In February 2008 I set off from Musselburgh, where I’d spent a few days with my mother, and began a journey all the way round Scotland. As I approached the Forth Road Bridge a Haar fog swept in and so, after travelling through this up the M90, I decided to drive inland in order to escape invisibility. Driving towards Glenshee I finally emerged from the fog into sunshine and I drove on to Braemar, and then on to Ballater where I stayed for a couple of nights. After two nights there I set off early in the morning to drive north via Tomintoul to join the A9 and then up and over the sweeping bridge that took me up and over the Ness. I continued to drive northwards until I finally stopped in glorious sunshine in a small place called Helmsdale.
After stretching my legs and having some refreshments I found myself facing a statue of some ten foot or so depicting three highland women ‘leaving’ home, some hovel in Scotland that would be, to emigrate to the Americas or wherever. The statue had been unveiled by Alex Salmond in summer 2007. The statue is called The Emigrants. It ‘Commemorates the people of the highlands and islands of Scotland who, in the face of great adversity, sought freedom, hope and justice beyond these shores. They and their descendants went forth and explored continents built great countries and cities and gave their enterprise and culture to the world. This is their legacy.’ Then it ends: ’Their voices will echo forever thro the empty straths and glens of their homeland.’
Every Scot knows something of the Highland Clearances, that ignominious period of our history when impoverished, desperate, people were driven from their homes. I had recently had a renewal of my education in this field because in September 2006 I’d rented a cottage for two weeks near Poolewe and after a week I’d run out of reading material. In a bookshop in Gairloch I bought a book by David Craig: On the Crofters Trail. This was all about the Clearances, their consequences, and the remaining stories of that appalling time. At that time, reading the book at night and exploring during the day, I developed a healthy distaste for the highland sheep, or four-footed locusts as Sir Walter Scott called them. The sheep, you see, were the beasts that had displaced the Crofters. In winter 2008 though, as I drove further north finding myself enveloped in fog again, I realised that the sheep had not chosen to displace the crofters themselves, humans had decided this. Don’t, I thought, blame the beasts; blame the Beasts.
The main period of the Clearances was between the years 1790 to 1845 but could easily be stretched from 1750 to 1860 I realise as I‘m crawling in a long line of traffic. The Haar, well known on the east coast of Scotland, is a freezing, thick fog and, when in traffic, all you can do is follow the rear lights of the vehicle in front; nose to tail is the only way forward. The period 1750 to 1860 is rather better known in Scotland as the Scottish Enlightenment, so the Clearances and the Scottish Enlightenment are happening at the same time. The question is how the hell do you get from the one to the other, nose to tail, as it were? Whose rear lights do you follow to get from Enlightenment to Clearance?
At the time this wasn’t really conscious, it was mulling around my subconscious waiting to either find a spark to make it emerge, or simply fade away. In the meantime I reached Wick, not that you could see it, wrapped in fog, so I decided to drive over to Thurso and half way there I emerged from the fog into sunshine. After stopping off for a sandwich and coffee I decided to drive up to the north coast, a coast I’d never seen. Looking north into the sea I wondered where the Atlantic stopped and where the North Sea ended, or was it the other way round? