The Frayed Atlantic Edge, page 14
The work of these Gaelic poets (like the Counter-Desecration Phrasebook) has the particular virtue of being tied to place: landscape and language are resources that constantly enrich one another.
The cape itself is an entirely other-worldly cliffscape: as remote as anything in Britain yet still as richly inscribed with names. The long westward approach passes a series of huge offshore skerries. Each is scarred, bare and brutal, but that is where their resemblance ends. The region is like a vast gallery of modern art with each exhibit sculpted by a different artist and named in Norse or Gaelic. An Garbh-eilean is a high wall of solid rock, simple and monolithic but cratered like a moon of Jupiter or Saturn. Its name is Gaelic for ‘the Rough Isle’ and is echoed in Garvaghy in Ulster. Next comes Stac Clò Kearvaig, a tall tower bristling with spikes, like some airy hillfort; its name derives from a Nordic ship, a little smaller than a longboat, and echoes Karvevik on the north Norwegian coast. Thousands of miles of Atlantic seaboard are thus knitted into a few ragged chunks of rock that have never been farmed, never desired, rarely, if ever, even stepped on. By the time I reached this point, the blue had turned grey and rain had set in. I began to plunge through tidal overfalls and the grandeur of the shadowy stacks showed more forbidding aspects.
After a long and bumpy ride across the swell-strafed mesh of tides that gives Cape Wrath its name (derived from the Norse for turning point, hrof) I was on the southward journey that George of Tarbert paid Donn to sing. For two days I delved into the sheltered inlets of Loch Inchard and Loch Laxford, looking up at the low slopes of Foinaven and Arkle. Despite leaving Donn’s land behind, there was still something wistful about this landscape on these short autumnal days. Scots pines creaked above, while brown bracken and heather decayed beneath them. I sat to rest by a small stream and looked up to see a tiny deer calf trot towards me. The most beautiful of creatures, it was large-eared, with deep black eyes and small wet muzzle. The fur on head and neck were silver and short, but its back was a thick russet fuzz, flecked with black, that seemed to demand a hand run through it. The calf stopped an arm’s length away and stared as though expecting a response (figure 5.3). It was entirely alone: there was next to no chance it would survive the coming winter.
The next leg of November’s journey brought reminders of connections by land and water. On the coldest morning of the journey so far, with slow swell but a frenzied chop, I made my way to Handa Island. Passing beneath the island’s towering sandstone cliffs on a rough sea was as challenging as Cape Wrath itself; in the seam of tidal movement at the north-west corner, I found myself swimming: tipped from my boat and kicking free after failing to roll for the first time in months. Half an hour later, my teeth chattered as I watched adult sea eagles feed their giant offspring in the heather.
Home in summer to 200,000 seabirds, Handa is now the premier bird reserve of the far north-west. Run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust it feels, in winter, as wild and unpeopled as anywhere on these coastlines. Yet its historical significance belies its littleness. Throughout tales of the northern clans, Handa recurs as a place whose people changed the course of history. I’d first come across the island’s reputation as the home of large and powerful fighting men when reading tales of the sixteenth-century clans of Atlantic Lewis. In 1595, John Morrison, brieve of Lewis, conspired in the murder of the Macleod chief, Torquil Dubh. The Ness Morrisons fled to the mainland to escape revenge. But a broad-shouldered Macleod warrior, John mac Dhomhnuill mhic Ùisdein, lived on Handa and it was he, with a small band of men, who punished the Morrisons, despite their greater numbers. When other men of Ness crossed the Minch to retrieve the brieve’s body, a storm prevented them returning home and in order for his corpse not to decompose entirely they were forced to bury his spilled and rotting innards on an islet of Eddrachillis Bay (just south of Handa) still known as Eilean a’ Bhritheimh: the Brieve’s Island.
At that time, Handa itself was a place for burials. The wolf had been hunted close to extinction, but the tradition of using islands to save corpses from wolf packs had not yet ended. Later collections of verse record wolfish disturbances:
On Eddrachillis’ shore
The grey wolf lies in wait, –
Woe to the broken door,
Woe to the loosened gate,
And the groping wretch whom sleety fogs
On the trackless moor belate.
Thus every grave we dug
The hungry wolf uptore,
And every morn the sod
Was strewn with bones and gore:
Our mother-earth had denied us rest
On Ederachillis’ shore.
South-west Handa, where the ruins of a chapel can still be seen, hosted multitudes of burials, but the rest of the island was populated far more heavily than much of Sutherland; evictions took place in 1829, but only in the 1840s did the last of the population (sixty-five in 1841) quit Handa. Like St Kilda, the island was run by its own small parliament where, at daily meetings, the oldest widow was queen. Yet documentation of Handa traditions is far sparser than that for similarly historic centres: it would take a novelist rather than a historian to restore the queens of Handa to life. Here, as at Havera on Shetland, the dispersal of island people was followed by avian colonisation. No skuas bred here as late as 1960, now 250 pairs dominate the interior: one pair for each human resident in 1800.
Bearing down on Handa is Ben Stack: a small mountain of steeply pyramidal form that marks the northern boundary of Norman MacCaig country. The improbable act of imagining Handa densely peopled has a parallel in MacCaig’s verse. Standing on Ben Stack one day he recorded the strange historical dislocation of seeing old sea roads resurrected: a ‘real full-rigged ship in this wilderness of a place’. To watch a vessel of the old clipper days pass Handa was, he said, ‘like something from another time’:
At the cairn I turn round and scan
the jumbled wilderness
of mountains and bogs and lochs,
South, East, North and then – West
– the sea
Where a myth in full rig,
a great sailing ship, escaped
from the biggest bottle in the world,
glides grandly through the rustling water.8
Time and the sea are twin obsessions in MacCaig’s verse, and to a Scot of his temperament each was both beautiful and disastrous. ‘History frightens me’, he wrote, its developments bringing ‘the goodies of civilisation, / every one sweet, every one poisonous’.9 The fate of the Highlands under the commercial pressures since Donn’s time meant that MacCaig was deeply sceptical of his era, prepared only to ‘put one foot / dangerously into the twentieth century’. No nationalist, he famously stated that
My only country
is six feet high
and whether I love it or not
I’ll die
for its independence.10
Yet he was more attentive to the damage nationalism did to local difference than the ways in which it toxified international affairs. Despising abstractions, he saw ‘patriotism’ as an emotionally laden ‘big word’ – along with progress, liberty ‘and all their dreary clan’ – each used in unexamined ways to trigger stock responses from half-attentive listeners.11 Poetry was a tool for encouraging scepticism towards the ‘fake, the inflated, the imprecise and the dishonest’ and for seeing and celebrating things divorced from the pompous and the ‘high falutin’’. Although he had an intense love for individual people – people with unique personalities and stories – MacCaig insisted that he hated ‘humanity’ in the abstract: humanity, after all, was the species that killed on industrial scale and desecrated landscapes with equal abandon. This attitude, born of war, was shared by many Scottish poets of the era. Hugh MacDiarmid, for instance, had written that all the ‘big words … died in the First World War’. But it was also the response of someone attuned to his environment at seeing the scale of man-made degradation: it’s now the explored areas of the map, MacCaig famously wrote, in which people write ‘here live monsters’.12
MacCaig’s view of landscape might be seen as similar to his perceptions of humans and humanity: he isn’t the kind of poet to praise a mountain range or a long river; instead he conjured the detail of a specific spot and the precise thoughts triggered by its observation. It was at sites on the coastline south from Handa where he honed these skills of seeing. Time and again, observing the detail of landscape, or the movement of sea, inspired a characteristic stretching or compression of time. In the poem ‘Wreck’, for instance, he considers a stranded hulk:
Twice every day it took aboard
A cargo of tide; its crew
Flitted with fins. And sand explored
Whatever cranny it came to.
Its voyages would not let it be.
