Without the Heartbreak of the Tale
A week or so following their brief halt at Achadh nan Seileach, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell were in Skye, where they stayed for a day or two at Corriechatachain, a couple of miles from Broadford. Here the two travellers were the guests of one of the local gentry whose home, Johnson recalled, was ‘very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it’. This hill is Beinn na Caillich. And looking at its scree-covered slopes from the single-track road which nowadays heads out of Broadford in the direction of Torrin, Kilbride, Kilmarie and Elgol, it is easy to understand why Beinn na Caillich’s ‘height and steepness’ should have dissuaded Johnson from climbing to its summit.1
Westwards from Corriechatachain is the valley of Strath Suardal. Here, in a township which has long since vanished, there was born William Ross, who was about eleven years of age when Samuel Johnson came this way and who was afterwards to produce some of the eighteenth century’s more memorable Gaelic poetry. There is no way of identifying now the precise location of the hill shielings which William Ross describes so lyrically in his verse. But some at least of these shielings – the name given to the upland pastures where cattle were driven each summer – would very probably have been tucked away among the low hills on the south side of Strath Suardal. Because there is a lot of limestone in this quarter, its soils are less acidic than one normally expects in Skye. As can be seen from the footpath which leaves Strath Suardal in the vicinity of the ruined church of Kilchrist, there is consequently good grass to be got here – the sort of grass on which to raise fine cows.2
This footpath heads eventually due south, traversing the boggy plateau to the west of Loch Lonachan prior to plunging into the gorge cut by the noisy burn called Allt na Pairte. Here you begin to catch sight of the sea and to get spectacular views of Rum and other islands. Here, too, on turning a sudden corner in the path, you find yourself gazing down on the green fields and ruined homes of Boreraig.
In 1850, just before this part of Skye was cleared, there were more than thirty families living in Boreraig and in the neighbouring township of Suisnish, some two miles to the west. The district’s owner was Lord Macdonald of Sleat, whose freespending ways had resulted in debts of £218,000 – then a quite staggering sum. This was clearly something of a problem for Lord Macdonald. It was to be rather more than that for the folk of Boreraig and Suisnish. As a newspaper editorial of the time observed:
When the lands are heavily mortgaged, the obvious, though harsh, resource is dispossessing the small tenants to make room for a better class . . . and this task generally devolves on south country managers . . . who look only to money returns and cannot sympathise with the peculiar situation and feelings of the Highland population.3
The Boreraig and Suisnish people were accordingly evicted. Some, as was afterwards remarked, were ‘scattered here and there’ across the southern half of Skye. Others were shipped to Australia, their departure being witnessed by Archibald Geikie, a pioneering geologist who happened to be investigating rock formations in the vicinity of Strath Suardal on the day that many of Lord Macdonald’s newly dispossessed tenants made their way to Broadford and the waiting emigrant ship. His recollections of the Boreraig and Suisnish evictions, as is clear from Geikie’s memoirs, were to stay with him always:
I had heard some rumours of those intentions, but did not realise they were in process of being carried into effect until, one afternoon, as I was returning from my ramble, a strange wailing sound reached my ears at intervals from the west. On gaining the top of one of the hills on the south side of the valley, I could see a long and motley procession winding along the road that led north from Suisnish. It halted at the point of the road opposite Kilbride, and there the lamentation became loud and long . . . It was a miscellaneous gathering of at least three generations of crofters. There were old men and women, too feeble to walk, who were placed in carts; the younger members of the community on foot were carrying their bundles of clothes and household effects, while the children, with looks of alarm, walked alongside . . . Everyone was in tears . . . When they set forth once more, a cry of grief went up to heaven, the long plaintive wail, like a funeral coronach, was resumed, and after the last of the emigrants had disappeared behind the hill, the sound seemed to re-echo through the whole wide valley . . . in one prolonged note of desolation.4
One modern historian of the clearances has called Boreraig ‘bleak country’. But it is hard to go along with that – particularly on the sort of day when the township, south-facing and sheltered by enclosing hills, is warmed by a summer sun. On such a day, as you sit among its empty houses and look across its meadows in the direction of the sea, Boreraig seems more beautiful than bleak. Nor is it nearly as difficult as is usually the case in such deserted villages to imagine how the place would have been when inhabited. Boreraig, as an archaeologist has commented, ‘survives almost as when cleared in the 1850s’. You can readily envisage, therefore, how its various component parts connected with each other:
The relationship between crofting township, the later sheep folds and enclosures, a standing stone in the centre of the infield, a dun and chapel on the seashore and different phases of settlement inside and outside the head-dyke all point to the dynamics of settlement in the area.5
Think about that standing stone, that dun, that chapel. Collectively they demonstrate that people lived in Boreraig for one, two, three, four, or even five, millennia before the place was cleared. People have been missing from this spot, then, for fewer than one hundred and fifty of the last five thousand years. That is why the Boreraig landscape, from a Highland standpoint, seems so terribly unnatural. That is why, as in this poem by Iain Crichton Smith, the clearances can still cause so much anger. Their consequences, after all, are still so very obvious:
The thistles climb the thatch. Forever
this sharp scale in our poems,
as also the waste music of the sea.
The stars shine over Sutherland
in a cold ceilidh of their own,
as, in the morning, the silver cane
cropped among corn. We will remember this.
Though hate is evil we cannot
but hope your courtier’s heels in hell
are burning: that to hear
the thatch sizzling in tanged smoke
your hot ears slowly learn.6
Anger of this kind, however, was to take a long time to make its presence felt. The clearances, as well as depopulating so much of the Highlands, went a long way to breaking the spirit of those communities which managed to escape destruction. Crofters did not resist eviction in anything other than a sporadic and uncoordinated fashion. And although Iain MacCodrum, Duncan Ban MacIntyre and other eighteenth-century poets were highly critical of those former chieftains to whom money came to matter more than clanship, worthwhile opposition to evicting landlords was made all the harder to organise by the fact that these landlords, very often, were men whom the Gaelic world had customarily regarded as its leaders and protectors. Had Boreraig’s landlord been a foreigner, so to speak, it might have been comparatively easy to mobilise his tenants against him. But the man who was ultimately responsible for Boreraig’s clearance, Lord Macdonald, was also the latest representative of a chieftainly dynasty to whom Skye people had owed allegiance since the fourteenth century. This maybe did not mean a lot to Lord Macdonald – whose family had long since ceased to care about their Gaelic heritage. But it was no easy thing for other, still Gaelic-speaking, Highlanders to come to terms with the extent to which their former chiefs were now reneging on traditional obligations.
From the first, of course, the extinction of communities like Boreraig and Achadh nan Seileach caused Highlanders to look on landscape in a wholly novel way. Places which had previously been regarded with the sort of affection which Duncan Ban MacIntyre felt for Ben Dorain were now associated with the melancholy which so infuses this nineteenth-century poem from Morvern:
Dìreadh a mach ri Beinn Shianta,
Gur cianail tha mo smuaintean;
Sealltainn sìos thar a’ bhealaich
’S ann agamsa tha an sealladh fuaraidh.
’S lìonmhor bothan bochd gun àird air
Air gach taobh ’na làraich uaine;
Agus fàrdach tha gun mhullach
Is ’na tulach aig an fhuaran.
Far an robh an teine ’s na pàisdean
’S ann as àirde dh’fhàs an luachair.
As I go up the face of Ben Hiant
my thoughts are very sad;
seeing the mountain a wilderness
with no tillage on its face.
As I look down over the pass
the view I have is very chill.
There is many a poor hut levelled,
a green site on every side . . .
Where the fire and children were
the rushes grow the highest.7
Such sentiments could hardly have been more at odds with those expressed, during the same general period, by Wordsworth, Scott, Byron and other exponents of a romanticism which saw nothing but grandeur where many Highlanders discerned only cause for grief. Nor was there anything at all transient about such differences of opinion as to the meaning and significance of Highland landscape. In one form or another they have endured into the present. They underlie the contrast between Hugh MacLennan’s response to Kintail and the much more general tendency to think Kintail an altogether splendid place. They are equally evident in two modern approaches to the countryside around Loch Shiel – the area where Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair grew up. To an environmentalist like Mike Tomkies, this countryside, as the title of one of his books puts it, is nothing other than A Last Wild Place. But where Tomkies is content to celebrate the Loch Shiel landscape as it now exists, a Highland writer like the late Calum MacLean was much more inclined to mourn the human beings who were previously integral to the Loch Shiel scene:
I have never seen anything so beautiful as Loch Shiel in the sunshine of an early June morning. But the beauty of Loch Shiel makes one sad, for on the wooded slopes can still be seen clear traces of tillage . . . left to be overgrown with grass when the tillers left over a hundred years ago to face an uncertain future and to start life anew beyond the seas.8
Mike Tomkies writes well about wildlife. But his failure to grasp the essential artificiality of an environment from which people have been forcibly removed is indicative of a wider failing on the part of the environmental movement as a whole. Although environmentalist approaches to the Highlands, as the following chapter will acknowledge, are at last starting to take account of Highland susceptibilities, environmentalist thinking about the area remains shot through with notions which owe much more to romanticism and to the Celtic Twilight than they do to any genuine understanding of how the Highlands came to be the way they are. So much has been made by so many for so long of the haunting beauty of our empty glens and our unpopulated lochsides that it seems little short of heretical to suggest that human communities should be established in these places once again. But a willingness to contemplate just such resettlement, so this book argues, will be a necessary element in any general rapprochement between environmentalists and the many Highlanders who have felt strongly, for a hundred years or more, that the consequences of the clearances both can, and must, be utterly reversed.
A vital step in the direction of Highland betterment was taken by the Highland Land League, which, by finally making it impossible for crofters to be evicted, brought the clearances to an end. But the Crofters Act of 1886, the Land League’s main achievement, was deficient in one key respect. It made no provision for restoring to the crofting population the many areas from which crofters had already been expelled. Hence the extent to which the Highlands continued to be convulsed, into the 1920s and beyond, by land raids mounted by crofting communities attempting to stake their claims to the sheep farms and deer forests from which earlier generations had been evicted. Nothing of this, it goes almost without saying, was reflected in the work of writers of the Celtic Twilight school. But the Celtic Twilight, it had become clear by the 1920s, was not forever to have things all its own way. An alternative view of the Highlands was at last beginning to find literary expression. And this view was one that sought explicitly to promote the regeneration of a culture and a population which a whole succession of hugely influential writers – from the eighteenth century onwards – had assumed to have no future.9
He would have found it ‘comparatively easy and acceptable’, Neil Gunn commented in 1929, to fill his novels with ‘the staple fare of kilts, sporrans and romance in island dawns and Celtic twilights’. But Gunn, to begin with anyway, was determined to depict the Highlands as they really were. And his characters consequently interact with their surroundings in a way that must have seemed extraordinarily discomfiting to anyone whose reading had previously consisted of Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson, Alasdair Alpin MacGregor and other writers of that type:
This land was too old. Scarred and silent, it was settling down to decay . . . A huddle of grey houses, straw-thatched, lying to the earth with an aged decrepitude that humped their backs. Seven of them all told. No life stirred urgently, nor cry of child. An old man came to a gable-end and, his shoulders hunched, stood looking at Ewan.
A middle-aged man ploughed slowly in a field . . . Ewan’s eyes fell on the houses that now seemed to be huddled for warmth, and all at once he saw them mean and wretched, and understood that they were dying, thin-blooded and miserable.10
But the Highland predicament, as far as Gunn was concerned, was neither inevitable nor unalterable. It was the product, as Gunn observed in 1931, of conscious human action:
The people were not only cleared out of the glens, hunted and dragooned or shipped aboard like cattle, but those who remained, after being cowed into a mood of utter subjection, were by the most subtle and insidious means . . . made to despise their language and tradition.11
With Neil Gunn, then, this book returns to its opening chapter and, in particular, to Frantz Fanon’s conviction that any people wishing to regain control of their own destiny had best begin by retrieving their own past from those who have sought to impugn and devalue it. Highlanders, Gunn admitted, had long since ceased to produce ‘music or poetry or anything of the slightest consequence’. But this was because they had been so exploited as to have become ‘a really first-class slave race’; watching the Highlands degenerate into ‘a sporting preserve’; ‘glad of any chance of earning a pound or two from . . . your wealthy outsider’. None of this, Neil Gunn contended in 1945, was necessary. The Highlands need not be so deprived. The area could be revitalised. But such revitalisation would not be brought about by means of economic development alone. Highlanders had to be roused from the torpor and apathy to which evicting landlords had reduced them. They had to be persuaded to take a pride both in themselves and in their heritage. They had to be made aware of the achievements of a Gaelic civilisation which had once brought ‘Christianity and learning’ to much of Europe:
It is the simplest matter in the world to set down on paper a full scheme for Highland regeneration. We all know the ingredients by this time as we know the words of an old song: crofting, hill sheep farming, sea fisheries, hydro-electric development, afforestation, appropriate light industries, transport and so on. But there is one thing that is always missing, one all-important matter which the paper economists forget, and that is the general lack of belief among the Highland people themselves in the future of their own land as a place where life could be lived interestingly and well.12
A lot of this was music to the ears of Christopher Murray Grieve, or Hugh MacDiarmid, who also began to attract attention in the 1920s. Like Gunn, MacDiarmid was heavily embroiled in the politics of Scottish nationalism. Like Gunn, MacDiarmid looked to Ireland – then newly independent – for both political and cultural inspiration. And like Gunn, whom he believed to be leading Scotland ‘out of the Celtic Twilight and into the Gaelic sun’, MacDiarmid insisted that Highlanders, indeed Scots generally, had to be made to realise just how much Gaels had once accomplished.13
The Caithness-born Neil Gunn’s father was a Gaelic-speaker. Hugh MacDiarmid, who came from the Borders, had first been exposed to Gaelic when, as a child, he spent his holidays in the Easter Ross household of an uncle whose second wife was as much at home in Gaelic as in English. Both the language and its literature clearly intrigued the young MacDiarmid. Nor was this most eminent of twentieth-century Scottish poets ever to lose interest in Gaelic. Eventually, in fact, MacDiarmid was to become convinced, as he put it, that ‘a Scottish Scotland must be a Gaelic Scotland’. Hence his adoption of the Highland name, MacDiarmid. Hence his translations of the poetry of Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. Hence his typically virulent assaults on the ‘trite moralisings’, ‘mawkish sentimentality’, ‘supernatural fancies’ and ‘outrageous banality’ which MacDiarmid thought characteristic of writers like Fiona MacLeod and Alasdair Alpin MacGregor. The Highlands and Islands, MacDiarmid observed, were certainly worth knowing. But their fame ought not to rest on the increasingly widespread conviction that the area and its people possessed some sort of direct line to the hereafter:
Not a bit of it! That is the bunkum of the Celtic Twilight. There is nothing more detestable, perhaps, than this Tibetization of the Hebrides – this myth that represents the islanders as all some sort of spiritual sportsmen, specialising in weird and wonderful soul states.14
Ever since James MacPherson had first put pen to paper, the Gaelic and the Highland mind had been imagined to be dark, mysterious, brooding, mystic, fey. MacDiarmid’s purpose was to overturn all such ideas. That was why he wanted as many people as possible to know something of the Gaelic literature of earlier ages. To be acquainted with this literature, as MacDiarmid realised, was immediately to be convinced that James MacPherson and the Twilight circle had got the Highlands, and the Celtic world generally, quite wrong. Another modern Scottish poet, William Neill, made essentially the same point in these words:
I have read a great deal of poetry in the Celtic tongues. Formal stanzas, clear images and a lack of obscurity are the characteristics of its best exemplars; Celtic mistiness is an invention of non-Celts and bad romantic novelists. It is this ‘bright’ poetry which is to my taste and I hope it has influenced my own work.15
A good deal of Neill’s ‘own work’ – although he was born in Ayrshire and although he wrote also in Scots and in English – was in Gaelic. But the style and ethos of the older poetry to which Neill referred have equally influenced the thinking of a poet like Norman MacCaig – for all that English was his sole linguistic medium. In an interview touching on his family connections with the Highlands, the Edinburgh-born MacCaig once commented:
Celtic art is not at all the romantic, not to say sentimental, thing of popular belief. Its extreme formality is to be seen in all the forms it takes – in its carvings and sculptures, its personal ornaments, its poetry and its music. Think of pibroch!16
Similar observations have been made by several of the twentieth-century scholars, such as Kuno Meyer and Kenneth Jackson, who translated into English the very ancient Gaelic nature poetry quoted in a previous chapter. ‘The Celtic literatures,’ Jackson wrote in his preface to a series of translations on which that chapter drew substantially, ‘are about as little given to mysticism or sentimentality as it is possible to be; their most outstanding characteristic is rather their astonishing power of imagination.’ These were MacCaig’s views exactly. And Jackson’s comments, interestingly enough, might readily be applied to Norman MacCaig’s own poetry:
A bird’s voice chinks and tinkles
Alone in the gaunt reedbed –
Tiny silversmith
Working late in the evening.
I sit and listen. The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.
Flowers’ closing time: bee lurches
Across the hayfield, singing
And feeling its drunken way
Around the air’s invisible corners.17
There is a sense in these lines of something reaching back, across the centuries, to the hermit-poets of very long ago. And that same sense of a modern poet being in touch with the remotest of his predecessors is still more evident in Sorley MacLean’s great evocation of the woods on his native Raasay:
Gallain a’ ghiuthais
air lùthadh an fhirich;
gorm-chlogadan suaithneis,
muir uaine gun dinneadh;
treun, aotrom, ceann-gaothail,
neo-shaothrach, gun shireadh,
a’ choille mhòr ghuanach,
ruadh, uaine, dà fhilleadh.
air an t-seòmar àrd uaine;
am mullach ’s an t-ùrlar
trom-dhathte le suaimhneas:
mith-chuachan na sòbhraig,
bileag bhuidhe air uaine;
is cuilbh dhìreach an t-seòmair,
giuthas òirdheirc in luasgain . . .
A’ choille mhòr shiùbhlach
’s i ùrail am meanmna;
a’ choille àrd uaine
ann an luadh ioma-dhealbhach.
A’ choille ’s mo bhuadhan
ann an luathghair nan geala-chas:
a’ choille bàrr-gùcach
le ùrachadh falbhach.
