On the Other Side of Sorrow

The Glory of Great Hills Is Unspoiled

ON THE ISLAND side of Clachan Bridge, the enormously hump-backed structure which links Seil with the Argyll mainland, the Easdale road picks its way delicately between shallow inlets and grass-covered hills. White-painted houses are scattered all along a sheltered shoreline. And so small-scale is this landscape that the altogether wider view which opens suddenly to the west and south-west comes as something of a shock. Out there is the Atlantic Ocean. Also out there, though only visible on good days, are the Garvellachs – a set of wave-battered islets of the sort that you would expect to have been forever left to seals and seabirds.

But here and there across these strung-out scraps of land, and especially on Eileach an Naoimh, the most southerly of them, there are to be seen the remnants of human habitation – not, as at Achadh nan Seileach, the ruins of nineteenth-century homes, but structures which are far, far older. The dwellings which still stand on Eileach an Naoimh were built more than a thousand years ago. And it is no small testimony to the skill of their builders, folk who employed no mortar, that this low island’s clustered huts – their shapes reminiscent of beehives – have so successfully stood up to storms for so very many centuries.1

There is nothing that is unique about these carefully constructed shelters. If you were to make a voyage all along the length of the immensely intricate and jagged western coastlines both of Scotland and of Ireland – starting, say, at the northernmost tip of the Hebrides and finishing in County Cork or County Kerry – you would discover lots of former settlements of the Eileach an Naoimh type. You might begin with North Rona, an island so tiny and so remote that it can seldom be seen from either Lewis or Sutherland, the nearest pieces of inhabited land. You might take in some of the many other – and scarcely more accessible – fragments of rock and heather to be found in the wide sounds which separate larger islands like Skye, Mull, Jura, Islay, Harris and the Uists both from each other and from the Scottish mainland. You might visit Inishmurray in Donegal Bay or Skellig Michael, which projects, like an inverted cone, from the waters to the south-west of Valencia. And at each and every landfall you would find more buildings of the sort that have endured on the Garvellachs.

What would be your most enduring memory of such a journey? The feel and smell and sound of the sea would obviously linger in your mind. But possibly making an even more indelible impression would be those huge Atlantic skies on which there is continually played out the meteorological drama that results from weather front after weather front advancing from the ocean. Something of this drama’s character was captured by Neil Gunn in words he wrote in 1937 at the end of a trip from Skye to Eigg:

The wind became intermittent and the colours in the sea varied and fascinating. Towards the west, where the blue sky was widening, the water was living amarynth; east and south it was a leaden rolling waste. The cloud formations were of great complexity, from pure white puffs in the distant blue, airy as meadowland dreams, through swirls and wind-drawn white augers overhead, to the sombre pall that lay on Skye and the inky gloom that blotted out the south-west . . . There was a splendid exhilaration in this width and expanse, an expanse rendered all the vaster by the hazed islands and the immense stretch of the mainland Highlands now rising out of the thinning clouds far to the east and south’ard. Something here very much grander, more impressive, than any circle of horizon when no land is seen.2

It is remarkably easy, when trying to turn any such scene into words, to resort to the language of the Celtic Twilight – a literary school this book will get around in time to criticising rather harshly. Twilight authors – always more at home with shadow than with substance – were inclined to attach a mystical significance to the effects produced by light on cloud and water. In truth, all such phenomena can be explained without resorting to the supernatural. Their origins are mostly to be found in the extraordinary translucence of an atmosphere which, especially when the wind blows from the west or from the north, is almost wholly free of smoke, dust, fumes and other debris of that kind.

What Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘the inimitable brightness of the air’, then, is one of the most striking features both of the Hebrides and the adjacent mainland. Hence these lines by a Lewis-born poet, Derick Thomson:

’S iongantach gu bheil iarmailt air an t-saoghal

tha cur cho beag a bhacadh air daoine

sealtainn a-steach dhan an t-Sìorraidheachd;

chan eil feum air feallsanachd

far an dean thu chùis le do phrosbaig.

Probably there’s no other sky in the world

that makes it so easy for people

to look in on eternity;

you don’t need philosophy

when you can make do with binoculars.3

There are plenty of times in the Highlands, of course, when lowering cloud combines with rain and wind to produce zero visibility. But when the good days come along, and in the end they always do, you find yourself, if not exactly in touch with eternity, then certainly much more aware than usual of your natural surroundings – the clarity of these surroundings being all the more apparent after a spell of dull and stormy weather.

This heightening of perceptions, it seems more than probable, must have been experienced particularly strongly by those individuals who elected, at various periods in the past, to live in isolation on the remotest Hebridean islands. Such was certainly true of the naturalist and pioneering ecologist, Frank Fraser Darling, who, when he made this entry in his diary on 14 July 1938, was permanently resident on North Rona:

Enormous waves broke against the cliffs and the water was churned to white foam . . . The sound and the scene were awe-inspiring. It was the sort of sea of which people often say, ‘Nothing could survive in this terrible surf.’ So you would think, but there, close into the rocks and where the waves broke most fiercely, were our friends the great seals. They were not battling against the seas, but taking advantage of them for play . . . They were leaping to the surface, nearly a hundred of them, enjoying the deep rise and fall of the sea and the spray of the shattered waves. They were living joyfully and I, in my way rejoiced with them. The sky had become a brilliant blue, the wind was dropping and, as usually happens, the surf began to get bigger. The whiteness of it shone in the sunlight and the movement and the sound of it all were glorious.4

Delightful I think it to be in the bosom of an isle, on the peak of a rock that I might often see there the calm of the sea.

That I might see its heavy waves over the glittering ocean, as they chant a melody to their Father on their eternal course.

That I might see its smooth strand of clear headlands, no gloomy thing; that I might hear the voice of the wondrous birds, a joyful tune.

That I might hear the sound of the shallow waves against the rocks; that I might hear the cry by the graveyard, the noise of the sea.

That I might see its splendid flocks of birds over the fullwatered ocean; that I might see its mighty whales, greatest of wonders.5

The Gaelic-speaking monks who created verses of this type – and who created also so many stone cells like the one that so impressed Frank Fraser Darling on North Rona – were remarkably at home in lonely places. Their stonework survives on islands of the sort already mentioned. What does not survive are the equivalent dwellings constructed from timber in the woods where numbers of these monks also established hermitages. But whether they lived among forests or on the edge of the Atlantic, these determinedly ascetic individuals, as is readily apparent from their writings, developed what was – from a European standpoint anyway – a wholly new relationship with nature.

Western civilisation, until the eighteenth century, mostly tended to treat wild nature as something to be feared – something, ideally, to be beaten down, conquered and subdued. The Greeks, being a mountain people, had some degree of positive feeling for the hills around them. But the Romans – for all that poets like Virgil and Horace were given to idealising those pastoral and farmed countrysides which had already been domesticated by Italian agriculturalists – regarded untamed territory with a deep repugnance. Typical of the products of such thinking are those Latin verses which consider it a ‘serious defect’ – and one which ought, by implication, to be quickly set to right – that so much of the earth was ‘greedily possessed by mountains and the forests of wild beasts’.6

This adversarial approach to nature was to be reinforced, if anything, by Christianity. The Bible, as a result of its stressing humanity’s God-given right of dominion over the rest of the divine creation, encourages a dim view to be taken of any components of the natural order which manage, as it were, to maintain their independence. Such was the way, at least, in which the scriptural message was initially interpreted – not just by the Romans but also by many of the Germanic peoples who were to come to prominence in much of Western Europe, including a large part of the British Isles, in the wake of Rome’s collapse. These peoples, after all, had traditionally lived in some considerable dread of the dangers thought, by no means without reason, to lurk in still-unsettled country. That much is apparent from the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, where mountains and wooded places are invariably characterised as dismal, dark, wolf-haunted, weird and frightening. Wilderness, it is thus made clear by their earliest literature, held absolutely no appeal for England’s founding fathers. And in the case of woodland, in particular, most English people, over several hundred years, saw little reason to challenge the longstanding identification of unbridled nature with all that was menacing, fierce and disruptive. Thus the very word ‘savage’ – applied so frequently, as the preceding chapter showed, to Scottish Highlanders – had its origins in a Latin term, silva, meaning forest. To cut down trees was consequently to expand civility and culture – the prevalent state of English opinion on such issues being highlighted, as late as the seventeenth century, by a poetical dictionary which suggests that woods are most appropriately described as dreadful, uncouth, melancholy or gloomy.7

The sheer staying power of such ideas makes all the more remarkable the sentiments contained in thousand-year-old poems like the following:

May-time, fair season, perfect its aspect; blackbirds sing a full song, if there be a scanty beam of day.

Summer brings low the little stream, the swift herd makes for the water, the long hair of the heather spreads out, the weak white cotton-grass flourishes.

The harp of the wood plays melody, its music brings perfect peace; colour has settled on every hill, haze on the lake of full water.

The corncrake clacks, a strenuous bard; the high pure waterfall sings a greeting to the warm pool; rustling of rushes has come.

Light swallows dart on high . . . The hardy cuckoo sings, the speckled fish leaps . . . The glory of great hills is unspoiled.

Delightful is the season’s splendour, winter’s rough wind has gone; bright is every fertile wood, a joyful peace is summer.8

You sense in these verses something of the sheer relief with which Frank Fraser Darling, many centuries afterwards, would greet the return of spring to the particular corner of the Highlands – it was not North Rona, this time, but somewhere almost equally inaccessible – where he was trying to set up home:

The first day of May will long remain in my memory, for to begin with it was gloriously calm and mild. When you have had a long period of wind and wild weather and it is followed by a perfect day, activity seems to be frozen and all you can do is lie about and heal your battered self in the quiet of it all. The morning had brought the welcome sound of common sandpipers to the lochans, that long-continued piping which is as moving to me as any music Pan himself might make. The sun shone through the canvas of the tent in the early hours, and I lay basking in it and listening to the sandpipers before I rose. This, I thought, was spring at last, and I let my imagination play with the picture of that active little mite standing on a stone at the edge of the sunlit water, his head and beak nodding and tail flirping, and then the ecstatic, vibrant flight over the lochan with a paean of his piping.⁹

Nature’s sounds, then, were as important as its sights to Fraser Darling. So they were also to the unknown poet who first set down these lines:

Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; wild geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark torrent.

A nimble singer, the combative brown wren from the hazel bough, woodpeckers with their pied hoods in a vast host.

Fair white birds come, cranes, gulls, the sea sings to them, no mournful music; brown fowl out of the red heather.

The voice of the wind against the branchy wood, grey with cloud; cascades of the river, the swan’s song, lovely music.10

Such poems – composed originally in Gaelic – date from the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries. Their touch is sure and delicate. They indulge neither in elaborate description nor in introspective moralising. They deal sometimes in memorable images: ‘the harp of the wood plays melody’; ‘the corncrake clacks, a strenuous bard’. But there tends to be about them something of that spare simplicity which was also to be characteristic of much later Gaelic verse and which Iain Crichton Smith captured perfectly in these lines of his own:

There is no metaphor. The stone is stony . . .

The rain is rainy and the sun is sunny.

The flower is flowery and the sea is salty.¹¹

But what matters most about such early Gaelic poetry, as far as this book is concerned, is the enormously sympathetic tone which it adopts when dealing with wild nature. This, in the context of its own time and in the context of very many later centuries also, was little short of revolutionary. No wonder, then, that Kuno Meyer, one of the earliest translators of such verse into English, should have commented in 1913:

In nature poetry the Gaelic muse may vie with that of any other nation. Indeed, these poems occupy a unique position in the literature of the world. To seek out and watch and love nature, in its tiniest phenomenon as in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as to the Celt.12

Meyer, in fact, exaggerated slightly. Eastern peoples like the Chinese and the Japanese, whose Buddhist and Shinto religions emphasise the essential unity of all living things, possess a literary tradition very similar to the one that had its origins in places like Eileach an Naoimh. Among green mountains, asserts a Chinese poet of the eighth century, there is to be found ‘a heaven and earth beyond the world of men’; a place where one’s soul ‘is quiet’; a spot where ‘peach blossom follows the moving water’. In such surroundings, another eighth-century Chinese poet comments, there is both delight and spiritual satisfaction to be got from tracking ‘a stream to its fountain-head’ or simply sitting on a rock ‘to watch the clouds gather at sunset’. The Gaelic-speaking monks who were just then making very similar observations, you feel on glancing at this Chinese poetry, would have instinctively identified with sentiments like these.¹³

In the slightly more limited setting of the British Isles, or even Europe, however, Kuno Meyer was surely right to emphasise the sheer distinctiveness of the lyrics he translated. Nor is it so surprising as it might seem initially that Gaels should have been so far in advance of so much of the rest of the world in this respect. Today, when the various dialects of Gaelic are spoken by a mere handful of people on the Atlantic fringes of Scotland and Ireland, it is easy to be unaware that the language was not always the highly marginalised tongue it has now become. Because we mostly assume Gaelic to be of no very general significance, we readily overlook the fact that Gaelic-speakers, as has been commented recently by a German historian, Michael Richter, ‘developed a written culture at an earlier stage than most other European peoples’. We tend to miss the point that, though they were the work of men who inhabited isolated islands or who lived alone in forests, the Gaelic poems quoted in this chapter were not at all the products of a primitive or unsophisticated society. Although they had chosen – for a time at least – to become hermits, the men who shaped such poems belonged to communities where there had developed modes of thought and forms of expression which, if we exclude only the overarching achievements of the Greeks and the Romans, were such as to have made these communities the originators of what was, to cite Richter again, the ‘most significant European culture’ of the Christian era’s early centuries.14