More slow than glacier it sailed
into the bottom of the sea.13
In his most famous and anthologised poem a personal but primal encounter with a ‘room-sized monster with a matchbox brain’, the basking shark, leads him to muse on the primeval monster in himself. Rowing in a bay thirty miles south of Handa, the accidental impact of his oar on the unseen shark is the moment when this ‘decadent townee’ shakes ‘on the wrong branch of his family tree’.14 In another poem, MacCaig confronts a Neanderthal and sees in him ‘what civilisation has failed to destroy in me’.15
More perhaps than any other poet, MacCaig was profoundly attuned to the ways in which engagement with the sea conjured the early stages of a slow, evolutionary and historical detachment from the water. Boats to him were the stuff of early epics – from Homer’s Odyssey to its parallel in Gaelic, Alasdair mac Mhaigstir Alasdair’s The Birlinn of Clanranald – which were reprised in miniature every time a person embarked on a sea voyage.
The ‘family tree’ that mattered to MacCaig was his Gaelic heritage. Seeing himself as a ‘leaf that hangs down helpless’ from that past, he bemoaned his split condition – a Lowland English-speaker with island Gaelic roots – and envied, achingly, those who could be at one with past and place (it’s hard for the sandpiper, holds one saying of these dual-cultured coasts, to work both the ebb tides). These convictions were tied intimately to his love of wilderness: ‘comfortless places comfort me’; they were also tied to the ways of life – crofting, fishing, weaving – that once took place in all the ruined structures of the land he loved.
Yet MacCaig’s most fiercely emotive poetry is in fact urban, recounting his arrival in the town of Ullapool during a deep northern freeze. He drove through thick, unblemished snow – not that ‘horrible marzipan in the streets of Edinburgh’ – and entered a bar ‘fireflied with whisky glasses’ to meet his great friend, Angus MacLeod.16 He likened the two of them to an accordion and fiddle that ‘fit nimbly together their different natures’. But this was the winter Angus died. Through his grief, MacCaig felt that the death of the man with whom he’d explored loch and hillside made ‘the pagan landscape sacred in a new way’. The funeral took place beside the ‘boring, beautiful sea’ and, later, MacCaig’s favourite themes poured out as he described music, in an Ullapool bar, that bounced with such wit that the darkness felt small:
Out there are the dregs of history. Out there
Mindlessness lashes the sea against the sea-wall:
And a bird flies screaming over the roof.
We laugh and we sing, but we all know we’re thinking
Of the one who isn’t here.
At the opposite end of coastal MacCaig country from Ben Stack, Ullapool is the big city and bright lights of the far north-west and was the culmination of this month’s journey. With 1,400 people it was the first town of more than 1,000 I’d passed for months. On my travel so far, only Ullapool and the Orcadian town of Stromness (accessible from the Atlantic but facing east to the North Sea) had a population of over 600. The recent past of Ullapool’s single mile of shore thus reveals elements of coastal life – from large industrial shipping in the 1970s to the biggest drugs bust in UK history – at odds with the stories raised by the other 600 miles I’d now travelled.
Designed by Thomas Telford and built by the ‘British Society for Extending the Fisheries and Improving the Sea Coasts of this Kingdom of Great Britain’, Ullapool didn’t begin as a cogently Gaelic community but as an imposition. Through decades of gradual integration with neighbouring villages, it retained a bilingual existence: where most places nearby were over 90 per cent Gaelic-speaking, Ullapool peaked at around 75 per cent, and an unusually high proportion of those speakers could read English but not Gaelic. There were few residents who spoke no English at all: around 10 per cent compared to 50 per cent a few miles north. In the 1830s the Statistical Account noted that Gaelic was losing ground in the whole region: Ullapool was a conduit of expanding Englishness. By the time MacCaig visited, few words of the language would be heard on the streets unless among tourists from the Western Isles.
MacCaig died in the 1990s just as the developments that were rejuvenating Gaelic in the islands began to be felt in his mainland haunts. And the most surprising feature of this development was that urban centres like Ullapool, which had led anglicisation, now drove the cause of Gaelic education and culture. A Gaelic primary school was founded in the town in 1991; many of the children came from backgrounds – both local and incoming – in which Gaelic wasn’t the main medium of life. Cities as far outside the Gàidhealtachd as Glasgow and Edinburgh have also led the urban Gaelic renaissance that followed hot on the heels of island revival. Where Gaelic when MacCaig died was the heritage of the rural elderly, today it’s also the future of the urban young.
