CHAPTER FOUR

Oh for the Crags That Are Wild and Majestic!

ON LEAVING KINGUSSIE and heading north through Badenoch on a road which is one of the busiest tourist routes in Scotland, you briefly glimpse a Georgian mansion on a hillside to your left. This is Balavil House, which, because its windows face the Cairngorms, rising steeply to the east, enjoys views as spectacular as any in the Highlands. But what gave a particular pleasure to the man for whom Balavil House was built, or so it is tempting to deduce from what is known of that man’s character, was the almost condescending way his fine home would originally have overlooked a less impressive set of dwellings just a mile or so away across the River Spey. James MacPherson had been born over there at Invertromie in 1736. And though his father was closely related to Ewen MacPherson of Cluny, chief of Clan MacPherson, the young James’s circumstances had been extremely modest – so modest as to make it unlikely that anyone, not even James himself, foresaw the slightest possibility of his ever being able to afford a house as striking as the one at Balavil.

The MacPhersons being every bit as staunchly Jacobite as Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s Clan Donald kinsfolk, this part of Scotland, when James MacPherson was growing up here, was not the sort of place where people very readily prospered. Badenoch, at that time, was more a military frontier than a tourist destination. Not far from Invertromie were Ruthven Barracks – a government garrison complex which was intended to keep Highlanders in order but which, in the event, was burned by Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s rebel soldiers in the early part of 1746. Nor was the eventual crushing of the prince’s army to bring immediate peace to Invertromie and its neighbouring localities. MacPherson of Cluny – although he had taken a leading part in Charles Edward Stuart’s rising and although he was known to be hiding out in Badenoch – was never found by the government troops who spent several years pursuing him. These troops, needless to say, took out their consequent frustrations on such lowlier MacPhersons as they could conveniently lay their hands on. The outcome, or so it was remarked by one of Cluny’s senior clansmen, included ‘murders, burnings, ravishings, plunderings’ on a scale that was exceptional even by the unexacting standards of the period.1

James MacPherson, a boy of ten when Culloden was fought, no doubt witnessed something of these horrors. But neither he nor his counterparts elsewhere in the Highlands were to make it their business to avenge this latest Jacobite defeat. The previous generation of Gaelic-speaking gentry, the class into which James had been born at Invertromie, had frequently been every bit as fanatically Jacobite as Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, whose own family belonged to this same middle-ranking segment of the clan-based society from which Charles Edward Stuart had obtained so much support. But that society, by the middle of the eighteenth century, was at last beginning to disintegrate. And Jacobitism, within a few years of Culloden, was clearly finished as a serious political force. Both James MacPherson and his similarly situated contemporaries, if they were to do anything substantial with their lives, had no alternative but to break completely with a lot of what had gone before. Soon many of these young men were openly ingratiating themselves – perhaps ignobly but, from their standpoint, realistically – with the new ruling order which had so forcibly been imposed on the Highlands. That ruling order naturally welcomed all such converts to its cause. Hundreds, even thousands, of well-born Highlanders – individuals of the sort who had once rallied to Charles Edward Stuart – were shortly to be serving an expanding British Empire as army officers, colonial officials, entrepreneurs. They were to be making their way in the world, in other words, by means very much like those adopted by James MacPherson, who was eventually to move to England, where he became, in quick succession, an imperial civil servant, a pro-government pamphleteer, an MP and the London representative of the Nabob of Arcot. These, of course, were highly lucrative positions. Hence MacPherson’s ability, on his retiring to the Highlands in the 1780s, to find the sizeable sums required to pay for his grand house at Balavil.

What gives James MacPherson his huge relevance to this book’s central theme, however, is not his later – and highly successful – career as a Scotsman come to England on the make. What matters about MacPherson, in the context of an analysis of changing attitudes to Scotland’s natural environment, is a flimsy volume he published in 1760 while still in his early twenties. MacPherson, at this point, was teaching in Badenoch, to which he had returned in 1756 after a stint at university in Aberdeen. Aspiring to make a name for himself as a writer, the young man from Invertromie had already published a number of poems. These had attracted little interest. But his 1760 effort, Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, was to catapult its author to practically unprecedented literary fame. What James MacPherson was apparently making available to his readers – by means both of his 1760 collection and two very similar books which followed in 1762 and 1763 – were the poems of a Gaelic bard who had died some fifteen centuries earlier. This bard’s name, it seemed, was Ossian. And that name, like James MacPherson’s own, was now to wing its way across the world. Not just in Scotland and England, but in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, the United States and a host of other countries, the Highlands thus acquired a renown and a reputation they have never since quite lost. But the Highlands which more and more people now heard about, read about, thought about and wrote about were James MacPherson’s Highlands. And James MacPherson’s Highlands were a most peculiar kind of place.

The Highlands as depicted in MacPherson’s pages owe very little to the Highlands as described, in MacPherson’s own lifetime, by men like Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and Duncan Ban MacIntyre. They owe equally little to the Gaelic-speaking world as portrayed by those hermit-poets whose writings date from the period in which MacPherson’s Ossianic outpourings are ostensibly located. Neither the ‘sunniness’ which Iain Crichton Smith discerned in Beinn Dòbhrain nor the sheer joie de vivre which you get in the earliest Gaelic poetry are anywhere to be found in James MacPherson:

I sit by the mossy fountain; on top of the hill of winds. One tree is rustling above me. Dark waves roll over the heath. The lake is troubled below. The deer descend from the hill. No hunter at a distance is seen; no whistling cowherd is nigh. It is midday: but all is silent. Sad are my thoughts alone.2

MacPherson’s Highlands, then, are irredeemably cheerless, gloomy, desolate, even haunted:

From the wood-skirted waters of Lego, ascend, at times, grey-bosomed mists . . . Wide over Lara’s stream is poured the vapour, dark and deep: the moon, like a dim shield, is swimming through its folds. With this clothe the spirits of old their sudden gestures on the wind when they stride, from blast to blast, along the dusky night. Often, blended with the gale, to some warrior’s grave they roll the mist, a grey dwelling to his ghost, until the songs arise.³

The songs MacPherson has in mind, you can be sure, will not be happy ones:

Autumn is dark on the mountains; a grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill and marks the grave of Connal. The leaves whirl around with the wind and strew the grave of the dead. At times are seen here the ghosts of the deceased, when the musing hunter alone stalks slowly over the heath. Appear in thy armour of light, thou ghost of the mighty Connal! Shine, near thy tomb, Crimora! Like a moonbeam from a cloud.4

The wind which swirled around the grave of Connal was as nothing to the storm that was to break around the head of James MacPherson within months of this material’s publication. Was MacPherson, as he first implied and afterwards insisted, no more than a translator of very ancient Gaelic poetry? Or was he, as Samuel Johnson and many others were soon to assert, simply defrauding his huge public by palming off as antiquated epics what were, in truth, the products of his own imagination?

There is no simple answer to these questions. The eighteenth-century Highlands were certainly well supplied with stories and poetry dealing with the very remote epoch which Ossian – a familiar name in Fenian legend and tradition – had supposedly set out to chronicle in Gaelic epics which MacPherson, in turn, had supposedly converted into English. A good deal of this material was eventually recorded systematically by folklorists whose own interest in the Highlands was stimulated, in large part, by the controversy surrounding James MacPherson’s work. And much of what was afterwards collected in this way was clearly well known to MacPherson himself. As well as taking a close interest in such lore as was available in Badenoch, then a wholly Gaelic-speaking district, the young MacPherson made various forays into the West Highlands and the Hebrides. He had access, it is now conceded even by his critics, to some at least of those Gaelic manuscripts which had not fallen victim to the destructive processes described by Lachlan MacMhuirich. MacPherson’s Ossianic writings, then, are by no means their author’s own invention. They are founded on very ancient Gaelic myth of the sort MacPherson claimed to be translating. But the undoubted basis of authenticity on which James MacPherson constructed his prose poems was just that, a basis and an underpinning. The finished product was, in large part, his own work.5

This, however, did little to reduce MacPherson’s impact on the wider western world. That world had for some time been dominated intellectually and philosophically by the increasingly scientific and rationalist mentality associated with what afterwards became known as the Enlightenment. Economies were expanding. Cities were growing. Society as a whole, or so Enlightenment thinkers generally considered, was steadily advancing. Humanity, in consequence, was taking charge of its own destiny. Nature was yielding up its secrets. The universe was to be understood and analysed mathematically. The superstitions and credulities of earlier ages were no longer to be taken seriously. People – certainly the people who most mattered – were increasingly committed to the values of a civilisation which took something of a self-righteous conceit in the extent to which its leading intellects appeared to be escaping from the constraining influences of a more tradition-ridden past.