Coille na grèine
’s i èibhneach is mireagach:
a’ choille ioma-ghaothach,
an leug fhaodail dhrithleannach;
coille na sgàile
’s i tàmhach neo-dhribheagach:
coille a’ chrònain
’s i òranach luinneagach.
Straight trunks of the pine
on the flexed hill-slope:
green, heraldic helmets,
green unpressed sea:
strong, light, wind-headed,
untoiling, unseeking,
russet, green, two plaitings.
Floor of bracken and birch
in the high green room:
the roof and the floor
heavily coloured, serene:
tiny cups of the primrose,
yellow petal on green,
and the straight pillars of the room,
the noble restless pines . . .
The great wood in motion,
fresh in its spirit;
the high green wood,
in a many-coloured waulking;
the wood and my senses
in a white-footed rapture;
the wood in blossom
with a fleeting renewal.
The sunlit wood
joyful and sportive,
the many-winded wood,
the glittering jewel found by chance;
the shady wood,
peaceful and unflurried,
the humming wood
of songs and ditties, 18
Sorley MacLean, born at Osgaig in Raasay in 1911, and easily the most significant Gaelic poet of recent times, had much in common with the rather older MacDiarmid – whose poetry MacLean always valued very highly. Like MacDiarmid, MacLean was deeply scornful both of the Celtic Twilight and its romantic antecedents. Also like MacDiarmid, MacLean looked for inspiration to the eighteenth-century Gaelic poets – most notably, in MacLean’s case, to William Ross and Duncan Ban MacIntyre – whose works were generally ignored by the very large number of people who preferred to think of the Highlands in the way that Scott, Wordsworth and the romantics thought about them. For all such romantics, as is evident from a comment which he made in the mid-1930s, the young MacLean had nothing but contempt. MacLean was speaking about Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, the poem with which this book began. He said of it:
Exquisitely subtle in technique, it is in content, I believe, the greatest example of naturalistic realism in the poetry of Europe . . . In my opinion, MacIntyre’s objective naturalist realism is likely to be considered far more permanently significant than the mixture of sentimentalism, pure illusion and ruminating subjectivity . . . which constitutes Wordsworth’s poetry.19
Sorley MacLean was also to discern in Hugh MacDiarmid’s early lyrics ‘a sensitivity to certain impressions from external nature’ which MacLean, as a Gaelic poet striving to write about landscape in an authentically Gaelic manner, also thought superior to anything in Wordsworth. Such comments – despite the fact that the more mature MacLean was to retract the statement in which he compared the great English romantic poet so adversely to Duncan Ban MacIntyre – provide a highly informative insight into the major literary effort being made, by the 1930s, to develop a new understanding of Scotland’s natural environment. This understanding – as generated by writers like Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean – was inevitably a twentieth-century one. But it also contained important elements of the way that nature and landscape had been understood, especially by Gaelic poets, in the era prior to MacPherson, Scott and their disciples so successfully transforming the Highlands into one of romanticism’s best-known icons.20
His natural surroundings consequently mattered very much to Hugh MacDiarmid:
My earliest impressions are of an almost tropical luxuriance of nature – of great forests, of honey-scented heather hills, and moorlands infinitely rich in little-appreciated beauties of flowering, of animal and insect life, of strange and subtle relationships of water and light.21
Much the same was true of Sorley MacLean. Landscape, he stressed in interview after interview, was one of the key creative influences on his work. And this is instantly apparent in the poem MacLean called An t-Eilean, meaning Skye, the island:
O Eilein mhòir, Eilein mo ghaoil,
is iomadh oidhche dhiubh a shaoil
leam an cuan mòr fhèin bhith luasgan,
le do ghaol-sa air a bhuaireadh
is tu ’nad laighe air an fhairge,
eòin mhòir sgiamhaich na h-Albann,
do sgiathan àlainn air an lùbadh
mu Loch Bhràcadail ioma-chùilteach,
do sgiathan bòidheach ri muir sleuchdte
bhon Eist Fhiadhaich gu Àird Shlèite,
do sgiathan aoibhneach air an sgaoileadh
mu Loch Shnitheasort ’s mun t-saoghal!
O Eilein mhòir, m’ Eilein, mo chiall,
’s iomadh oidhche shìn mi riamh
ri do thaobh-sa anns an t-suain ud
is ceò na camhanaich gad shuaineadh!
Is gràdhach leam gach bileag fraoich ort
bho Rubha Hùnais gu Loch Shlaopain,
agus gach bileag roid dhomh càirdeach
o Shròin Bhiornaill gus a’ Ghàrsbheinn,
gach lochan, sruth is abhainn aoibhneach
o Ròmasdal gu Bràigh Aoineart,
agus ged a nochdainn Pàrras,
dè b’ fhiach a ghealach-san gun Bhlàbheinn?
O great Island, Island of my love,
many a night of them I fancied
the great ocean itself restless,
agitated with love of you
as you lay on the sea,
great beautiful bird of Scotland,
your supremely beautiful wings bent
about many-nooked Loch Bracadale,
your beautiful wings prostrate on the sea
from the Wild Stallion to the Aird of Sleat,
your joyous wings spread
about Loch Snizort and the world.
O great Island, my Island, my love,
many a night I lay stretched
by your side in that slumber
when the mist of twilight swathed you.
My love every leaflet of heather on you
from Rudha Hunish to Loch Slapin,
from Stron Bhiornaill to the Garsven,
every tarn, stream and burn a joy
from Romisdale to Brae Eynort,
and even if I came in sight of Paradise,
what price its moon without Blaven?22
Here landscape is personalised, even eroticised, as it is also in Norman MacCaig’s poem, A Man in Assynt:
Glaciers, grinding West, gouged out
these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone,
and left, on the hard rock below – the
ruffled foreland –
this frieze of mountains, filed
on the blue air – Stac Polly,
Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven,
Canisp – a frieze and
a litany.
Who owns this landscape?
Has owning anything to do with love?
For it and I have a love affair, so nearly human
we even have quarrels. –
When I intrude too confidently
it rebuffs me with a wind like a hand
or puts in my way
a quaking bog or a loch
where no loch should be. Or I turn stonily
away, refusing to notice
the rouged rocks, the mascara
under a dripping ledge, even
the tossed, the stony limbs waiting.
