implies, then today’s Highlanders will be more readily persuaded to assert themselves politically on their own account.32
MacNeacail’s ambition thus ‘to shape a weapon’ from the Highland past is shared by another modern poet, Angus Peter Campbell from South Uist. Campbell, reflecting in adult life on a schoolroom experience which must have closely paralleled the humiliation endured by Neil Gunn’s Kenn, wishes he had then understood what he now understands about his people’s history:
and oh that I would have known
of Columba and Alasdair MacColla
or screamed of the MacMhuirichs . . .
but all I knew
was that my Gaelic father was only a joiner
and that my Gaelic mother scrubbed floors
in a polished English world.33
Columba, MacColla and the MacMhuirichs – the first, the great sixth-century churchman known to Gaels as Colum Cille, the second a seventeenth-century general who fought alongside the Marquis of Montrose, the third the bardic family who served the medieval Lords of the Isles – are here called forth to give the lie to the idea that both Gaelic and the folk who speak it are, in some inescapable way, unworthy. What is being resisted, then, is a process which theorists of colonial revolution, most notably Frantz Fanon, have dubbed inferiorisation. This process – which Fanon describes in terms which are very close to those employed by both John Murdoch and Neil Gunn – belittles practically everything about a colonised people. Not just their language, but their entire culture, their music, their traditions – all those things, in short, which render them distinctive – are scorned, derided, denigrated. The colonised community’s sense of identity is thus diminished. And those individuals who together constitute that same community – the African in his school just like Kenn, or Neil Gunn, in his – have their self-esteem diminished, their self-confidence eroded.34
Inferiorisation triumphs completely, of course, when the subjects of colonial rule begin actually to believe its endlessly repeated insistence on their intrinsic incapacity; when it is taken for granted, by the subject people as well as by those who rule over them, that a colonising country’s culture, language and general ethos are indeed superior to those of the society which has been colonised. Frantz Fanon, a Caribbean psychologist who participated in the Algerian war of independence, would have recognised just such acceptance of their own subordinate status in those Highlanders who, over the years, have condemned and resisted the emergence of Gaelic-medium schools and the beginnings of television broadcasting in Gaelic. But Fanon would have recognised also what it is that has impelled poets like Campbell and MacNeacail to reach back into their people’s history for the means to combat such defeatism. ‘The passion with which contemporary Arab writers remind their people of the great pages of their history,’ Frantz Fanon comments, ‘is a reply to the lies told by the occupying power.’ Substitute ‘Highlander’ or ‘Gael’ for ‘Arab’, and that sentence, set down by Fanon in the 1960s, goes some considerable distance to explaining why the more mature Angus Peter Campbell should so earnestly wish that his younger self had been in a position to ‘scream of the MacMhuirichs’.35
Fanon accepts that a knowledge of long-vanquished societies can very readily be dismissed as being of no practical utility today. To those who make such points, however, he makes this reply:
I am ready to concede that on the plain of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilisation does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today. I admit that all the proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilisation will not change the fact that today the Songhais are underfed and illiterate, thrown between sky and water, with empty heads and empty eyes. But . . . this passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era finds its legitimate reason in the anxiety shared by native intellectuals to shrink away from that Western culture in which they all risk being swamped. Because they realise they are in danger of losing their lives and thus becoming lost to their people, these men, hot-headed and with anger in their hearts, relentlessly determine to renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life of their people.
Let us go farther. Perhaps this passionate research and this anger are kept up or at least directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others. I have said that I have decided to go farther. Perhaps unconsciously, the native intellectuals, since they could not stand wonderstruck before the history of today’s barbarity, decided to go back farther and to delve deeper down; and, let us make no mistake, it was with the greatest delight that they discovered there was nothing to be ashamed of in the past, but rather dignity, glory and solemnity.36
These passages were written with the Third World very much in mind. But they have their Highland applications also. Just as colonial revolutionaries were made more steadfast in their purposes by finding that their supposedly worthless past was characterised, after all, by dignity, glory and solemnity, so Highlanders who have learned of Columba and Alasdair Mac Colla – Highlanders who, as Angus Peter Campbell puts it, can scream of the MacMhuirichs – are arguably much more likely to possess both the motivation and the self-confidence they will need if they are to put right the many things which, over the last two centuries, have gone so badly wrong in Highland Scotland. Not least among the matters urgently requiring such attention, so this book claims at all events, is the tripartite relationship between Highlanders, their natural surroundings and the environmental movement.