But any movement of this kind tends eventually to produce a backlash. And just such a backlash duly took shape in a growing conviction that material progress, far from being a force for liberation, was destroying and corrupting all that was best about mankind. Human beings, it began to be argued vigorously by mid-eighteenth-century philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had once been virtuous, upstanding, brave and pure. But civilised man’s increasingly complex institutions, together with the money and possessions being flaunted on all sides, had hopelessly subverted those naturally occurring characteristics. A new austerity was consequently called for; a new readiness to acknowledge that affluence was frequently synonymous with decadence; a new willingness to learn from those simpler societies which Enlightenment opinion automatically dismissed as primitive. All that was tribal and primeval – whether it was to be found among eighteenth-century North America’s native peoples or among Europe’s own much earlier inhabitants – was thus in vogue, by the 1760s, as it had never been before.6

To adherents of this cult of the ‘noble savage’, and there were growing numbers of such adherents both in Scotland and the rest of Britain, James MacPherson’s books seemed a heaven-sent confirmation of their most passionate beliefs. The world evoked by MacPherson’s renderings of the poems of Ossian was a world as far removed as it was possible to be from the one inhabited by the many comfortably-off individuals who now felt their lives, as a result of what was being said so stridently by Rousseau and his followers, to be seriously lacking in the more heroic virtues. This lack MacPherson’s publications helped – at least vicariously – to make good. Here was nobility. Here was courage. Here were men with whom it was a real thrill to identify:

As a hundred winds on Morven; as the streams of a hundred hills; as clouds fly successive over heaven; as the dark ocean assails the shore of the desert: so roaring, so vast, so terrible the armies mixed on Lena’s echoing heath. The groans of the people spread over the hills: it was like the thunder of night when the cloud bursts on Cona and a thousand ghosts shriek at once on the hollow wind.⁷

No wonder that Napoleon, that archetypal man of action, was reputed to have carried an edition of Ossian with him on his campaigns. No wonder that Edinburgh’s intelligentsia, those self-styled literati who had made Scotland’s capital an internationally significant centre of learning, should have been equally enthralled. The Edinburgh of Adam Smith and David Hume might not have condescended to notice the great Gaelic poet – Duncan Ban MacIntyre – who was actually living in its midst. But James MacPherson was to experience no such rejection. The ‘artless song of the savage’, as discerned in The Iliad and The Odyssey by the Edinburgh historian and pioneer sociologist, Robert Ferguson, seemed readily discernible in Ossian also. MacPherson, as a result, found Edinburgh’s doors thrown open to him. Just as the literati were afterwards to patronise the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, Robert Burns, so they now took a slightly off-putting delight in flattering and befriending a previously obscure schoolteacher from Badenoch.8

Both Robert Burns and James MacPherson, in their different ways, provided eighteenth-century Edinburgh – or so eighteenth-century Edinburgh told itself – with direct access to the ‘natural’ sentiments which were then so much in fashion. But this was not the only service rendered by MacPherson, in particular, to a Scottish establishment which, despite its apparently unshakeable belief in its own significance, was prone to occasional anxiety about Scotland’s long-term prospects. The country, since 1707, had been united with England. And Scotland’s governing classes had no intention of imperilling this economically vital link. To have done so would have been to place their own prosperity in jeopardy. But neither were mercantile and middle-class Scots at all enamoured by the prospect of their national identity being submerged in that of England. What such Scots ideally needed, then, was a means of asserting their Scottishness in a wholly non-challenging manner. It was just such a means that James MacPherson now provided.

By enabling his patrons to lay claim to a heroic heritage on a par with that of Greece, MacPherson hugely boosted the collective ego of the men who mattered in the Scotland of his day. At a time when – thanks to Rousseau – all of Europe was in search of just such primeval glories, Scots found themselves the possessors of ancient epics of a kind that could be placed alongside those of Homer. This was something in which Scotland could take pride. This was something which reinforced the country’s claim to be distinctive. But this was also something which – precisely because the world of Ossian was so far removed from eighteenth-century actualities – could readily furnish Scotland’s rulers with a wonderfully unthreatening national identity. Scotland’s genuinely historical heroes, such as Robert Bruce or William Wallace, could be cultivated only at the risk of raising questions as to what had happened to the independence for which such men had fought. To make too much of them – unless one wanted, Fanon-like, to conjure up the past in aid of revolutionary struggle – could well be awkward. MacPherson’s mist-enveloped warriors, however, could be celebrated safely. They stood for no cause other than the one of making Scotland out to be a place that was not quite the same as England. James MacPherson, then, began the process of providing modern Scotland, and not least Lowland Scotland, with the slightly bizarre self-image which the country has kept polished ever since. Because of its Ossianic origins – and in spite of the mutual hostility which had previously characterised relations between Lowland Scots and their northern neighbours – this self-image has been mostly Highland in character. It has habitually dealt, as all the world knows, in kilts, in pipe bands and in cabers. None of these, of course, are actually featured in James MacPherson’s publications. But all such emblems nevertheless serve to reinforce the essentially Ossianic, and still astonishingly powerful, notion of Scotland as a wholly ‘Highland’ country. Nor does modern Scotland’s ‘Highlandness’ begin and end with tartan. Ours is a country, as all the world also knows, of bens and glens as well as bagpipes. That the world has known this for so long is due in large part to the work of James MacPherson.

James MacPherson’s books were to go through hundreds of editions in dozens of languages. The English essayist and critic, William Hazlitt, writing in 1818, thought that ‘the principal works of poetry in the world’ were ‘Homer, the bible, Dante and, let me add, Ossian’. Goethe, Herder, Schiller and numerous other eminent literary figures were almost as unstinting in their praise. Rather like J. R. R. Tolkien’s twentieth-century fantasy, Lord of the Rings, which owes a recognisable debt to MacPherson and which was similarly to fulfil the romantic cravings of an age that had become a little disenchanted with its own prosperity, Ossian thus acquired cult status. But Tolkien’s Middle Earth, other than in the psychedelic fantasies of 1960s hippies high on pot, had no reality beyond the printed page. The Highlands, in contrast, were very solidly in existence. It was possible to visit the area in search of the eerily enticing scenes which MacPherson had so graphically described. And though MacPherson’s Ossianic landscapes were scarcely less illusory than Tolkien’s, it was all too easy for people to visualise the Highlands not as the Highlands actually were but as MacPherson had imagined them to be. When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, therefore, their homeland became the setting for poems and romances even more successful than MacPherson’s, Highlanders found themselves condemned to live simultaneously, as it were, in two parallel universes. One of these universes was the grimly matter-of-fact Highlands which were characterised by clearance, poverty and growing social dislocation. In the alternative Highlands, on the other hand, these things did not impinge. Their history, if it had not exactly ended, had become stuck firmly in an era which, if a bit more recent than the Ossianic one, was equally escapist.9

That such was so was due to Walter Scott. ‘By far the greatest creative force in Scottish literature,’ Edwin Muir wrote of him. And so he was. This meant that when Scott took over MacPherson’s Ossianic backdrops for his own dramatic purposes, Highland hills, Highland lochs, Highland woods, even Highland weather, became still more inescapably associated with the moody grandeur in which Walter Scott delighted every bit as much as James MacPherson:

The stag had eve had drunk his fill,

Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

And deep his midnight lair had made

In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade;

But, when the sun his beacon red

Had kindled on Benvorlich’s head,

The deep-mouth’d bloodhound’s heavy bay

Resounded up the rocky way,

And faint, from farther distance borne,

Were heard the clanging hoof and horn.10

These lines, which could once have been recited by practically any Scottish schoolchild, are from the opening stanzas of The Lady of the Lake, which Scott published in 1810. The poem’s action takes place in the Trossachs – mostly in the vicinity of Loch Katrine. And though Scott apparently intended his narrative to be a ‘vivid and exact description’ of the Highlands as they were in the sixteenth century, the period in which The Lady of the Lake is set, it is immediately apparent that the poem’s world exists primarily in Scott’s imagination:

With boughs that quaked at every breath,

Grey birch and aspen wept beneath;

Aloft, the ash and warrior oak

Cast anchor in the rifted rock;

And, higher yet, the pine tree hung

His shatter’d trunk, and frequent flung,

Where seem’d the cliffs to meet on high,

His boughs athwart the narrow’d sky.

Highest of all, where white peaks glanced,

Where glist’ning streamers waved and danced,

The wanderer’s eye could barely view

The summer heaven’s delicious blue;

So wondrous wild, the whole might seem

The scenery of a fairy dream.11

That last line is crucial. By Gaelic poets like Duncan Ban MacIntyre landscape was celebrated for its own sake and in recognition of its own importance. In Walter Scott’s work, however, landscape is always a means to an end. His trees, cliffs, and mountains clearly have a basis in reality. But Scott felt free to rearrange nature in such a way as to create ‘the scenery of a fairy dream’. And the technique is one he utilised in his novels every bit as much as in his poetry:

It was towards evening as they entered one of the tremendous passes which afford communication between the High and Low Country; the path, which was extremely steep and rugged, winded up a chasm between two tremendous rocks, following the passage which a foaming stream, that brawled from below, appeared to have worn for itself in the course of ages. A few slanting beams of the sun, which was now setting, reached the water in its darksome bed, and showed it partially, chafed by a hundred rocks, and broken by a hundred falls.¹²

The point of that paragraph from Waverley, Walter Scott’s first novel, is to make readers properly aware of the huge distinction between the Highlands, as described by Scott at any rate, and the much more workaday world which these same readers actually inhabited. Like many of the nineteenth-century prints and paintings which it did so much to inspire, Scott’s fiction quite deliberately heightens hills, widens rivers and generally creates the impression of a territory containing absolutely nothing of the commonplace. As for the Highlanders one meets in Waverley, they are, if anything, still more picturesque than their surroundings:

He started at the sight of what he had not yet happened to see, a mountaineer in his full national costume. The individual Gael was a stout, dark, young man, of low stature, the ample folds of whose plaid added to the appearance of strength which his person exhibited. The short kilt, or petticoat, showed his sinewy and clean-made limbs; the goatskin purse, flanked by the usual defences, a dirk and steel-wrought pistol, hung before him; his bonnet had a short feather, which indicated his claim to be treated as a Duinhe-wassel, or a sort of gentleman; a broadsword dangled by his side, a target hung upon his shoulder, and a long Spanish fowling-piece occupied one of his hands.13

Walter Scott, it should be said, knew both the Highlands and Highlanders extremely well. He understood Highland history. His novels – not just Waverley and Rob Roy but others also – deal very plausibly with the workings of the clan-based society which is recreated in their pages. What Scott’s fiction neither examines nor concedes, however, is the possibility that Gaelic civilisation, for all the catastrophes which had befallen it since Culloden, might still have a future. In this Scott followed James MacPherson. The ‘popularity’ of MacPherson’s writings, Walter Scott was to note towards the end of his life, had helped convince him that ‘Highland subjects’ were worth tackling. But these subjects, if they were to appeal to the mass audience which Scott always wanted to attract, had to be treated very carefully. The reading public could certainly be persuaded to take an interest in Highlanders. James MacPherson had proved as much. But the Ossianic phenomenon had also shown, as Scott would have been well aware, that the public liked its Highlanders kept safely in the past.¹⁴

The melancholy which so pervades MacPherson’s work is quite inseparable from his conviction that the Gaelic world was doomed:

How long in Moi-lena shall we weep? How long pour in Erin our tears? The mighty will not return. Oscar shall not rise in his strength. The valiant must fall in their day and be no more known on their hills. Where are our fathers, O warriors! The chiefs of the time of old? They have set like stars that have shone. We only hear the sound of their praise . . . Thus shall we pass away; in the day of our fall. Then let us be renowned when we may; and leave our fame behind us, like the last beams of the sun, when he hides his red head in the west . . . The days of my years begin to fail. I feel the weakness of my arm. My fathers bend from their clouds to receive their grey-haired son.15

There is detectable in such passages something of the feelings experienced by James MacPherson as a result of his youthful exposure to the consequences of Culloden. The society which shaped MacPherson had collapsed around him in the 1740s. And for all that MacPherson was ultimately to walk away from its wreckage, with a view to making his career in England, he was clearly affected very deeply by clanship’s sudden and complete distintegration. That much is evident from the despairing hopelessness which oozes from every nook and cranny of his Ossianic landscapes.

Ironically, however, nothing did more to ensure the commercial success of James MacPherson’s Highlanders than the fact that these same Highlanders were safely dead and buried. You cannot very well romanticise a people who might be about to endanger your existence. That is why the only emotions which Highlanders aroused outside the Highlands, prior to Culloden, were those of fear, suspicion, even hatred. And that is why the military conquest of the Highlands was an essential prelude to the Ossianic craze. The Edinburgh intellectuals who were both to make a god of Ossian and to treat MacPherson as his prophet would most certainly have done neither of these things if there had been the slightest prospect of a set of real-live Gaelic warriors coming once more marching up their city’s High Street in the way that Charles Edward Stuart’s Highland army had done in 1745. Absolutely central to the cult of Ossian, therefore, was the fact that, by the 1760s, Highlanders no longer threatened to disturb the wellbeing of the middle-class men and women who bought James MacPherson’s books.

Walter Scott appreciated this as much as anyone. Reflecting on the immense public appeal of The Lady of the Lake, which sold the then enormous number of 20,000 copies in its first year, he openly acknowledged that ‘the richer and wealthier part of the kingdom’ would have been ‘indisposed to countenance a poem the scene of which was laid in the Highlands’ had the ‘feuds and political dissensions’ of an earlier period not been permanently ended at Culloden. Nor was Scott in the business of unsettling his southern readers by suggesting to them, even at a remove of more than half a century, that there was anything fundamentally wrong about the way that Highlanders had been treated in the 1740s. As Waverley amply demonstrates, Scott identified emotionally with the Jacobite cause and with that cause’s many Gaelic-speaking adherents. But he identified a lot more strongly, and in an altogether harder-headed fashion, with the commercially driven society to which both he and his readers actually belonged. And this society, as Scott clearly understood, would have been dealt a potentially devastating blow had Jacobite Highlanders somehow managed to win their war with Hanoverian Britain.16

Edward Waverley, the young and rather ineffectual English officer at the centre of Walter Scott’s first novel, becomes romantically infatuated with the Highlands. He attaches himself, as a result, to Charles Edward Stuart’s army. But when that army goes into action against General Sir John Cope’s forces on the outskirts of Edinburgh in September 1746, Waverley begins to be confronted by several home truths:

Waverley could plainly recognise the standard of the troops he had formerly commanded, and hear the trumpets and kettle-drums sound the signal of advance, which he had so often obeyed. He could hear, too, the well-known word given, in the English dialect, by the equally well-distinguished voice of the commanding officer for whom he had once felt so much respect. It was at that instant that, looking around him, he saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike that which he had worn from his infancy, and wished to awake from what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible and unnatural.17

On reading this, you feel Scott, as it were, come tapping slyly on your shoulder. And, just like Waverley, you feel the spell which Scott himself has cast begin at last to break. Highlanders, you realise, for all their primitive charm, could not be permitted to get in the way of progress. Theirs, you are inclined to agree with Waverley, was a heroic, strangely captivating, lifestyle. But it was also, as Scott has finally got round to reminding you, a barbaric and outmoded one. So Culloden, you conclude, was maybe for the best. And not just Culloden either. For if you were one of the thousands who read Waverley in the year or so following the novel’s publication in the summer of 1814, that gentle tapping on your shoulder – as well as adding to your enjoyment of Scott’s fiction – might well have helped forestall such unease as you might otherwise have experienced on learning of the eviction of so many families from Strathnaver. For what was the expansion of sheep-farming but one more manifestation of civilisation’s onward march? And what were the clearances but one more instance of the price the world has to pay for such advancement?