I can’t pretend
it gets sick for me in my absence,
though I get sick for it. Yet I love it
with special gratitude, since
it sends me no letters, is never
jealous and, expecting nothing
from me, gets nothing but
cigarette packets and footprints.
Who owns this landscape? –
The millionaire who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?
To read A Man in Assynt is immediately to be reminded of Hugh MacLennan’s reaction to Kintail. For MacCaig, unlike the Gaelic poets of an earlier time, could not simply treat landscape as a given fact, a simply present entity. He was ineradicably aware, as Hugh MacLennan was aware, as every Highlander has been aware since the early nineteenth century, of the extent to which community and landscape have been severed by the complex of forces, the sequence of events, we call the Highland Clearances:
Or has it come to this,
that this dying landscape belongs
to the dead, the crofters and fighters
and fishermen whose larochs
sink into the bracken
by Loch Assynt and Loch Crocach? –
to men trampled under the hoofs of sheep
and driven by deer to
the ends of the earth – to men whose loyalty
was so great it accepted their own betrayal
by their own chiefs and whose descendants now
are kept in their place
by English businessmen and the indifference
of a remote and ignorant government.24
The clearances loomed large, then, for Norman MacCaig. For Sorley MacLean – writing always in Gaelic and, as a result of his Raasay upbringing, rather closer than the Edinburgh-born MacCaig to family memories of eviction – the clearances loomed larger still. So intermingled were his surroundings with his community’s often tragic past, in fact, that it was clearly difficult for MacLean to separate the one from the other:
My symbols almost automatically became the landscape of my physical environment. But, of course, that was always blended with what I knew of the history of my people.25
An especially inescapable fact of that history was the clearance of the greater part of Raasay in the 1850s. It was with the implications of this clearance that Sorley MacLean was to wrestle in a poem he entitled simply Hallaig – the name of one of the twelve Raasay townships which were then emptied of their people. Assessing the significance of Hallaig, John MacInnes, perhaps the most perceptive analyst of MacLean’s poetry and certainly the analyst most conscious of the historical influences operating on that poetry, has commented:
Hallaig is a twentieth-century poem and contains images of its time. Setting these aside, I have a feeling that it is also a poem that would have been understood a thousand years ago and more.26
What would certainly have been understood by the Gaels of many centuries back, whether in Scotland or in Ireland, is the emphasis in MacLean’s work on the link between people and locality. Community and place have always been believed by Gaelic-speakers to be integral to each other. That is one reason why the destruction of villages like Hallaig, Boreraig and Achadh nan Seileach had such traumatic repercussions. By no means the least powerful aspect of MacLean’s Hallaig, therefore, is the way the poem encapsulates the terrible hurt involved in the breaking of the bond between Hallaig’s human occupants and the little piece of ground to which these same folk, and so many of their ancestors, had for so long belonged. The point is well made by a modern Irish Gael, Brendan Devlin, in the course of a reflection on MacLean’s unusually intimate relationship with the island environment in which so many of his poems are set:
This sense of landscape and attachment to place is closely bound up with human relations, not merely with personal memories of friends and their company . . . but with a profound awareness of the community extended not only in place but also in time; an awareness of all those who lived and strove and were buried in the earth, not as remote figures in a history-book but as part of one’s own flesh and blood.27
Just as a living community is made the more attractive by its possessing a collective consciousness of its own continuity, so a place which has been cleared seems, from a Highland perspective at all events, to have about it something of the dreariness which Hugh MacLennan sensed so strongly in Kintail. The romantic mind, as the previous chapter argued, might sometimes have been thrilled by a depopulated landscape’s tragic associations. The Highland mind, however, is much more likely to find the self-same landscape merely saddening and depressing. That is why Loch Shiel’s surroundings seemed so dispiriting to Calum MacLean. That is why Neil Gunn invariably felt dejected when visiting the once thickly peopled Strath of Kildonan:
For not only does environment affect human development, but human development in turn affects environment. In a happy, thriving community the very land, to our senses, takes on a certain pleasant friendliness. Children feel this particularly and, in after life, have an enhanced memory of sunlight and flowering growths. On the other hand, in Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill, of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed.28
Hugh MacDiarmid, for his part, compared the almost audible silence of a depopulated glen to ‘the stillness of foetal death’ – an extinguished community, as his image suggests, having something of a still-born infant’s ‘unevolved’ potential. Death resonates through MacLean’s Hallaig also; for the poem is, in its way, a lament, a cry of heartfelt anguish for what has been so wantonly, so casually, destroyed. As Iain Crichton Smith observed, however, there is much more to Hallaig than that:
Sometimes in certain texts in literature we sense that the poet has reached levels of intuition that go beyond the intelligence and the reasoning mind, that he has made contact with his theme in a very direct way. I have myself sensed this often in Shakespeare and in some Greek poetry. We find it, I believe, very finely in Hallaig. In this poem it is as if MacLean felt and sensed quite clearly the desolation, the sadness, the terrible emptiness of the Highlands, its ghosts and presences, in an absolute intuitional music.29
In Hallaig, as in so many of the older Gaelic poems cited earlier, trees are very much in evidence. But these trees are symbols now as well as simple objects of affection. The township’s former community, its ‘ghosts and presences’, have been transformed and transmuted into a wood. And it is this touch, perhaps, which gives to Hallaig its strangest, most unanticipated, quality. Iain Crichton Smith again:
In this poem there is not only desolation, the loneliness of the Highlands, but also a deep central joy, as if there is also immortality.30
This book returns in due course to MacLean’s transcendent optimism. But first to an extract from Hallaig, ‘this most beautiful, mysterious and intriguing poem’, as Iain Crichton Smith called it:
Tha bùird is tàirnean air an uinneig
trom faca mi an Àird an Iar
’s tha mo ghaol aig Allt Hallaig
’na craoibh bheithe, ’s bha i riamh
eadar an t-Inbhir ’s Poll a’ Bhainne,
thall ’s a-bhos mu Bhaile Chùirn:
tha i ’na beithe, ’na calltainn,
’na caorann dhìrich sheang ùir.
Ann an Sgreapadal mo chinnidh,
far robh Tarmad ’s Eachann Mòr,
tha ’n nigheanan ’s am mic ’nan coille
a’ gabhail suas ri taobh an lòin.
Uaibhreach a-nochd na coilich ghiuthais
a’ gairm air mullach Cnoc an Rà,
dìreach an druim ris a’ ghealaich –
chan iadsan coille mo ghràidh.
gus an tig i mach an Càrn,
gus am bi am bearradh uile
o Bheinn na Lice fa sgàil.
Mura tig ’s ann theàrnas mi a Hallaig
a dh’ionnsaigh Sàbaid nam marbh,
far a bheil an sluagh a’ tathaich,
gach aon ghinealach a dh’fhalbh.
Tha iad fhathast ann a Hallaig,
Clann Ghill-Eain ’s Clann MhicLeòid,
na bh’ ann ri linn Mhic Ghille Chaluim:
chunnacas na mairbh beò.
Na fir ’nan laighe air an lèanaig
aig ceann gach taighe a bh’ ann,
na h-igheanan ’nan coille bheithe,
dìreach an druim, crom an ceann.
Eadar an Leac is na Feàrnaibh
tha ’n rathad mòr fo chòinnich chiùin,
’s na h-igheanan ’nam badan sàmhach
a’ dol a Chlachan mar o thùs.
Agus a’ tilleadh às a’ Chlachan,
à Suidhisnis ’s à tir nam beò;
a chuile tè òg uallach
gun bhristeadh cridhe an sgeòil.
The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,
a birch tree, and she has always been
between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-chuirn:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.
In Screapadal of my people
where Norman and Big Hector were,
their daughters and their sons are a wood
going up beside the stream.
Proud tonight the pine cocks
crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,
straight their backs in the moonlight –
they are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birch wood
until it comes up from the cairn,
until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice
will be under its shade.
If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,
to the Sabbath of the dead,
where the people are frequenting,
every single generation gone.
They are still in Hallaig,
MacLeans and MacLeods,
all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
the dead have been seen alive.
The men lying on the green
at the end of every house that was,
straight their backs, bent their heads.
Between the Leac and Fearns
the road is under mild moss
and the girls in silent bands
go to Clachan as in the beginning,
and return from Clachan,
from Suisnish and the land of the living;
each one young and high-stepping,
without the heartbreak of the tale.31
When looking on a Highland scene – on Boreraig, on Achadh nan Seileach or on Hallaig itself – you find yourself imagining very often, the more so maybe if you are a Highlander, how that scene might be today if what took place in the nineteenth century had not done so. You find yourself, in other words, trying to envisage the Highlands as they would be without the heartbreak of the tale. And it is in this sense, one suspects, that Hallaig is inextricably bound up with the cultural setting – possibly even with the language – in which it was conceived. Certainly this was Seamus Heaney’s conviction when, in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, this leading Irish poet first read aloud the English translation of Hallaig, as quoted above, and then listened, in mounting awe, to Sorley MacLean recite his own poem in Gaelic:
This had the force of revelation: the mesmeric, heightened tone; the weathered voice coming in close from a far place; the swarm of the vowels; the surrender to the otherness of the poem; above all the sense of bardic dignity that was entirely without self-parade but was instead the effect of proud self-abnegation, as much a submission as a claim to heritage.32
It is as a result of his ability thus to connect with our past that Sorley MacLean, more than any other twentieth-century figure, was able so forcefully to express, on behalf of Highlanders generally, the feelings so strongly evoked by those landscapes where, as Hugh MacLennan observed, you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone. MacLean’s own family, as it happens, had links, just like MacLennan’s, with Kintail. But it was Mull, a place depopulated more than most in the course of the nineteenth century, which, on his going to teach in Tobermory in 1938, affected Sorley MacLean especially deeply:
I think Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances everywhere on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael.33
Mull’s unpeopled terrain, MacLean remarked on another occasion, ‘nearly drove me mad’. Sutherland’s equally empty straths, you gather from Norman MacCaig’s response to an interviewer who asked about this other landscape-obsessed poet’s relationship with the part of the Highlands which featured so largely in his output, are quite capable of producing a very similar effect:
Sutherland, the county, the whole of it, was most shamefully treated in the clearances. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful countryside. But it’s also very sad, because there are hardly any people in the place. And you keep coming across ruins of what used to be crofts, in the most unlikely places, from a time when the population was much bigger than it now is. So it’s a sad landscape in that way. You can walk for miles and miles and miles and never see a house, let alone a person. It’s got that sadness in it, and you can’t help being afflicted by that history in that landscape, because there it is under your eyes.34
A key element in this sadness – and one which is especially evident to those of us who have inherited the merest smattering of the language – is to be found in the fact that the snuffing out of community has led, inexorably and inevitably, to the snuffing out of a great deal of Gaelic also. The effect of this has been to break the previously intimate connection between the natural environment of the Highlands, on the one hand, and the Highland population’s everyday speech, on the other:
Words rise out of the country. They are around us. In every month of the year we are surrounded by words.35
These lines are Iain Crichton Smith’s. Later in this same poem, he observed:
He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander who loses his language loses his world.