Environment and landscape have featured only obliquely in the course of this excursion from Glen Shiel and Achadh nan Seileach – by way of the writings of Hugh MacLennan, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon – into contemporary Highland literature. But one or two of the difficulties in the way of getting an agreed environmental strategy for the Highlands have become a little clearer all the same. Highland landscapes, it has been demonstrated, mean very different things to different people. The unpopulated character of these landscapes, it has been shown, are every bit as symbolic of the eradication of human communities as they are suggestive of wild nature. And the elimination of humanity from so much of the Highlands, it has been stressed, has been merely the most dramatic manifestation of exploitative processes which have also subverted an entire culture. Already it begins to be apparent why Highlanders can be so easily aggravated by those environmentalists who, knowing little of Highland history, tend to see in localities such as Achadh nan Seileach nothing more than ‘unspoiled’ country of a sort that ought to be kept always in an uninhabited condition.
Reflecting in 1982 on some of the problems inherent in promoting economic expansion in societies which are still experiencing traumas of the sort produced in Scotland by the clearances, the World Bank observed:
A tribal population confronted with development or modernisation often experiences loss of self-esteem; its members feel a deprivation of their sense of self-worth and a devaluation of their own identity. Loss of self-esteem may result from explicitly critical or negative evaluations of the tribal culture by the agents of change or members of the dominant society. Belittling the tribal population as ignorant, dirty or backward is common . . . Development itself may be phrased in terms that implicitly, if not explicitly, devalue the tribal culture . . . Tribal traditions and knowledge are stigmatised and simply replaced by the dominant culture. Seldom are traditional tribal values acknowledged or are attempts made to perpetuate them.37
The World Bank, for all its capitalist credentials, is there endorsing a large part of the Frantz Fanon critique of colonialism. And its strictures deserve to be taken on board by environmentalists as much as by developers. This may seem an odd comment to make in view of the fact that the World Bank – the principal source of funding, very often, for large-scale dams and other projects which have caused a lot of environmental havoc in various Asian, African and Latin American countries – has been much criticised by the international environmental movement. But environmentalists are arguably every bit as prone as Patrick Sellar’s modern counterparts to ignore or undervalue cultures and traditions which they do not fully understand. And for all that the modern Highlands are very far removed from situations of the sort the World Bank customarily addresses, the region’s history has been such, as this chapter has now emphasised sufficiently, to give the bank’s remarks some relevance to Highland circumstances. The most successful strategies for the Highlands – in the environmental sphere as well as in the developmental one – are likely to be those which are framed in such a way as to draw on the cultural traditions of the area with which they deal.
Nor need this be at all constraining. As was stressed in this book’s introduction, Gaelic culture has habitually placed an extraordinarily high value on the natural environment. It is remarkably easy, therefore, to make connections between modern environmental concerns and longstanding Highland attitudes to land, to landscape and to nature. To appreciate the full extent of what is possible, however, it is necessary to leave aside more recent history and, taking Frantz Fanon’s good advice to heart, to go far back and to delve deep. The era to which this book now turns, then, is the one to which Angus Peter Campbell refers when wishing that, as a boy, he ‘would have known of Columba’. Here, some fifteen hundred years ago, one finds the Highland equivalent of those other historical epochs which Fanon had in mind when remarking that ‘there was nothing to be ashamed of in the past, but rather dignity, glory and solemnity’. Here, too, one discovers the ultimate origins of the Scottish green consciousness with which this book began.