Walter Scott’s swashbuckling clansmen and Patrick Sellar’s ‘aborigines’, then, are arguably the two sides of a single coin. Highlanders, from Scott’s perspective every bit as much as Sellar’s, were fated, if not to vanish from the earth, then certainly to be extinguished as a culturally distinctive people. And even if Highlanders were to disappear entirely, what then? The empty glens which so depressed a man like Hugh MacLennan, those glens where this Canadian thought that everyone who ever mattered was now dead and gone, were not to be viewed in such a light by more than a tiny minority of their visitors. Where MacLennan was to see a depopulated and deserted countryside, Patrick Sellar and his successors were to see thriving sheep farms or flourishing deer forests. Where a North American novelist was to be saddened by thoughts of what had been destroyed, a million other tourists were to be captivated by landscapes possibly made more, not less, appealing by a sense of their having once been home to a race which Walter Scott, like James MacPherson, had imagined to be doomed. Many years after the event, the Edinburgh publisher, Robert Cadell, was still recalling the ‘extraordinary sensation’ caused in 1810 by the publication of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake:

The whole country rang with the praises of the poet. Crowds set off to the scenery of Loch Katrine, till then comparatively unknown; and, as the book came out just before the season for excursions, every house and inn in that neighbourhood was crammed with a constant succession of visitors.18

Nearly twenty years later, as noted by the eminent judge and diarist, Henry Cockburn, Loch Katrine and its surroundings were as popular as ever:

The inn near the Trossachs could, perhaps, put up a dozen, or at the very most, two dozen of people; but last autumn I saw about one hundred apply for admittance, and after horrid altercations, entreaties and efforts, about fifty or sixty were compelled to huddle together all night. They were all of the upper rank, travelling mostly in private carriages, and by far the greater number strangers. But the pigs were as comfortably accommodated. I saw three or four English gentlemen spreading their own straw on the earthen floor of an outhouse with a sparred door and no fireplace or furniture.19

All this activity was put down by Cockburn to Scott. ‘His genius,’ the diarist commented, ‘immortalises the region.’ And what The Lady of the Lake had done for the Trossachs, it soon became apparent, Scott’s subsequent writings were to do for the rest of the Highlands. ‘Every London citizen,’ Scott himself observed a little ruefully, ‘makes Loch Lomond his washpot and throws his shoes over Ben Nevis.’²⁰

Not only had Scott almost singlehandedly conjured the Highland tourist industry into existence. He had also helped to determine, as Robert Louis Stevenson so plainly recognised when writing of the Trossachs, what it was that people believed themselves to be seeing when, drawn north by Scott’s novels and poems, they first ventured into the Highlands:

I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly prepared for the impression.²¹

It was certainly the case that earlier visitors to the Highlands – people not ‘rightly prepared’, in Stevenson’s phrase, for the experience – had found the region anything but enticing. Samuel Johnson, journeying down Glen Shiel in the direction of Achadh nan Seileach, remarked of scenes that have since featured on innumerable postcards: ‘An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility.’ The English military men who had preceded Johnson were equally uncomplimentary. These soldiers came from a country where much less lofty peaks than Scotland’s were routinely described as ‘warts’, ‘wens’ and ‘blisters’. And Highland hills thus seemed to them ‘most horrible’. Mountains were not so much beguiling as ‘frightful’. The highest summits were so many ‘monstrous excrescences’.22

The extent to which external perceptions of the Highlands had changed by the early nineteenth century was indicative of more than Walter Scott’s huge influence – although his role was critically important. Scott, and before him James MacPherson, were part and parcel of a much wider romantic movement which, having begun as a critique of Enlightenment attitudes, had gone on to become something of an intellectual orthodoxy in its own right. At the heart of romanticism – as is evident from the writings of its many literary exponents – was a re-evaluation of humanity’s relationship with nature, especially wild nature. A thousand years on from the Gaelic-speaking hermits who had first thought to seek spiritual renewal in places like the Garvellachs, western civilisation had at last begun to follow where the Columban church had led. This did not happen overnight, of course. The English-speaking world’s deep-seated suspicions of nature – as shown by Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language having defined wilderness as ‘a tract of solitude and savageness’ – were to endure well into the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the Johnson line already seemed completely out of date. To Lord George Byron, romanticism’s archtetype, only an untamed landscape could have any real appeal:

England! thy beauties are tame and domestic

To one who has roved o’er the mountains afar;

Oh for the crags that are wild and majestic!

The steep frowning glories of dark Loch na Garr.²³

Mountain landscapes of the sort which had previously been feared and detested were thus subjected by romanticism to a process which has, without hyperbole, been likened to ‘divinisation’. The fact that the Highlands consequently came to be valued by southerners in a wholly new way, however, was of no real benefit to Highlanders other than those who began to profit from the developing tourist trade. As interest grew in landscapes of the Highland type, so the people who lived among such landscapes tend to drop more and more from view. That is why the typical romantic writer – as opposed to Samuel Johnson, for example – is so poor a source of information about Highlanders. Johnson might have had practically no regard for Highland hills. He might have had equally little regard for the claims being made on behalf of Gaelic tradition by James MacPherson and his backers. But he was fascinated by human beings: how they lived; what they thought; why they acted as they did. Johnson’s Highlanders are real-life individuals. The Highlanders who feature in the poetry of William Wordsworth, on the other hand, are something else entirely:

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain . . .

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

Some natural sorrow, loss or pain,

That has been, and may be again?24

Samuel Johnson, had he wanted to know what a reaping girl’s Gaelic song was all about, would have stopped his horse and – with an interpreter’s assistance if need be – would have asked her to tell him. But it much better suits Wordsworth’s purposes to impose his own Ossianic-inspired fantasies on the subject of his poem. Since nothing would be nicer than to think of her exacting such a post-humous revenge on all Wordsworthians, past, present and future, it is much to be hoped that the ‘solitary Highland lass’ was, in fact, singing one of Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s earthier ballads. As it is, however, we are forever stuck with her dwelling habitually on ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’, on ‘sorrow, loss or pain’. Wordsworth, having steeped himself in the works of James MacPherson, inevitably expected Highland songs to be mournful. He equally expected the typical Highland glen to be practically devoid of habitation. That, as is evident from Wordsworth’s thoughts on the supposed burial place of Ossian, was part of what it was that gave such places their romantic fascination:

Does then the Bard sleep here indeed?

Or is it but a groundless creed?

What matters it? I blame them not

Whose Fancy in this lonely Spot

Was moved; and in such way expressed

Their notion of its perfect rest.

A convent, even a hermit’s cell,

Would break the silence of this Dell:

It is not quiet, it is not ease;

But something deeper far than these:

The separation that is here

Is of the grave; and of austere

Yet happy feelings of the dead:

And, therefore, was it rightly said

That Ossian, last of all his race!