This loss, as far as landscape is concerned, is both literal and symbolic; literal in that it is impossible for anyone who is not fluent in the language to appreciate the highly descriptive way in which particular localities were often named by their Gaelic-speaking occupants; symbolic in that the snapping of the linguistic link between people and place is a metaphor for the much more all-encompassing collapse of Gaelic civilisation. William Neill – in lines which embody a translingual pun and which can be fully appreciated, therefore, only by a reader understanding both Gaelic and English – made the latter point exactly:
When Irongray grew out of Earran Reidh
the culture could not stand on level ground.36
A comment made by a character in Fionn MacColla’s 1932 novel, The Albannach, is equally suggestive:
Now in our own Gaelic a man can’t tell his name itself without every man will know his whole history and his people’s before him; and the name of every place will be a picture of what will be there, so that a man will almost know a place on its first seeing by its likeness to the name that will be on it. Say Achadh nam Beith to a Gaelic man and he will be seeing in his mind a level place and the birch trees growing here and there, and they white and slender. Say Achadh nan Siantan and he will be seeing a little plain between great mountains and the rain driving down on it. But will a man of you tell me what Achbay or Achnasheen will mean in the Beurla [English], or what kind of place is in Lowestoft or Dover?37
The anglicisation of Gaelic placenames – the turning of Achadh nan Siantan into Achnasheen or the much more offensive transformation of Aonach Mòr into Nevis Range – can thus be seen as a type of linguistic imperialism. Indeed the practice is explicitly portrayed in just this light – though from an Irish rather than a Highland standpoint – in Brian Friel’s play, Translations, which deals with the activities of Ordnance Survey mapmakers sent from Britain to Ireland in the 1820s. ‘My job,’ one of these mapmakers remarks to one of Friel’s Irish characters, ‘is to translate the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the king’s good English.’38
The Scottish Highlands, fortunately, were treated less offhandedly by the Ordnance Survey than was Ireland. But Highland placenames, as a result of the contraction of the area where Gaelic is still spoken, have become steadily less comprehensible all the same. That is one reason why such placenames run, in an almost talismanic fashion, through so much modern Gaelic poetry. It is as if the minority who understand their meaning are endeavouring, by constant repetition of these names, to conserve what would otherwise be lost. And Gaelic-influenced English poetry, by no means coincidentally, is equally given to what one Irish writer has dubbed ‘topophilia’. Sometimes, as by William Neill and Norman MacCaig, Gaelic placenames are translated literally into English – emerging into this new language as ‘the Black Loch’ and ‘the Glen of Rushes’, ‘the Loch of the Wolf ’s Pass’ and ‘the Loch of the Green Corrie’. At other times, even in English poetry, placenames are untranslated. But whether in English or in Gaelic, they constitute a kind of litany; a telling of linguistic beads for those communities which have vanished so completely from the earth.39
This book does not contend, it should be made clear at this stage, that there is anything intrinsically invalid about those perspectives on the Highlands which differ from its own. No condemnation is to be attached to the innumerable tourists who, never having heard of either Hugh MacLennan or Achadh nan Seileach, are content to treat Kintail as nothing more than an uncomplicatedly beautiful piece of scenery. Nor are the hundreds of climbers whose cars fill Glen Shiel’s lay-bys every Saturday and Sunday committing any crime when they experience on Kintail’s high tops that soaring of the spirit which a whole series of twentieth-century lovers of Highland hills, from Seton Gordon to Mike Tomkies, have so emotively described. Nobody – other than those of our native Calvinists to whom a sunny day is a suspiciously sensual pleasure to be ‘paid for’ by some ensuing climatic calamity – should ever feel guilty about enjoying the Scottish Highlands.
But a powerful sense of Glen Shiel, of Boreraig, of Hallaig and a thousand other such locations being places where everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone is a meaningful response to Highland landscape also. It is one, or so this book asserts, which requires to be taken much more seriously outside the Highlands if environmentalists – whether individually or collectively – are ever to be at one with Highlanders on how the Highlands should be treated in the future. And there is something else that needs to get more emphasis in this context; something which is evident in the concluding lines of Norman MacCaig’s fine poem, A Man in Assynt:
Greenshank, adder, wildcat, guillemot, seatrout,
fox and falcon – the list winds through
all the crooks and crannies of this landscape, all
the subtleties and shifts of its waters and
the prevarications of its air –
while roofs fall in, walls crumble, gables
die last of all, and man becomes,
in this most beautiful corner of the land,
one of the rare animals.
Up there, the scraping light
whittles the cloud edges till, like thin bone,
they’re bright with their own opaque selves. Down here,
a skinny rosebush is an eccentric jug
of air. They make me,
somewhere between them,
a visiting eye,
an unrequited passion,
watching the tide glittering backward and making
its huge withdrawal from beaches
and kilted rocks. And the mind
behind the eye, within the passion,
remembers with certainty that the tide will return
and thinks, with hope, that that other ebb,
that sad withdrawal of people, may, too,
reverse itself and flood
the bays and the sheltered glens
with new generations replenishing the land
with its richest of riches and coming, at last,
into their own again.40
There is an echo here of the great bard of the nineteenth-century Highland Land League, Mary MacPherson, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran. In one of her songs – set, significantly enough to the tune of a much earlier composition in which Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, writing in the bitterness of Jacobitism’s defeat, envisages Charles Edward Stuart coming back from exile to lead the Gaels at last to triumph – Mary looks far beyond the crofting community’s battles for security of tenure. She imagines a time when both the physical and the mental impact of eviction and depopulation will have been utterly expunged. She visualises how her native Skye, and the rest of the Highlands, will appear when the empty glens have finally been reclaimed:
’S nuair bhios mise ’s na bòrdaibh
Bidh mo chòmhradh mar fhàistneachd,
’S pillidh gineal na tuatha
Rinneadh fhuadach thar sàile.
’S bidh na baigearan uasal
Air an ruaig mar bha iadsan;
Fèidh is caoraich ’gan cuibhleadh
’S bidh na glinn air an àiteach;
Am cur is àm buana
’S àm duais do na meàirlich;
’S thèid na tobhtachan fuara
Thogail suas le ar càirdean.
And when I am under boards
my words will be as a prophecy,
And the beggars of gentry
will be routed as they, the crofters, were;
deer and sheep will be wheeled away
and the glens will be tilled;
a time of sowing and of reaping
and a time of reward for the robbers;
and the cold ruined stances of houses
will be built up by our kinsmen.41
To anyone determined to deal only with the ‘facts’ of Highland history, to anyone concerning himself or herself only with the seeming ‘realities’ of contemporary Highland life, this must seem a wholly fanciful, indeed illusory, aspiration. But it is one that is held strongly by many Highlanders for all that. This was convincingly demonstrated, during the 1970s, by the rapturous reception given in village halls and community centres, right across the northern half of Scotland, to John McGrath’s musical play, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Towards the end of McGrath’s drama, which takes the form of a ceilidh, Mary MacPherson’s vision – articulated in the play in her own words – is made to seem both a legitimate and an attainable political objective:
Remember your hardships and keep up your struggle.
The wheel will turn for you
By the strength of your hands and the hardness of your fists.