This culture had its origins, of course, in Ireland. It was imported into Scotland by those Gaels – as Irish people then called themselves – who began moving from Ulster to Kintyre, Islay and adjacent localities at about the time the Roman Empire was beginning to disintegrate. Rome, though it had ruled much of mainland Britain, had never brought the Irish under its jurisdiction. But Ireland, in the early part of the fifth century, had nevertheless become Christian. And in their successful fusing of Christianity with older Celtic tradition is to be found the distinguishing feature of the civilisation which the Gaels now began to develop both in Ireland and in Scotland.

Crucial to this civilisation was a commitment to monasticism. But monasteries of the Celtic type are not to be confused with their medieval successors. They left, for instance, no great architectural monuments along the lines of those resulting from the much later abbeys of the Scottish border country. This is because the Gaels, in contrast to many other early Christians, had not inherited the temple-building traditions of more Mediterranean-orientated peoples. Their churches, just like the monastic settlements which developed around these churches, were consequently very modest. The typical place of worship was built largely of timber. Only occasionally – and mostly in those places where wood was simply unobtainable – was it constructed from stone. Always it was fairly small. And the other buildings which went up in such a church’s immediate vicinity – a refectory, a guest-house, a school perhaps and certainly a clutter of those little cells or huts inhabited by individual monks – were similarly unpretentious.15

One of the most famous and most influential of all such monasteries was the one established in the sixth century by the Ulster churchman, Colum Cille, St Columba, on the Hebridean island of Iona. Nowadays, our civilisation being so closely bound up with great cities, it is extremely hard for us to think of places like Iona as anything other than peripheral. We mostly go to such localities in search of peace and quiet, not mental stimulation. The development and interchange of new ideas we associate with towns. But in Columba’s time, and for some centuries afterwards, the monastic community which developed in Iona was one of Europe’s leading intellectual centres – a source of literacy, of learning and of several innovative strands of thought.

Iona’s steadily expanding missionary effort brought Christianity both to the Pictish realms and to the kingdom of Northumbria – the Picts being a Celtic people who then occupied most of what is now Scotland and the Northumbrians, whose territories stretched from the Forth to the Humber, being Germanic incomers who had migrated westwards from the continent. Nor were Pictland and Northumbria the limits of Iona’s influence. Gaelic-speaking monks were to bring both their faith and their scholarship to several of the continental kingdoms founded by the Roman Empire’s barbarian invaders. Thus it came about that the Carolingian Renaissance, the name given by historians to the cultural upsurge which so transformed Western Europe in the ninth century, can be attributed in no small part to men who – though they spent much of their lives at the Aachen court of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne – began their careers in monasteries of the kind Columba had created on Iona.¹⁶

A key focus of Iona’s monastic life, in Colum Cille’s time and later, was the building known as the scriptorium – a word meaning place of writing. Here both Columba himself and perhaps hundreds of his contemporaries and successors helped to turn out the intricately illuminated scriptures now considered to be one of the marvels of their age. The highly ornamented pages of these gospel books, in the opinion of a leading twentieth-century art historian, Kenneth Clark, ‘are almost the richest and most complicated pieces of abstract decoration ever produced’. And from a time some eight hundred years earlier than Clark’s there comes an equally striking tribute. It is to be found in the writings of Giraldus of Wales, a leading cleric of that period. The volume to which his passage refers was very probably the Book of Kells which is held today by Trinity College, Dublin, and which was almost certainly created, or so the current consensus has it, on Iona.17

A mightily impressed Giraldus commented:

This book contains the harmony of the four evangelists according to Jerome, where for almost every page there are different designs, distinguished by varied colours. Here you may see the face of majesty, divinely drawn, here the mystic symbols of the evangelists, each with wings, now six, now four, now two; here the eagle, there the calf, here the man, there the lion and other forms almost infinite. Look at them superficially, with an ordinary casual glance, and you would think it an erasure, not tracery. Fine craftsmanship is all about you, but you might not notice it. Look more keenly at it, however, and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies so delicate and subtle, so exact and compact, so full of knots and links, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might say all this was the work of an angel and not of man. For my part, the oftener I see the book, and the more carefully I study it, the more I am lost in ever fresh amazement.¹⁸

The Book of Kells and other equally striking versions of the scriptures, it is readily apparent to the modern eye, drew on design traditions which were common to the various Celtic peoples who were dominant in much of Western Europe prior to the rise of Rome. But these traditions, in the Iona monastery and in its sister institutions, were brought to a wholly new pitch of perfection:

They began with the barest patterns

Of design, in their minds, and then

Something converted them into artists

With an exalted lyric gift.

What this something was

No one can claim perfectly to know.

Some of them were reported as believing

In assistance from the angels.

Whatever the source, the result was some

Of the most beautiful work the world has ever seen.19

These lines were written by twentieth-century Scotland’s greatest poet, Hugh MacDiarmid. In them, as in so much of his work, he was looking for inspiration – both of the artistic and the political variety – to those Gaelic-speaking folk who, as the previous chapter demonstrated, were so widely and so persistently considered, both by Lowland Scots and by the English, to have contributed practically nothing of value to the sum of human experience. MacDiarmid, being the sort of man he was, took great pleasure in adopting a position wholly at odds with the conventional one. Scotland, he came to believe, would never find cultural purpose or salvation in anything other than its Gaelic heritage – a heritage which, MacDiarmid thought, reached back to the Book of Kells and its creators.²⁰

This book returns to Hugh MacDiarmid in due course. For the moment, it suffices to have registered the fact that Gaelic-speaking Highlanders – those ‘aborigines’ whom men like Patrick Sellar took such pleasure in evicting from their ancestral lands – could lay claim, after all, to a substantial record of achievement. Nor was that achievement confined to art and literature. The Gaels or the Scoti, as this people were habitually called in the Latin of the chroniclers who first set down their history, both created the Scottish kingdom and provided that kingdom with its monarchs. Thus it came about that Scotland, for the first few centuries of its existence, was a predominantly Gaelic-speaking country ruled by Gaelic-speaking kings. These kings, however, are not this book’s concern. The development of its arguments depends much less on great men and their doings than it does on those monastic hermits who sought spiritual salvation in places like Skellig Michael, the Garvellachs and North Rona.21