Lies buried in this lonely place.25

This notion of wild country being all the more captivating as a result of its associations with a dead or dying culture was one which was to have applications far beyond the Highlands. It was to have such applications, most of all, in the United States, where both James MacPherson and Walter Scott were to have enormously enthusiastic followings. Thomas Jefferson, an early US president, found MacPherson’s books ‘a source of daily pleasure’ and considered Ossian ‘the greatest poet that has ever existed’. Nor was Jefferson the only American to be thus inspired by Scottish literature. James Fenimore Cooper, his country’s first great novelist and the first literary figure to appreciate the fictional possibilities of the US frontier, was not only to model himself explicitly on Scott. He was to turn Indians into Ossianic figures. That much is obvious from the closing paragraphs of The Last of the Mohicans:

Chingachgook grasped the hand that, in the warmth of feeling, the scout had stretched across the fresh earth, and in that attitude of friendship these two sturdy and intrepid woodsmen bowed their heads together, while scalding tears fell to their feet, watering the grave of Uncas like drops of falling rain.

In the midst of the awful stillness with which such a burst of feeling, coming, as it did, from the two most renowned warriors of that region, was received, Tamenund lifted his voice to disperse the multitude.

‘It is enough,’ he said. ‘Go, children of the Lenape, the anger of the Manitto is not done. Why should Tamenund stay? The palefaces are masters of the earth, and the time of the Red Man has not yet come again. My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warriors of the wise race of the Mohicans.’26

Both that scene and its language are drawn directly from MacPherson. And not only do Cooper’s Indians talk like Ossianic Highlanders. They similarly invest landscape, though in this case American landscape, with a tragic, but nevertheless romantic, ambience which stems ultimately from their own extinction. For just as it is the destiny of Highlanders in Waverley to be defeated by the superior civilisation which they have dared to challenge, so it is the destiny of Native Americans in The Last of the Mohicans to give way, in the end, to whites:

Where are the blossoms of those summers! Fallen, one by one. So all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of spirits. I am on the hilltop, and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps, there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans.²⁷

North America’s English-speaking colonists had begun by both fearing and loathing the forests and mountains which so hemmed in their farms and townships. Wild country was routinely described here, just as it had previously been in Europe, as ‘hideous’, ‘howling’, ‘gloomy’, ‘brutish’, ‘dismal’ and ‘terrible’. The typical frontiersman, advancing across the Appalachians and into the plains beyond, looked forward happily to the distant day when ‘populous cities, smiling villages, beautiful farms and plantations’ would take the place of ‘solitude and savageness’. An unsettled territory, then, was reckoned to have no intrinsic worth. Like a wild horse, it gained value only by being tamed. Hence the sheer novelty of James Fenimore Cooper’s portrayal of the American wilderness both as a place of beauty and as a place which enabled people to discover their innate moral worth.28

Cooper’s fictional heroes – the frontier scout, Hawkeye, and Hawkeye’s Indian allies, Chingachgook and Uncas – were clearly thought by their creator to derive their strength of character from their closeness to the very environment which the territorial expansion of the United States was to do so much to destroy. And though Cooper, whose novels date from the period between 1820 and 1840, was not actually to argue that wilderness was consequently deserving of protection, other Americans – many of them as imbued as Cooper was himself with the ideals of European romanticism – were shortly to be doing just that. Foremost among these pioneer environmentalists was Henry David Thoreau whose mission, as he told a Massachusetts audience in 1851, was ‘to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness’. James Fenimore Cooper had arguably done as much. But Thoreau now went further. ‘In wildness,’ he claimed, ‘is the preservation of the world.’²⁹

These were not mere words. By glorifying the self-same New England forests which earlier Americans had found so threatening, and by staging his own personal retreats into the woods around his native Concord, Henry David Thoreau made a decisive contribution to the emergence of the modern ecological outlook. A highly skilled naturalist, he combined the scientific study of plants and animals with a growing conviction that people ought to discard the material encumbrances which had become inseparable from a supposedly civilised existence. Only by such radical means, Thoreau considered, could humanity recapture the primeval nobility which was to be seen most clearly, Thoreau insisted, in the works of James MacPherson. ‘Ossian seems to speak a gigantic and universal language,’ Thoreau wrote in the course of one of his wilderness excursions. MacPherson’s ‘stern and desolate poetry’, he continued, was hugely superior to most English literature. The writings of Chaucer, ‘and even of Shakespeare and Milton’, seemed strangely effete by comparison. This, Thoreau thought, was because such poets were not in sympathy with nature. ‘The bard has in great measure lost the dignity and sacredness of his office . . . The poet has come within doors and exchanged the forest and crag for the fireside.’30

Just as Thoreau was to admire MacPherson, so Thoreau, in his turn, was to be greatly esteemed by the man who, more than any other, was to make wild country positively regarded by Americans. This was John Muir, the crusading writer and publicist whose name will always be coupled with California’s Yosemite Valley, which, in 1890, thanks very largely to Muir’s promptings, Congress agreed to safeguard and protect for all time coming. The resulting Yosemite Act – because it recognises wilderness to have a significance which can transcend people’s freedom to exploit natural resources – signalled a substantial stride along the road which James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau had started to map out. The Yosemite Act did something more, however. It demonstrated what could be accomplished by a determined effort to mobilise public opinion in support of nature conservation. And it is in this sense that John Muir – who organised a tremendously successful public relations campaign on Yosemite’s behalf – can be seen to have invented environmental lobbying of the sort that was eventually to transform the western world’s attitude to nature.

John Muir had been born in Dunbar in 1838 and had emigrated to Wisconsin with his parents in 1849. ‘When I was a boy in Scotland,’ Muir wrote long afterwards, ‘I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures.’ Muir, it appears, never lost his Scottish accent. Nor did he ever cease to take pride in his background – going so far as to ascribe his strong feelings for landscape, and especially his love of mountains, to the fact that his ancestors included Highlanders. Intellectually, however, he was shaped primarily by a romanticism still more all-embracing than Thoreau’s. Natural objects, to Muir, were ‘the terrestrial manifestations of God’. Nature was a ‘window opening into heaven’. To venture deep into hill country was at once to be restored both psychologically and spiritually:

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as the sunshine into the trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.31

This was a philosophy which John Muir was to expound in a long series of increasingly influential books. One of these, My First Summer in the Sierra, consists principally of the journal which Muir kept in the course of his initial foray into the Californian mountains. The year is 1869 and with every day that passes, Muir’s narrative explains, the country works its soothing charms on his mind. June, in particular, ‘seems the greatest of all the months’ the 31-year-old Muir has so far lived through. Each sunrise brings another ‘reviving’ morning. ‘Down the long mountain slopes the sunbeams pour, gilding the awakening pines, cheering every needle, filling every living thing with joy.’ But every Eden has its serpent. And Yosemite’s appeared to Muir some three weeks into August.³²

The day in question had begun promisingly enough. Muir had set out for Mono Lake by way of Bloody Canyon Pass:

Near the summit, at the head of the pass, I found a species of dwarf willow lying perfectly flat on the ground, making a nice, soft, silky grey carpet, not a single stem or branch more than three inches high . . . A little higher, almost at the very head of the pass, I found the blue arctic daisy and purple-flowered bryanthus, the mountain’s own darlings, gentle mountaineers face to face with the sky, kept safe by a thousand miracles, seeming always finer and purer the wilder and stormier their homes . . . Here, too, is the familiar robin, tripping on the flowery lawns, bravely singing the same cheery song I first heard when a boy in Wisconsin newly arrived from old Scotland. In this fine company, sauntering enchanted, taking no heed of time, I at length entered the gate of the pass and the huge rocks began to close round me in all their mysterious impressiveness.33

At this point, however, it is as if a dark cloud has suddenly shut out the sun:

Just then I was startled by a lot of queer, hairy muffled creatures coming shuffling, shambling, wallowing towards me as if they had no bones in their bodies. Had I discovered them while they were yet a good way off, I should have tried to avoid them. What a picture they made, contrasted with the others I had just been admiring! When I came up to them, I found that they were only a band of Indians from Mono on their way to Yosemite for a load of acorns. They were wrapped in blankets made of the skins of sage-rabbits. The dirt on some of the faces seemed almost old enough to have a geological significance . . . How glad I was to to get away from the grey, grim crowd and see them vanish down the trail!³⁴

John Muir’s attitudes to North American native peoples are those of a period when a Kansas newspaper could describe Indians as ‘a set of miserable, dirty, louse-infected, gut-eating skunks’. And he is maybe not to be condemned too harshly for his failure, in this respect at least, to step outside the mental confines of his time. But the condescending way that Muir wrote about Yosemite’s original inhabitants is, for all that, most revealing. It is suggestive of the problem which so many environmentalists have always had in accommodating the claims of people who happen to live in places which the same environmentalists deem special.35

It was relatively straightforward, as James Fenimore Cooper had shown, to idealise the Indian in the abstract; to conceive of him as a noble savage whose way of life had somehow served to dignify the American landscape. It was much harder to cope with nineteenth-century Indians as they actually existed. Thus Henry David Thoreau, for all that he spent so much time imagining a pristine Massachusetts inhabited only by America’s first nations, saw little merit in the native peoples he actually met in Maine. These real-life Indians, Thoreau commented, were ‘sinister and slouching fellows’ who made only a ‘coarse and imperfect use . . . of nature’. Other romantically inclined whites were to be similarly disparaging about the many native Americans who most uncharitably refused to conform to Ossian-influenced stereotypes. Hence the steadily developing notion of the nineteenth-century Indian as a degenerate; a person who had fallen badly from his primeval state of grace; a person who could thus be dismissed as just one more potential pollutant of those wilderness areas which American governments were persuaded to safeguard for posterity by early environmentalists like John Muir.³⁶

When, in 1872, Wyoming’s highly scenic and geyser-rich Yellowstone Mountains were declared the world’s first national park, the relevant legislation provided ‘for the preservation . . . of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities or wonders . . . in their natural condition’. Definitely not scheduled for such preservation, however, were the new park’s human occupants. Several Indian bands – drawn from the Crow, the Blackfeet and Shoshone peoples – were forcibly expelled from Yellowstone the year the park was designated. And in 1876, despite its tourist trade being already under way, Yellowstone was the scene of fighting between the US cavalry and one more of America’s first nations, the Nez Perce. Reflecting on his people’s subsequent defeat and slaughter, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce commented:

I learned . . . that we were few while the white men were many, and that we could not hold our own with them. We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not and would change the rivers and mountains if they did not suit them.37

What the Nez Perce chieftain most disliked about our so-called western civilisation, of course, was what America’s earliest environmentalists most disliked about it also. John Muir, for instance, was to spend the last years of his life defending his beloved Yosemite Valley from a planned dam which, if it had gone ahead, would have altered ‘the rivers and mountains’ more fundamentally than Chief Joseph could have envisaged possible. ‘These temple destroyers,’ Muir wrote of the Californian businessmen and politicians who were promoting the controversial dam with a view to improving San Francisco’s water supplies, ‘seem to have a perfect contempt for nature and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the almighty dollar.’ But for all that he was eventually to develop some sympathy for Indians, most notably those whom he encountered while travelling in Alaska in the 1880s and 1890s, it was never to occur to John Muir that a national park, from the perspective of the native peoples who were deprived of their lands to make its creation possible, might appear to disrupt the natural order every bit as much as the damming of a river.³⁸

Many years afterwards, when Indian traditions had been extinguished almost as completely as the clan-based society depicted in Scott’s Waverley, environmentalists at last got round to ransacking nineteenth-century publications for some record of the environmentally significant remarks made by men like Chief Joseph. One source of such comments, as it happens, was a series of articles published in a Montana newspaper in 1877. These articles told the story of the Nez Perce War of the previous year. Most untypically, they told that story from the Nez Perce point of view. And it is of some passing relevance to this book’s themes that the author of the articles in question bore an obviously Highland name. He was called Duncan MacDonald. Through his Indian mother, he was related to the leading families of the Nez Perce. Through his Scottish father, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, he was descended from men and women who had been killed, some two hundred years earlier, during the massacre of Glencoe.39

Just as men like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir found it difficult to incorporate nineteenth-century Indians into their vision of the American wilderness, so the Scottish successors of James MacPherson and Walter Scott found it hard to make room for nineteenth-century Highlanders in their portrayal of the Highlands as the part of Europe where romanticism’s ideals had been realised most concretely. Highlanders, admittedly, were at as low an ebb as they had ever been. But despite their having been removed from much of the area which they had formerly occupied, Highlanders had failed to exit from the Highland scene. Nor had they abandoned all hope of regaining some control of their own lives. At one level, of course, this was recognised by everyone. When Highlanders rioted in protest at the clearances, for example, the consequent affrays were duly reported – and in terms, very often, which might have been employed had neither MacPherson nor Scott ever penned a single word. Just as America’s Indian wars were invariably put down to Indian untrustworthiness rather than to white encroachment on Indian lands, so riots which had been provoked by evictions were routinely attributed to Highland undependability. The violent and the disaffected Highlander, however, was firmly confined to just one of the parallel universes in which, as mentioned earlier, the Highlands now seemed to exist. In the alternative Highlands – the Highlands as most southerners increasingly wanted, or pretended, the Highlands to be – a very different sort of Highlander was on display.

When King George IV came to Scotland in 1822, the attendant pageantry – organised by none other than Walter Scott – featured plaided retainers who might have stepped straight out of Waverley. When Queen Victoria ventured into the Highlands in the later 1840s, a decade during which the crofting population suffered enormously from poverty and hunger, these things were never mentioned in her journal. Victoria could not have been ignorant of the famine relief programmes which had been organised to keep crofting families alive. Nor could she have been unaware of the renewed clearances which were emptying still more Highland glens. But such matters seem to have been excised from her consciousness. Travelling the Highlands in the company of a well-thumbed copy of The Lady of the Lake, Britain’s queen found the area ‘most delightful, most romantic’. The Highlands were characterised by ‘quiet’, ‘retirement’, ‘wildness’, ‘liberty’ and ‘solitude’. Here there were no reminders of humanity’s many troubles. ‘All seemed to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.’40

Victoria’s purchase of Balmoral was to cement a continuing association between the royal family and the Highlands. It was also to usher in the heyday of the deer forest. With imports of overseas wool and mutton now making sheep farming less and less profitable, huge tracts of territory were turned over to field sports. Shooting lodge after shooting lodge was built to accommodate the landed aristocrats and newly monied businessmen who came north each summer with a view to sampling a lifestyle modelled, very often, on largely fictional accounts of how the Highland chieftains of a previous era had organised their homes.

The sporting existence was anything but indolent, of course. To engage successfully in stalking, one nineteenth-century authority insisted, a man had to be ‘able to run like an antelope and breathe like the trade winds’. This was to ask rather a lot of the portly Victorians who now found themselves toiling up Highland hillsides in the rain. By surrounding himself with kilted ghillies, keepers and other flunkies, however, the owner or tenant of a sporting estate – his lodge wall covered with the trophies of the chase – could act out a role that had begun as little other than a literary fantasy of what it meant to live in the grand Highland style.41

Crofters, by the 1880s, were organising themselves politically with a view to staking their own claim to deer forests – which almost invariably contained the ruins of former townships. But the activities of the Highland Land League and its allies made little more impression on the cosily cocooned world of the sporting estate than the clearances had earlier made on Queen Victoria. Nor were crofting disorders permitted to trespass into the standard fictional depiction of the Highlands – most such depictions owing a good deal more to the works of James MacPherson and Walter Scott than they did to a Scotland where the military had to be regularly deployed to deal with Land League demonstrations.⁴²

Robert Louis Stevenson thought about writing a History of the Highlands – this history to deal with ‘the collapse of the clan system and the causes and growth of existing discontents’. Instead he wrote Kidnapped, which, though a great novel, is set firmly in the 1750s. Stevenson gives the clan-based Highlands a superb spokesman in Alan Breck whose real-life namesake was believed to have organised the assassination of one of the government officials charged with the task of rooting out surviving Jacobites. But Alan obviously belongs to a dying society. And the Highlands, significantly enough, are usually seen through the Lowland eyes of David Balfour, who is both Stevenson’s hero and the embodiment of an external social order which, in Kidnapped as in Waverley, seems most unlikely to do anything other than to shape Gaelic-speaking Highlanders to its own purposes.⁴³

If a first-rate writer like Robert Louis Stevenson was unable or unwilling to challenge the way in which the Highlands were now habitually represented, it was most unlikely that lesser novelists would instigate a new departure. And so it proved. Neil Munro, who came from Inveraray, was by no means unaffected by the results of clearance and depopulation:

O sad for me Glen Aora,

Where I have friends no more,

For lowly lie the rafters,

And the lintels of the door.