Your cattle will be on the plains,
Everyone in the land will have a place,
And the exploiter will be driven out.42
Not for nothing did Edward Said note of the very similarly expressed ambitions of the world’s more directly colonised peoples:
One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename and reinhabit the land. And with that came a whole set of further assertions, recoveries and identifications, all of them quite literally grounded on this poetically projected base. The search for authenticity, for a more congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history, for a new pantheon of heroes and (occasionally) heroines, myths and religions – these, too, are made possible by a sense of the land reappropriated by its people. And along with these nationalistic adumbrations of the decolonised identity, there goes an almost magically inspired, quasi-alchemical redevelopment of the native language.43
Edward Said, as his tone suggests, saw manifold dangers in such projects. So does this book. That is why the following chapter, although it strongly advocates the repopulation of the Highlands, suggests that such repopulation, if it is to help put right the long-term damage inflicted by the clearances, will have to be much less exclusively Highland in character than Màiri Mhòr nan Òran might have wished. The present chapter’s task is more straightforward. It is to emphasise – by way of introducing this book’s concluding arguments – that, in many parts of the Highlands, it is only through the restoration of a permanent human presence that our artificially depopulated landscapes can be returned to their natural condition.
It was ‘futile to imagine that the common people are sensible to the peculiar charms of a mountainous and romantic country’, a visitor to the Highlands commented in 1820:
If the Highlander would show you a fine prospect, he does not lead you to the torrent and the romantic rocky-glen, to the storm-beaten precipice of the cloud-capped mountain. It is to the strath covered with hamlets and cultivations, or to the extended tract of fertile lowlands, where the luxuriance of vegetation and wood depends on the exertion of human labour.44
Many such fine prospects and hamlet-covered straths have long since been denuded of their people. But the wholly unoccupied tracts of territory which have resulted seem, to some at least of their visitors, never quite to have recovered from the ejection of the folk who formerly inhabited them. ‘I’m never sure whether it’s imagination or something less easily explained,’ the modern writer, Derek Cooper, remarked in the introduction to one of his several books about the Highlands, ‘but there are times in some emptied glen when I can almost feel the physical presence of the dispossessed.’ Nor is there anything unique about Derek Cooper’s feelings. Frank Fraser Darling more than once experienced very similar sensations when exploring the hills of Wester Ross:
I have lain sometimes on the western slopes of Beinn a’ Chaisgein Beag . . . which are rich and pleasant and where, doubtless, man’s animals have grazed in past times. The burns fall to the waters of the Fionn Loch, gleaming as white as its name in the June sun, and there are traces of the dwellings of men. I have heard the singing of women’s voices and the laughter of children in this place. Perhaps the play of wind and falling waters made these sounds – I neither know nor care – I was content to listen to the beauty of the moment.45
Just two or three years before Frank Fraser Darling got there, Wester Ross was made the setting of Fionn MacColla’s novel, The Albannach – MacColla, whose real name was Tom MacDonald, having been a teacher for some time in Gairloch. In the course of his book’s closing chapter, MacColla brings Murdo Anderson, the novel’s hero, to a place rather like the one which Fraser Darling was subsequently to describe:
On a sudden he became very sad because of the people of the glen. He saw it there as it had been, a little world in itself, savouring its own joys, tholing its own peculiar sorrows. There had been old people in it, old men and women with a lifetime’s memories . . . There had been young men and lassies, and they at the courting on summer evenings in the woods of lapping water. There had been little children running about the grassy braes and knolls, shouting to each other in their play . . . But that day was no more. Instead was the light on the loch face, the moss-grown mounds among the braes, and silence.
For some reason he kept coming back to the thought of the children . . . Suddenly it seemed to him that there if you want it is an ordering for the world. How else should the world be ordered but that little children should run bare-legged on the grassy knolls shouting out of the gladness of their hearts? What else is there that should take first place to that in the ruling of man’s affairs? What else in the name of God?46
Mere sentiment? Perhaps. But it as well, before peremptorily dismissing Fionn MacColla’s fiction, to be aware of a story told by Angus Macleod, a Lewisman who, in the mid-1980s, became the principal founder of the Scottish Crofters Union. Angus’s story dealt with the part of Lewis to which he belonged. The area is known as Pàirc and Angus was an expert on its history, its genealogy and tradition. He could tell you, should you make the time, of clearance after clearance – some three dozen Pàirc communities having been destroyed to make way for a single sheep farm. Angus told, in particular, of the clearance of Steimreway on the north shore of Loch Shell. This clearance took place in 1857 and Angus, himself an old man when reflecting on that clearance’s implications, first heard about it from other old men who, as boys, had been among its victims.
Steimreway, as it happens, was one of the numerous localities which, some twenty years into the twentieth century, were ‘raided’ by ex-servicemen who, on their return from the Great War, were looking to get the ‘homes for heroes’ which they had been promised by their country’s politicians. Many such raids were successful. But the raid on Steimreway, which took place in 1921, was not. Again the township had to be abandoned by its occupants. And except for a few hours in 1991, Steimreway has since remained every bit as unpopulated as Boreraig, Hallaig or Achadh nan Seileach.
So what of these few hours? Well, Pàirc possesses a flourishing local history society. And the society, with Angus Macleod’s enthusiastic participation, organised – on a July Saturday in the year in question – a day trip to Steimreway. A lot of local people – men, women and children – took part in the excursion. Some walked to Steimreway across the hill which separates the former township from the end of the Pàirc road. Others travelled there by sea. And though the day was much enjoyed, it undoubtedly contained, as Angus Macleod observed, its sadder moments also:
When we were there on the ‘day out’, it was a nice, warm summer’s day and the children were playing on a green, sloping hill on the eastern side of the old village. As I watched the dozen or two young, noisy, boisterous children playing on the hill, I could not help reflecting on the community that had lived there peacefully for generations. Since I am familiar with the names of all the families who were there in 1857, and with the names of all the families who were there in 1921 as well, I saw in my mind’s eye how Steimreway should be. A vibrant crofting community with its own carefree children. What a mad world landlordism imposed on our Highland people! What tragedy, what hardship!47
For Angus Macleod, then, Fionn MacColla’s imagery was transiently made real that summer day in Steimreway. It is the following chapter’s key contention that much the same should be made to happen – permanently this time – in many other parts of the Scottish Highlands.