Although Christianity differs so markedly from most other world religions – particularly Buddhism and Hinduism – in the separation that it makes between humanity and nature, the first Christians, like the Jews to whose own faith Christianity owed so much, looked to the wilderness as a place where an individual might most readily be alone with God. What the Bible means by wilderness, of course, is desert of the sort which has been common in the Middle East since long before Abraham moved out of Ur. And the original role of this type of arid wasteland in processes of spiritual renewal, one suspects, had less to do with its natural charms than with the fact that it offered very little in the way of distractions from the prayer and meditation thought to be the key to self-renewal. It was to such terrain, at all events, that various Old Testament prophets habitually retreated. It was in such terrain also, no doubt, that Jesus himself once engaged in wrestling with his conscience – in the shape sometimes of the devil – for, as Matthew tells us, ‘forty days and forty nights’.²²

It is by no means surprising, therefore, that Middle Eastern Christianity – especially in Syria and Egypt in the centuries prior to these countries yielding very largely to the still newer religion of Islam – should have developed its own tradition of seeking spiritual solace in wild places. Nor is it any more surprising, given the nature of the trade routes connecting Ireland with the Mediterranean, that the idea of the wilderness retreat should eventually have been adopted so enthusiastically by some of the sterner spirits within the monastic communities which had earlier been established in localities like Iona.23

These communities, as already mentioned, were nothing if not basic in their lifestyle. But the monastic existence was positively luxurious in comparison with that now adopted by the many individual monks who, having turned their backs more or less completely on their fellow human beings, departed, either by themselves or in small groups, for the wild places which both Ireland and Scotland could so plentifully offer. ‘Labouring with their hands,’ runs a typical passage from an early account of what it meant to be a hermit in such circumstances, ‘they tilled the earth with a hoe. Rejecting all animals, they possessed not so much as one cow. And if any offered them milk or butter they received it not.’ Such solitaries, then, practised a strict self-sufficiency; subsisting largely on what they could grow themselves; supplementing the output of their little gardens with fruit, eggs, honey and other natural produce of that kind. One hermit is described as drinking only ‘pure water’, eating nothing but ‘nuts of the wood and plants of the ground’, having ‘no bed but a pillow of stone under his head and a flag[stone] under him’. Many others were every bit as scornful of comfort.²⁴

Today, in the western world anyway, the only people who choose to live in so elemental a fashion are those so-called ‘deep ecologists’ who reject even the most far-reaching variants of conventional environmentalism as involving too many compromises with a civilisation they regard as utterly beyond redemption – and who consequently tend to take themselves off to mountain and forest locations where they try to enter into something approximating to a personal relationship with nature.

Deep ecology has been celebrated thus by an American poet, Robinson Jeffers:

Civilised, crying to be human again: this will tell you how.

Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity.

Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity.

Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes

Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.25

Although no Celtic monk would have been so uncaring of his Christianity as to discern the divine – other than indirectly – in an inanimate piece of stone, there is clearly much in deep ecology that is reminiscent of the thinking of the men who once inhabited the Garvellachs. Deep ecology, for instance, advocates its own modern variant of the hermitage. ‘The more we know a specific place intimately – know its moods, seasons, changes, aspects, native creatures – the more we know our ecological selves’. So writes one deep ecologist. And if ‘soul’ or something like it were to be substituted for that sentence’s last two words, it would readily have found an audience in the ninth-century world of Gaelic-speaking solitaries like Declan:

For he was in his own dear cell which he had built for himself. It is between the wood and the sea in a narrow, secret place above the ocean-edge. A clear stream of water flows from the hill into the sea and trees encircle it beautifully . . . He dearly loved his cell in which he could be . . . alone with God.²⁶

The more one discovers about Declan and his fellows, in fact, the more they seem to have in common with the much more recent originators of contemporary environmentalism. Here, for example, is Henry David Thoreau, the New Englander who, in 1845, did so much to initiate the modern cult of wilderness by deciding to live alone in a shack which he built for himself on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts:

Sometimes in a summer morning . . . I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacks, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house.27

In their own very similarly situated woodland huts, so you gather from hints dropped in their verses, the Gaelic-speaking clerics of some eleven or twelve centuries ago were every bit as given as Thoreau to sitting quietly listening to ‘the trilling of birds’ from some nearby ‘woodland thicket’. Nor were such men content merely to commune with nature. They observed it closely also – almost, it is no very great exaggeration to remark, with the determined accuracy of a modern field naturalist. Thus the ‘nimble’ bee is described, in one early poem, as regularly making ‘a great journey in the sun’; flying long distances in search of honey; returning, at last, to join ‘his brethren in the hive’. Birds were equally closely scrutinised. You read of one monk leaving his cell specifically to watch a lark. You come across another who compares the highly territorial blackbird with an especially isolationist hermit. The blackbird’s distinctive song, this poet comments, serves the same purpose as the bell which a solitude-seeking monk takes care to keep to hand. Both are sounded with the aim of warning off approaching strangers.²⁸

It is possible to detect various literary influences in this extraordinarily early nature poetry. The men responsible for its production were as highly educated, after all, as anyone in the Europe of their time. Many of them, being widely read in Latin, would have been well acquainted with the Roman authors whose works were copied and recopied in monastery scriptoria. Others – and this may be of more significance – were very probably among those monks who first rendered into written Gaelic a substantial selection of the tales, legends and sagas which their people had previously transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Much of this material makes imaginative use of language. And the very act of transcribing it – a process which was, in itself, revolutionary in a society formerly incapable of making a permanent record of its speech – might easily have helped unleash new forms of creativity.29

But the particular poetry which emerged in places like Eileach an Naoimh, as hinted at the beginning of this chapter, very probably owed rather more to the physical circumstances in which it was conceived than it did to the various cultural and intellectual influences operating on the minds of its originators. The ‘almost impersonal clarity’ which Iain Crichton Smith discerned in this poetry, or so it seems reasonable to theorise, surely derives – in part at least – from the fact that it reflected the experiences of men who had chosen to live in wild places entirely by themselves. These men, admittedly, left no personal memoirs of how it felt to be alone with nature in a setting such as that provided by the Garvellachs. But the content of their poetry is such as to indicate that their responses to their surroundings were by no means dissimilar to those of much more recent Highland solitaries.³⁰

Few recent writers have been so merciless as Alasdair MacLean in their debunking of romantic stereotypes of what it means to be by oneself in a place battered ceaselessly – or so it seems when winter gales are at their worst – by storm and wet. There is absolutely nothing in the way of lyrical evocation of the self-sufficient existence in MacLean’s grimly unsentimental account of life on the Ardnamurchan croft he inherited in the 1970s from his father. Rather the reverse. But for all the harshness of his time there, the wide view westwards from his coastal home could occasionally impact on Alasdair MacLean with a quite startling force. One such moment occurred at the end of one of those ‘appalling’ days so common in the Highlands; a day of ‘long curtains of rain sweeping across the hillside’; a day when, towards evening, the clouds start suddenly to break:

Since I had not been out of doors at all I went to the garden gate as the first few thistledowns of darkness began to seed the air. I went to lean and to ponder and I leaned long and pondered hard. I think I added a little to my store of riches though I should be in difficulties were I asked to state exactly where the profit lay. At last I watched night take the islands, blue becoming indigo becoming velvet black, these poor terms standing for a thousand delicacies of colour, till all labelling was lost in the general anonymity of night.31

That passage, of course, tells one as much about Alasdair MacLean as it does about the landscapes, or the seascapes, he was looking out on. But it is hard to believe that his mental processes would have been quite the same had his garden gate given access to a suburban street or, for that matter, to a neatly farmed countryside of the southern variety. The same is true of Gavin Maxwell’s reaction to Isle Ornsay, just off the southern coast of Skye:

Here, it seemed to me, where the rocks and the white stone buildings were the only solid things in a limitless bubble of blue water and blue air, one might be able to live at peace again, to recover a true vision long lost by now in the lives of other humans and in the strifes of far countries; here one might set back the clock and re-enter Eden.³²

Gavin Maxwell, writing in the 1960s, was famously given to searching for spiritual solace in exactly those Highland localities where the Gaelic-speaking hermits of a thousand and more years before had tried to discover the same thing. When a student, he once wrote, he had been ‘an earnest member of the Celtic fringe, avid for tartan and twilight’. Much of this, of course, was afterwards discarded. But Maxwell remained sufficient of a mystic to make his Isle Ornsay Eden readily dismissable as just another outgrowth of romanticism run riot. It is not so simple, however, to set aside Maxwell’s conviction that total isolation can be a hugely liberating experience.33

To be bereft of social intercourse when living in a busy town or city, Gavin Maxwell conceded, can be profoundly depressing:

But to be quite alone where there are no other human beings is sharply exhilarating; it is as though some pressure has suddenly been lifted, allowing an intense awareness of one’s surroundings, a sharpening of the senses and an intimate recognition of the teeming sub-human life around one.³⁴

Both his books and the films which were based on them made Gavin Maxwell’s name familiar to millions. The authors of the eighth- and ninth-century Gaelic poems featured in this chapter will forever be anonymous – their individual identities being now beyond recovery. But so striking is the extent to which Maxwell and his hermit predecessors share a common attitude both to wild country of the Highland type and to the creatures which inhabit all such country that it seems unnecessarily perverse to deny the possibility – already raised in relation both to deep ecology and to a nineteenth-century environmentalist like Thoreau – of the Gaelic-speaking world having long ago anticipated modes of thought which we mostly categorise as relatively recent.

The way in which the Celtic Church’s hermits identified with birds, with mammals, even with insects, is especially indicative of their ability to shake off the constraints of their own time. Again the earliest Gaelic poetry makes the point. ‘They lived so much among the wild creatures,’ it was noted of this poetry’s authors by one of the first modern commentators on their work, ‘that they became almost one with them, almost own brother to them, as it were hardly conscious that there was any distinction of genus.’ To accord such recognition to animals is highly unusual even today. Hence the fascination engendered by the manner in which Gavin Maxwell was prepared to share his life with otters. And in the past, of course, such a breaking down of the barriers between species was infinitely more exceptional – animals being generally regarded, by our western civilisation at any rate, as having no status beyond that bestowed on them by their biblically-ordained function of helping to meet humanity’s needs for food, for furs, for leather and for other materials of that sort.35

To one of Protestant Christianity’s principal founders, John Calvin, a man whose doctrines were destined to come to prominence in the Highlands, it seemed beyond argument that ‘the end for which all things were created was that none of the conveniences and necessaries of life might be wanting to man’. And Calvin’s Scottish disciples, well into the twentieth century, were still insisting that ‘the world exists for our sakes and not for its own’. The Celtic Church, however, held an altogether less utilitarian, less exploitative, view of nature. Remarking that the weather of 917 had been so bad as to cause much ‘mortality of cattle’, one Gaelic-speaking chronicler of that remote period takes care to add – with an evident sense of regret – that ‘the sound of a blackbird or thrush was scarcely heard that year’. And this concern for wildlife is reflected still more strongly in the ‘lives’, or biographies, which Celtic monks compiled by way of honouring their church’s saints. Thus Columba is said to have cared for an injured crane. Comgall is trusted by the swans which come to him when he calls. Ciaran makes friends with a fox and a badger. Maelanfaid is reported never to have killed ‘any animal little or big’. And Moling, we learn, ‘nurtured animals both wild and tame in honour of their Creator’.³⁶

Consider, for a moment, Frank Fraser Darling’s account of an early summer’s morning on a Hebridean island:

I am lying in sunlight by lapping water, where bright green blades of flags come through the sodden ground at the water’s edge. Here is a tiny rowan tree in leaf, making a continual change of pattern against the sky as the breeze crosses its leaves. Bracken is uncurling all around me and I can see the blue carpet and smell the sweet nostalgic scent of the blue-bells . . . A brilliantly coloured fly hovers before the bells of a flower and settles on a stalk. I am struck by its iridescence in the sunlight.37

The saints of the Columban Church, or so it seems reasonable to deduce from what has been demonstrated of their outlook, could readily have written something very similar. So, too, could the nameless ninth-century monk who – while getting on with his copying on a summer’s morning of the kind, no doubt, described by Fraser Darling – paused long enough to note in Gaelic beside his Latin text: ‘Pleasant to me is the glittering of the sun today upon these margins.’ One senses even in such casual comments – and others could be cited – something of the sheer delight which the men who made them clearly took in natural phenomena.³⁸

Nothing that has been said so far, it is important to get straight at this stage, proves the existence of a uniquely caring or protective attitude towards the natural environment on the part of the Gaelic-speaking society which began to be established in the Highlands during the fifth and sixth centuries. The nowadays common belief that pre-industrial communities lived totally in harmony with their surroundings is one that probably owes more to our guilty feelings about the undoubted damage which we are presently inflicting on the earth than it does to the way our remoter ancestors actually behaved. Their impact on nature was certainly a lot less than ours. But this might well have been due principally to their having had no access to technologies of the kind required to produce environmental disasters of the sort with which we have become all too familiar. The relative lack of such disasters in earlier ages is certainly not to be attributed to an instinctive ecological awareness on the part of men and women who necessarily lived close to nature. Right across the world, after all, peoples armed only with spears, bows and arrows proved perfectly capable of exterminating entire animal species. And Scotland, where humanity had been present for several millennia before the arrival of the Gaels, had undoubtedly been affected in a very fundamental way by successive generations of hunters and farmers. Even in the time of Colum Cille, then, as a later chapter will have cause to emphasise, the Highlands are not to be imagined as a pristine wilderness. Nor should every Highlander of that period be presumed to have shared beliefs of the kind that took some men to the Garvellachs.39