The friends are all departed,

The hearth-stone’s black and cold,

And sturdy grows the nettle

On the place beloved of old.44

But this was to sentimentalise what had been destroyed rather than to envisage the possibility of its being recreated. And it is indicative of Neil Munro’s inherent lack of confidence in a worthwhile Highland future that it is only in his resolutely whimsical Para Handy Tales that he deals with the Highlands as they existed in his lifetime. Munro’s ostensibly serious novels, most notably The New Road, were set, like Kidnapped, in the eighteenth century. And while the author of The New Road is clearly angered by what was done to Highlanders in the wake of Jacobitism’s collapse, he tends to be almost as gloomy as James MacPherson about his people’s long-term prospects. The eighteenth-century military roads which provide the novel with its title are symbolic of the triumph of the invader:

Whole tribes, that not so long ago were ill to meddle with as any bike of wasps, were now so little to be feared as butterflies; packmen from the Lowlands sometimes travelled through the worst-reputed valleys selling specs and ribbons.⁴⁵

As Kidnapped and The New Road proved, the Highland novel remained as popular as ever. But its popularity seemed predicated on its not challenging established stereotypes. The Highlands which the generality of people wanted both to visit and to read about – indeed the Highlands which the sporting fraternity attempted actually to create synthetically – was a place whose primary purpose was to gratify the wider world’s conceptions of how the Highlands ought to be. The Highlands of the Land League might be debated in parliament and in the editorial columns of the press. But the Highlands of popular fiction, as can readily be observed in the best-selling romances published in the 1870s and 1880s by a Glasgow-born journalist named William Black, had been transformed into a never-never-land where even the climate, so you sense, was expected to get togged up in the meteorological equivalent of full Highland dress.

An early Black novel, A Princess of Thule, makes the point perfectly. The hero and the heroine have been carefully manoeuvered on to a Lewis moor from which they are obliged to run by an approaching downpour:

But this race to escape the storm was needless; for they were just getting within sight of Barvas when a surprising change came over the dark and thundrous afternoon. The hurrying masses of cloud in the west parted for a little space, and there was a sudden fitful glimmer of a stormy blue sky. Then a strange, soft, yellow, and vaporous light shot across the Barvas hills, and touched up palely the great slopes, rendering them distant, ethereal and cloud-like. Then a shaft or two of wild light flashed down upon the landscape beside them. The cattle shone red in the brilliant-green pastures. The grey rocks glowed in their setting of moss. The stream going by the Barvas Inn was a streak of gold in its sandy bed. Presently the sky above them broke into great billows of cloud – tempestuous and rounded masses of golden vapour that burned with the wild glare of the sunset. The clear spaces in the sky widened; and from time to time the wind sent ragged bits of saffron cloud across the shining blue. All the world seemed to be on fire; and the very smoke of it – the majestic heaps of vapour that rolled by overhead – burned with a bewildering glare. Then, as the wind still blew hard, and kept veering round again to the north-west, the fiercely lit clouds were driven over one by one, leaving a pale and serene sky to look down on the sinking sun and the sea. The Atlantic caught the yellow glow on its tumbling waves; and a deeper colour stole across the slopes and peaks of the Barvas hills. Whither had gone the storm? There were still some banks of cloud away up in the north-east; and, in the clear green of the evening sky, they had their distant greys and purples faintly tinged with rose.46

William Black, you quickly gather from his many books, tended to go in for this sort of passage at those points in a narrative where one of his modern equivalents might indulge in a spot of bodice-ripping. But his orgasmic gales and thunderstorms were cumulatively to make the Highlands seem so other-worldly as to verge almost on the magical. Although some hints to this effect were certainly implicit in their novels and their poetry, writers like Scott had never gone quite so far. But the notion of the Highlands as a place of spiritual, even religious, significance had now got ineradicably into the atmosphere. And it was one which Black’s successors were deliberately to foster.

Foremost among these was William Sharp who, in the 1890s, turned out a whole series of novels and essays so unrelentingly dismal both in tone and content as to make James MacPherson seem positively light-hearted. Sharp’s writings were thought at the time to be the work of a woman called Fiona MacLeod. And something of their author’s altogether bizarre approach to the Highlands is to be discerned in the fact that Sharp, who took a close interest in the occult, believed Fiona to have a real existence as his feminine – or possibly Celtic – persona.

Nowadays Sharp’s books are not just unread but unreadable. In the years around 1900, however, he, or she, was widely regarded as one of the high priests, or priestesses, of the literary movement which became known as the Celtic Twilight. Taking its name from an early collection of short stories by the Irish writer and poet, W. B. Yeats, the Twilight was characterised, above all, by its making the Celtic peoples – whether in Ireland or the Highlands – the repositories of a uniquely mystical, if also pessimistic, way of life. Asserting that ‘the old Gaelic race is in its twilight indeed’, Fiona MacLeod attempted to recreate, indeed to heighten, the despondency which so suffuses MacPherson’s Ossian. Nor was she to be deflected from this task by the fact that land reformers, Gaelic revivalists and Irish nationalists were just then beginning to win victories of a kind that would have seemed wholly beyond the Gaelic-speaking world’s reach in the post-Culloden period which had given rise to James MacPherson. Ireland’s dreams of independence were ‘a perilous illusion’, MacLeod insisted. And no amount of crofting legislation could alter ‘the pathos’ and ‘the gloom’ which were intrinsic to the Highlands. The Highland ‘race’, MacLeod concluded, could look forward only to ‘a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its grave’.47

None of this would have mattered a great deal had it not served to take to new extremes the utterly fantastic way in which both Highlanders and their natural environment were now commonly regarded. In the 1920s and the 1930s, in particular, author after author churned out book after book in which the Highlands, their landscapes, their wildlife and their people are described in terms wholly disconnected from reality. Most of Scotland’s second-hand bookshops are still replete with the products of this curious industry. And even to dip into the multitudinous offerings of the trade’s leading practitioners, Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson and Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, is immediately to wonder if they, their publishers and their readers might have been more than slightly off their heads.

Donaldson was sufficiently aware of what was happening around her to acknowledge that Highlanders, especially island crofters, were among the ‘poorest of the poor’. But this, she implied, was of no real significance. What was important about such ‘poor islesmen’ was their ability to ‘exercise’ the ‘spiritual and natural graces’ which had transformed Barra, for example, into an ‘island of visions’.48

Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, his very name redolent of the Celtic Twilight he propagated so assiduously, was to indulge in even wilder flights of fancy. The Highlands, to MacGregor, were a place where ‘you will find yourself at one with the infinite’; a place of ‘faery-haunted isles’ steeped in the ‘magic peacefulness of dreamland’; a place where cattle ‘softly wend their way’ across ‘sleepy moors’ and where birds are forever ‘dipping their breasts into the roseate hues of morning’; a place of moonlit lochs where ‘little gnomes and fays are wont to play’; a place where ‘the soothing balm of the night-tide is sweeter far than the kisses of women’.⁴⁹