In 1970, the actor Robert Urquhart opened a small room behind Ullapool harbour which invited musicians to perform for their supper and share their histories. Now, that room has expanded to be the town’s leading venue: the Ceilidh Place. This bar increasingly caters to young Gaels, with a festival of Gaelic culture each September, Gaelic books in its bookshop, and Gaelic singers through the year. If MacCaig could return to a fireflied Ullapool bar once more, the verse his visit would inspire might well express more optimism than the regretful stance he’s known for.
A MOUNTAIN PASSAGE
(December)
DECEMBER, AS USUAL, promised storms. I had little chance of kayaking far without long and miserable confinement to spots where weather made movement impossible (figure 6.1). So I abandoned the kayak and headed uphill, stuffing my rucksack with the tiny packraft that would carry me over three great lochs as I made my amphibious way between Ullapool and Shieldaig. Mountains and the western seaboard are synonymous, as are hills and the Gàidhealtachd. Anail a’ Ghàidheil, air a’ mhullach, runs one saying: ‘the soul of the Gael is on the summit’. The sea routes of the Minch and the Atlantic were so significant precisely because the frictive forces of uplands rendered land travel gruelling and costly. Today, the population of this region is almost entirely concentrated on the coastline and its eastward skylines are always mountain.
Only the Cairngorm range rebuts the rule that the highest hills rise from western shores; with the Atlantic influence attenuated, everything of Cairngorm – structure, climate and species – diverges from the rest of Britain’s uplands. In contrast, the ranges south from Ullapool are perhaps the most emphatically oceanic, embodying the ragged ridges over deep sea lochs that indicate the twin erosive forces of ice and sea. It’s an undulating land of a hundred tight-packed hills, with zones whose names – Dundonnell, Fisherfield, Torridon – draw panegyric from countless climbers, walkers, geologists and geographers. A winter shell of snow and ice makes these peaks a place of real adventure: they are, like all Britain’s mountains, relatively small, but they inspire far more writing than ranges many times their height. Indeed, the west of Scotland is among the best-documented highland on the planet.
Only a tiny proportion of such writing features the history of those who worked the land, because these hills have never generated extensive historical record, and the sites that archaeologists would otherwise dig lie far from modern points of access. These familiar hills thus do little to shape accounts of British history or ideas about the ways of life that were widespread in these islands’ past.
That’s not to say there haven’t been fits of mountain enthusiasm among historians. Most, regretfully, make cautionary tales, not inspiration for a new upland perspective on the past. Such cautionary notes fill my memories of early interest in mountains and history. When, in my early teens, I found a volume by the historian G. M. Trevelyan that is mentioned at the beginning of this book, the first two things I read were brief but incandescent essays. The first, ‘Clio: A Muse’, was an outpouring of anger, penned when the young Trevelyan sat through a lecture by the most venerable professor of history in Britain, J. B. Bury. Bury declared that the discipline of history must be conducted on scientific lines. Trevelyan lamented that, under the auspices of such anodyne ideals, ‘literature, emotion and speculative thought’ would be banished from how people interpreted and expressed the meanings of the past.
The second essay was simply called ‘Walking’ and in it Trevelyan explored the place of mountains and glens in his vision of what it meant to be a historian. His romantic belief in the roles of wild places in historical thought was infectious, if judgemental. He called his legs his ‘two doctors’ and wandered upwards of fifty miles a day upon them. Not all walks, he pronounced, had equal recuperative power: ‘you cannot do much with your immortal soul’, he insisted, ‘in a day’s walk in Surrey’. Instead, he extolled
the northern torrent of molten peat-hag that we ford up to the waist, to scramble, glowing warm-cold, up the farther foxglove bank; the autumnal dew on the bracken and the blue straight smoke of the cottage in the still glen at dawn; the rush down the mountainside, hair flying, stones and grouse rising at our feet; and at the bottom the plunge into the pool below the waterfall.1