To be a churchman in the Gaelic-speaking world of the eighth century, say, was as much to be in a minority as to be a churchman today. To be a hermit of the Eileach an Naoimh sort – and the bulk of the early poetry in which this chapter deals was almost certainly composed by just such hermits – was to be in an altogether smaller minority still. It is a fair assumption, therefore, that an average member of the society in which there first began to emerge something approximating to a Scottish green consciousness was no more likely to have espoused that green consciousness than the typical twentieth-century Scot is likely to be intellectually in thrall to thinking of the kind associated with contemporary deep ecologists. This is not to say, however, that modern environmentalists – and especially those with a particular interest in the Highlands – have nothing to learn from the more secular, more mundane, concerns of the civilisation from which the Garvelloch hermits so steadfastly turned aside.

This civilisation’s basic unit was the tuath. Perhaps as close an approximation as has ever existed – in the British Isles at any rate – to the small, self-governing and largely self-contained community which some ecologists and environmentalists nowadays propound as the ideal alternative to our industrial society, the tuath, although ruled by a king, was not a kingdom in the commonly accepted meaning of that word. It was seldom more than a few hundred square miles in extent. It consisted of only a few thousand people. And it contained neither towns nor cities – the Gaelic-speaking world being, in its origins, entirely rural.40

While the ‘bioregional’ social structures postulated by green political theory might approximate in scale to the tuath, and while their economies might be similarly agrarian, few modern environmentalists would take kindly to the way the tuath actually operated. Although its king – just like the clan chief of much later times – was by no means all-powerful, the tuath was neither democratic nor egalitarian. It was, on the contrary, aristocratic, hierarchical and founded very largely on those kinship principles which were to remain the key social determinant in the Highlands until the old order was finally destroyed in the eighteenth century. The tuath, then, was organised – just like the clan of subsequent centuries – in such a way as to facilitate its mobilisation in times of war. Its king was also its military commander. Its higher ranking nobles, many of whom were closely related both to their king and to each other, were its senior officers. Its freemen-farmers were its NCOs. Its lower orders were the equivalent of a modern army’s private soldiers. The latter, some of whom were every bit as lacking in status as the serfs who were to constitute feudalism’s labouring class, consequently had far fewer rights than the warrior caste who were their rulers. But the tuath, despite its many inequalities, was no straightforward tyranny. Its leading men, including its kings, were subject to laws which were already ancient when they began to acquire a written Gaelic form during the seventh and eighth centuries. The resulting law tracts, as is to be expected of rules designed to govern the conduct of a society which looked primarily to the land and the sea for its livelihood, have a lot to say about natural resources. Their approach to such resources is one that retains relevance in the Highlands to this day.

The Gaelic law tracts, like the early Gaelic poems quoted elsewhere in this chapter, were preserved in Ireland rather than in Scotland. But the distinction between what is Irish and what is Scottish is one that made little or no sense to Gaels until comparatively recently. ‘Gaelic-speaking Scotland and Ireland,’ comments the leading authority on these matters, ‘constituted a single culture province down into the seventeenth century.’ This meant that Gaelic law, like Gaelic literature, was by no means limited to Ireland – the entire social order established in Scotland by the Gaels being modelled on Irish patterns. Organised, to begin with, in the way outlined in the preceding paragraph, that social order, even when modified substantially in later centuries, accorded considerable weight to the aes dana, meaning men of learning. This was a group whose existence is evident not only in Ireland but in those other Celtic societies whose fate it was to be submerged in the Roman Empire.41

Among the continental equivalents of the Irish aes dana were the priests called druids by the Romans. Julius Caesar, who tangled repeatedly with such druids in the course of his conquest of Gaul, left this account of them:

The druids are concerned with the worship of the gods, look after public and private sacrifice and expound religious matters. A large number of young men flock to them for training and hold them in high honour. For they have the right to decide nearly all public and private disputes and they also pass judgement and decide rewards and penalties in criminal and murder cases and in disputes concerning legacies and boundaries.⁴²

Other Roman and Greek writers make very similar comments. Most agree with Caesar that prospective druids underwent an extremely rigorous training lasting for as many as twenty years. Some, however, distinguish more carefully than Caesar between the different types of learned individual who, in the Gaelic-speaking world, were to be subsumed under the general heading of aes dana. As well as venerating druids, in Caesar’s sense of priests and law-givers, the continental Celts, according to observers like Strabo, Diodorus and Athenaeus, honoured also bards whose responsibilities clearly overlapped with those of druids proper and who are generally said to have combined the functions of poet, historian and tradition-bearer. Christianity, of course, was to deprive the druids of their priestly powers by introducing new forms of worship. But what is particularly striking about the aes dana as a whole is the way in which their more secular roles were to survive virtually unaltered from one generation to the next. Thus the Gaelic bards of the seventeenth-century Highlands performed much the same tasks as their Irish and Gaulish predecessors of some two millennia before. Continuity of this kind was commonplace. It is particularly evident, as this book often emphasises, in the relationship between Gaels and their natural environment.43

Take woodland, for example. Economically it was a vital source of raw materials in places like the Highlands for practically the whole of the period covered by this book:

Picture a specific but not untypical Highland scene of the not so distant past – a township of a few families, near the shore of a loch, on gentle ground at the foot of wooded hills. On the loch there are boats made of oak and pine, with oars and rudders of ash. Above the beach there are meadows hedged by hawthorn and holly. In the midst of the meadows are the houses with beams of oak and thatch supports of hazel, with furniture of elm and alder, and baskets of willow and bowls of elder. By the houses are rowans and there are cherry trees and blackthorns and elders for fruit. A river flows by the houses and there is a mill with a waterwheel of alder. Nearby are the osier-beds and along the banks are coppiced alders. The land rises to open pasture then to copses of hazel. Then there are oaks and huge ash trees, then pines and juniper on rocky knolls surrounded by seas of birch, rising high up the hills to the high crags where rowans grow. From those wild woods of oak and pine and elm and ash and birch and hazel and holly, the people of the township take timber and fuel, dyes, fertilisers and food . . . They relied upon the trees and their way of life allowed for and demanded the indefinite flourishing of the trees.44

Given its huge day-to-day importance, it is not at all surprising that woodland should have loomed large in Celtic culture from the very earliest times. Along with springs and rivers, which were equally essential to life, trees were commonly thought sacred by pre-Christian Celts. One Roman writer, Lucan, notes of the Gauls that ‘they worship the gods in woods without making use of temples’. Other classical authors stress the part played by oak groves, in particular, in druidic ritual. Nor was the coming of Christianity noticeably to diminish the high regard in which woods and trees were held both in Celtic Ireland and Celtic Scotland. Thus the conviction that the planting of a rowan beside a house will help ward off misfortune is one that lingers in the Highlands still. Other trees were long believed to have their own equally powerful, and equally magical, properties.⁴⁵

In view of such carryovers from the pagan past into a world which owed its literacy to its newfound Christianity, there is something symbolically appropriate about the fact that the Gaelic alphabet – A ailm, B beith, C coll, D darach, E eadha – was itself connected, for mnemonic purposes, with the names of trees. These same trees feature frequently in the literature which the new alphabet made possible:

Oak, bushy, leafy,

you are high above trees;

hazel-bush, little branchy one,

sweet-smelling with hazel nuts.

Alder, you are not spiteful,

lovely is your colour,

you are not like the prickly hawthorn

where you are in the gully.

Apple-tree, little apple-tree,

violently everyone shakes you;

rowan, little berried one,

lovely is your bloom.

Yew, little yew,

you are conspicuous in graveyards;

ivy, little ivy,

you are familiar in the dark wood.

Holly, little shelterer,

shutter against the wind;

ash, baneful,

weapon in the hand of a warrior.

Birch, smooth, blessed,

proud, melodious,

lovely is each entangled branch

at the top of your crest.46

Although that very ancient poem concentrates on the appearance of the different trees it praises, there is implicit in it the basis of a way of classifying tree species in accordance with the different uses to be made of them. Just such a classification can be found in the Gaelic law tracts where woodland – because of its importance to the workings of the tuath – is considered at some length.

Woodlands are mostly treated by the law tracts in much the same way as hill pastures. They are consequently seen as common property. It follows that the materials to be got from any woodland were available to all the inhabitants, certainly all the freemen, of the particular tuath which contained the woodland in question. On this point the law tracts are specific. They list, for instance, what it is exactly that the generality of people may take from those forests to which they have access:

The night’s supply of kindling from every wood.

The cooking material of every wood.

The nutgathering of every wood.

The framework of every vehicle, yoke and plough.

Timber of a carriage for a corpse.

The shaft fit for a spear . . .

The tapering wood of the three parts of a spancel.

The making of hoops [for barrels].

The makings of a churnstaff.47

The fact that woodlands were communal assets did not imply, however, that they were liable to uncontrolled depredation. Again the law tracts are clear on the point. Indeed it is when their authors turn to the means by which forests are to be conserved for future generations that the strictly hierarchical outlook of the tuath is seen to have been applied, as was hinted in the poem quoted earlier, to trees as well as to human beings.

The relevant passages in the law tracts list twenty-eight species of tree, shrub and plant which are then divided into four categories of seven species each – the four overall categories corresponding to degrees of social ranking in the communities where the law tracts originated. First come airig fedo, nobles of the wood, comprising trees like oak, hazel, holly, yew, ash, pine and apple. Next in line are aithig fedo, freemen or commoners of the wood, including alder, willow, hawthorn, birch, elm and wild cherry. Third and fourth in general standing are fodla fedo and losa fedo, which consist of blackthorn, aspen, juniper, bracken, bog myrtle, gorse, bramble, heather, broom and other species of that sort. Their status corresponds to that of serfs and slaves. And just as it was a lesser offence to do harm to a serf than to a nobleman, so the penalty for damaging gorse and brambles, say, was a lot less severe than that arising from the unlawful removal of an oak, an ash or a pine. Anyone who engaged in the illicit destruction of one of those superior trees risked a fine equivalent to the value of two-and-a-half milk cows. But a small amount of bracken, which was used for bedding animals, might be taken almost with impunity.48

The Gaelic law codes – which are, incidentally, the first documents of this type to be set out in any European language other than Greek or Latin – deal in cows-as-currency for the simple reason that they were intended to regulate an essentially pastoral economy in which cattle were the primary source of wealth. Nor were cow-based valuation systems to be rapidly abandoned. As late as the seventeenth century, more than a thousand years after the law tracts were first given written form, it was still possible in the Highlands to place a ‘price’ of sixty milk cows on an especially precious manuscript. And what was true of the way in which the law tracts reckoned fines was even truer of their approach both to woodland and other natural resources. The notion that such resources ought to belong to the generality of people in a given locality, rather than to privileged individuals, is one that Highlanders have still not given up.⁴⁹

The tuath of the early Gaelic world was not at all a communist society. Its farms, for instance, were occupied by particular families whose tenurial position the law tracts guaranteed. But the people of the tuath, as demonstrated by the way they managed woodland, made a marked distinction between what had been artificially created and what existed naturally. Both a cultivated field and the cultivator’s home were clearly in the first category. Forests, mountains and the wild animals they supported were clearly in the second. It was consequently unlawful to take corn from your neighbour’s field. But it was perfectly acceptable – provided that due attention was paid to the need to ensure that long-term output was sustained – to take supplies of timber, nuts and other commodities from a wood. It was equally acceptable for individuals to go where they pleased in hill country and to take the game such country supported – provided again that such resources were not exploited to excess. Much the same sort of thinking was applied to watercourses – an important source of food. Thus a man, though not entitled to take as many river fish as he liked, was certainly permitted to net or trap the occasional salmon for his family’s consumption.50

Anyone who knows the modern Highlands will recognise in that last stipulation the remote origins of the enduring conviction that, irrespective of our modern society’s remarkably draconian laws on poaching, there is nothing morally wrong in taking ‘a fish for the pot’. Folk memory – not just in this instance but in the still more generally applicable Gaelic proverb to the effect that everyone has a right to a deer from the hill, a tree from the forest and a salmon from the river – has both preserved the ethics of the tuath and employed these ethics in such a way as to provide a principled basis for actions which Scots law nowadays places on much the same basis as theft.⁵¹

‘It is not easy to convince a Highlander that a landlord has a better right to a deer, a moorfowl or a salmon than he has himself, ’ one pro-landlord commentator noted despairingly in 1802, ‘because he considers them the unconfined bounty of heaven.’ The fact that the persistence of such sentiments made it practically impossible to stamp out poaching seemed bad enough to the possessing classes. But what was still more worrying, from the estate-owning point of view, was the ease with which this kind of thinking could be incorporated into attacks on the entire institution of unrestricted private property in land.⁵²