For reasons that should now be obvious, it is difficult to take MacGregor seriously. It has been all the harder to do so ever since Compton MacKenzie, both in Whisky Galore and several other novels, transformed Alasdair Alpin MacGregor into Hector Hamish MacKay, ‘the well-known topographer of the Hebrides and author of Faerie Lands Forlorn’. Nobody who thus became acquainted with the not-altogether-fictional Hector Hamish MacKay – ‘a small man in a kilt with slightly shrivelled but well-weathered knees, a prim Edinburgh accent, and spectacles’ – was likely ever again to take Alasdair Alpin MacGregor at face value. And this, of course, was Compton MacKenzie’s purpose. To MacKenzie, who was to live for quite some time on Barra, Donaldson, MacGregor and the rest of the Twilightists seemed simply to be distorting truth for their own ends. MacKenzie made this opinion clear in 1936:

My complaint as a reader, as a critic, as an inhabitant against some of the numerous works published during the last decade about the Western Isles is not so much of their superficiality as of their effort to make the islands and the islanders conform to a sentimental preconception in the minds of their authors.50

Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, not unnaturally, felt deeply wounded. And in his Chelsea home he planned what he conceived as his revenge. This was one more book, The Western Isles, which appeared in 1949 and which – though still highly complimentary about island scenery – presents Hebrideans in an altogether less appealing light than its author’s earlier works. The people of the Western Isles, MacGregor now tells his readers, are as unattractive and reprehensible a set of folk as are to be met with anywhere. Their ‘morals in the sexual sense’ are ‘extremely lax’. There is much ‘early and indiscriminate mating’. It follows that ‘bastardy’ is ‘common’ and ‘interbreeding’ even more so – though quite what it is that the two island sexes see in one another is a little bit mysterious in view of MacGregor’s account of their respective characters. Island women are ‘plain . . . many of them exceedingly so’. Island males are ‘indolent’, ‘dilatory’, ‘vindictive’ and given to ‘drunkenness’. To get off the steamer at Compton MacKenzie’s Barra, which MacGregor had previously described as next best thing to paradise, is immediately to meet with islanders who ‘stand, in furtive groups, against the post office walls and door, chatting, chaffing, smoking, spitting, swearing, blaspheming and not infrequently giving off alcoholic fumes’. This would be slightly more tolerable, MacGregor observes, were islanders not so dirty. As it is, he comments, men and women alike believe a bath to be ‘a piece of nonsense’. Many are ‘perpetually in a verminous condition’.⁵¹

To read MacGregor’s last book, then, is to be reminded of John Muir’s remarks about the Indians he encountered in Yosemite. ‘The worst thing about them,’ Muir noted of these people, ‘is their uncleanliness.’ And there is a sense in which Alasdair Alpin MacGregor – as well as attempting to get back at Compton MacKenzie – was venting a parallel disillusionment with another group of human beings who have similarly shown themselves unworthy of their enchanting natural surroundings. Had MacGregor been able to arrange such a thing, you feel, he would have ideally liked the inhabitants of the Western Isles to be treated in much the same way as the Indians who had been driven out of America’s national parks. Such expulsions, after all, would have served to preserve the Western Isles for those best able to appreciate them – a category which, as far as Alasdair Alpin MacGregor was concerned, did not include most islanders.52

For all its ever more apparent craziness, it does not do to underestimate the influence of the Celtic Twilight. Alasdair Alpin MacGregor’s Over the Sea to Skye, a volume which also carried the typically Twilightist subtitle, Ramblings in an Elfin Isle, was introduced to the public by none other than James Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister. To be in Skye and to sit ‘by the ingle of an evening’, MacDonald assured MacGregor’s many fans, was to have an opportunity to ‘wander . . . into fairyland’. And so predominant are such sentiments in early-twentieth-century books about the Highlands that it is an enormous pleasure to come across the writings of the man who, more than any other single individual, can be credited with having begun to rescue the area from its numerous romanticisers.⁵³

This man was Seton Gordon. Born in Aboyne, on Deeside, in 1886, Seton Gordon was, above all other things, a naturalist. To read his work is to find Highland hills described more matter-offactly than they had been since Duncan Ban MacIntyre composed his poem in honour of Ben Dorain:

It is during the first days of August that we make a visit to the hills. The heat wave has broken and the weather is unsettled, though giving promise of better things to come. For some days past a mild breeze from the south has been blowing, and under its genial influence the remaining fields of snow are rapidly diminishing. It is early morning as we leave the shelter where we have been staying overnight. The sun has just risen, and shines brightly on the high ground to the westward, though the pass is as yet in twilight. Thunder showers the night before have cleared off the haze, and the mountains around us stand out with wonderful sharpness in the early morning light. During the hours of darkness a herd of stags have come down to the riverside, and as we open the door of our shelter we find them grazing some 100 yards from us. Evidently they are taken by suprise, for at first they show no inclination to move, but having realised that their archenemy, man, is in such close proximity, they set off at a mad rush, and do not pause until the river is crossed and they have climbed some distance up the hillside opposite.

Our way leads up a steep corrie, down which rushes a swift mountain burn, and in the soft sunlight every blade of grass stands out a vivid green. The corrie is rich in plantlife, and we come across several white-flowered specimens of the cross-leaved heath (Erica tetralix). The cow-wheat (Melampyrum montanum) still shows its delicate blossoms in favoured situations, and we meet with at least two Alpine forms of the staghorn moss. We surprise a fox on an early morning prowl, and the marauder crosses our path with easy stride; his tail is held erect, and this gives him a somewhat unusual appearance. The top of the corrie reached, we have a gradual ascent until a height of some 3,600 feet is reached, when we call a halt and wait for some time on a slope covered with scree, where the snow bunting has his home. In the earlier part of the summer the male bird is in almost continuous song from 1 a.m. until late afternoon, but now the nesting season is over he is silent, and though we watch the nesting site carefully, we are unable to see any traces of the birds.54

Like Frank Fraser Darling, who was to follow in his footsteps, Seton Gordon can be criticised for having failed to observe nature with a properly scientific detachment. And he was never to break completely with the romantic tradition. But he was much more inclined than most of his immediate predecessors to take the Highlands as he found them. His interest in Gaelic and piping was the interest of a man who genuinely wanted to understand Highland culture. And he was much more inclined to discern only material disadvantage in those island townships which writers like Fiona MacLeod and Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson had thought awash with Celtic spirituality. Writing of Skye in 1937, Gordon commented:

Life is still hard in the isles. Even at the present day many people have no road to their houses: the sick, the old and the infirm are carried or supported perhaps a distance of half a mile, perhaps more, to the nearest road. There are townships in Skye which it is impossible to reach in autumn or winter without wading over the ankles in mud or water.⁵⁵

In everything except his much greater willingess to learn from those who lived and worked in mountain country, Seton Gordon bears comparison with John Muir. And Gordon was to influence others just as Muir had done. Adam Watson, who would afterwards become the leading scientific authority on the ecology and wildlife of the Cairngorms, remembers how, at the age of eight, he first came across Seton Gordon’s books in a library in Ballater:

My parents had taken me to different parts of Scotland, but suddenly Deeside and the Highlands that I thought I knew were immediately relegated into distant memories of no importance. The fact was I had known them only in a superficial and trivial sense. The Highlands that Seton Gordon wrote about were utterly different, a place of endless beauty and variety, with a wonderful wildlife and fine people . . . From then on I saw Scotland, its wildlife, weather, skies, people and culture, with this different eye.56

Several other naturalists and ecologists – among them Desmond Nethersole Thomson and John Morton Boyd – were also to attribute their various involvements with the Highlands to their early exposure to Seton Gordon’s writings. Although Gordon had his own predecessors, most notably the Victorian naturalist, J. A. Harvie-Brown, he can consequently be seen to have played a key part in promoting a truly ecological understanding of the Highlands. And as Gordon’s ecologist successors got more and more to grips with the region, they began inexorably to undermine the whole basis of the romantic approach to it. The Highland landscape, it began to be suspected, was not at all as natural as had been assumed by the many people who had been so charmed by it. That landscape, for example, had been artificially stripped of its forests. It had also, of course, been artificially stripped of its people. And this was one more message that twentieth-century developments – cultural now as well as scientific – were unrelentingly to hammer home.