Speaking at a Highland Land League meeting in Skye in the 1880s, a crofter demonstrated something of the possibilities in this regard:

The fish that was yesterday miles away from the land was claimed by the landlord the moment it reached the shore. And so also were the birds of the air as soon as they flew over his land. The law made it so, because landlords were themselves the lawmakers, and it was a wonder that the poor man was allowed to breathe the air of heaven and drink from the mountain stream without having the factors and the whole of the county police pursuing him as a thief.53

The Highland Land League was an intensely radical organisation. It aspired to create a better future for those Highlanders who had survived the clearances. And it succeeded in so doing. As is shown by its Gaelic slogan, Is treasa tuath na tighearna, however, the Land League had strong roots in the past. Because it is usally translated into English as ‘The people are mightier than a lord’, that slogan seems to have a determinedly democratic, even a socialist, ring to it. But though tuath can certainly be rendered as ‘people’ in this forward-looking way, the Land League also wanted to be seen to be enforcing traditional rights of which Highlanders had been deprived by the men responsible for evictions of the sort which devastated Achadh nan Seileach. ‘The landlord class,’ one leading reformer observed, ‘have been but the usurpers of the right which the people . . . once possessed in the soil.’ The royal commission which looked into crofting grievances in 1883 was to hear a lot of testimony to much the same effect.⁵⁴

This testimony, just like the equally long-lived insistence that every Highlander was entitled to the odd deer or salmon, derived ultimately from the world of the tuath. Then the occupants of land were thought to have claims on that land which transcended those even of their king. Such claims, of course, are accorded no place in the externally imposed legal systems which have held sway in the Highlands in recent centuries. But this has never stopped Highlanders clinging stubbornly to much earlier formulations. Thus eighteenth-century tacksmen – those substantial tenants who were the first to feel the full force of the wind of change which Samuel Johnson and James Boswell found blowing in the Highlands – were reported to ‘look upon their farms as their right of inheritance’. So insistent were such men on their entitlement to what amounted to permanent tenancies that they commonly ‘refused to take a written lease’ on the grounds that the acceptance of such leases, which were for a stipulated period only, amounted to an admission that landlords could, if they wanted, go so far as to remove a farm’s occupants. Such removals, needless to say, went ahead in any case. But when a later generation of proprietors tried to buy off the Land League by granting leases to crofters who had previously been offered no such concessions, this offer, too, was turned down. To take such leases, the Highland Land League resolved, would be ‘inconsistent’ with its demand for security of tenure – such security being useless, so the Land League argued, unless it was effectively perpetual.55

When the royal commission of 1883 eventually reported on the underlying causes of the crofting unrest which was then convulsing the Highlands, its report included these words:

The opinion so often expressed before us that the small tenantry have an inherited inalienable right to security of tenure in their possessions . . . is an impression indigenous to the country, though it has never been sanctioned by legal recognition and has long been repudiated by the actions of the proprietor.⁵⁶

Such comments testify both to the sheer longevity of values which had endured in the Highlands for a millennium and to the fact that these values are of more than academic interest. Thanks to the Highland Land League, after all, various ideas which owe a good deal more to customary Gaelic law than they do to modern jurisprudence were incorporated into United Kingdom statute by the Crofters Act of 1886. The concept of security of tenure might have been one which, under the name of dùthchas, had for ages been preserved only in the minds of those Highlanders who refused to abandon such seemingly anachronistic notions even when clearance and eviction were at their most unstoppable. But for all that many landlords were appalled by such developments, a nineteenth-century parliament was persuaded that crofters should indeed have the security they desired. That is why, since 1886, landlords have had little control over crofters. That is why the affairs of crofting townships, including the rules of succession to crofts and the regulation of common grazings, are today governed in accordance with principles which would be instantly recognisable to the men who framed the Gaelic law tracts of so long ago. And that is why environmentalists should possibly take rather more interest than they mostly do in Highland history.

It proved possible in the nineteenth-century Highlands to reinstate ancient notions concerning land tenure. Might it not prove just as possible in future to incorporate other equally long-lived ideas into strategies for the Highland environment? Might it now be time to restore a communal interest in the management of salmon, game, woodland, even mountains? Should campaigners for the expansion of community forestry in the Highlands – of whom there are more with every year that passes – be looking to the Highland past for ideas as to how such an objective might be accomplished? And should sporting rights really continue forever to be limited in ways which the Highlanders of a thousand years ago would have considered quite inconceivable?

The future, of course, cannot be a recreation of the distant past. And this book, when it gets round to making some suggestions as to how the Highlands might move forward, will certainly not advocate the restoration of the tuath. But on looking round the northern half of Scotland in the twentieth century’s closing decade, it is depressingly apparent just how unprepared we are to make the case for freedoms which our Gaelic-speaking ancestors took more or less for granted.

When, in 1993, a number of environmental groups – the John Muir Trust, the Mountaineering Council of Scotland, the Ramblers Association and the Scottish Wild Land Group – concluded an access agreement with the owners of a particular Highland estate, much was made of the breakthrough which the agreement supposedly represented. And from the essentially southern perspective of the environmentalists concerned, this much-acclaimed ‘Letterewe Accord’ – which gives climbers and hill-walkers a conditional right of entry to the estate of the same name – might well have seemed a considerable advance. From a Highland standpoint, however, such agreements ought always to be as suspect as the leases which the Highland Land League was so careful to reject. For if it is accepted that access to our mountains is in the gift of landlords, no matter how benevolent, it follows that these same landlords may one day deny such access. No such denial ever could, or should, seem reasonable to Highlanders.57

Here, by way of reinforcing that point, is one more poem. In its surviving form – though it is probably much older – it was written during the middle ages in the literary Gaelic that was common then to Ireland and the Highlands. The spot the poem describes has long been thought to be Glen Etive in Argyll:

Glen of cuckoos and thrushes and blackbirds, precious is its cover to every fox; glen of wild garlic and watercress, of woods, of shamrock and flowers, leafy and twisting-crested.

Sweet are the cries of the brown-backed dappled deer under the oakwood below the bare hilltops, gentle hinds that are timid lying hidden in the great-treed glen.

Glen of the rowans with scarlet berries, with fruit fit for every flock of birds; a slumbrous paradise for the badgers in their quiet burrows with their young.

Glen of the blue-eyed vigorous hawks, glen abounding in every harvest, glen of the ridged and pointed peaks, glen of blackberries and sloes and apples.58

Nobody whose feeling for the Highlands has been shaped by words of that sort is ever likely to take kindly to the thought that a monied individual – even one ostensibly imposing his or her restrictions with a view to protecting our natural environment – should have any entitlement to say who should, or should not, walk in places like Glen Etive.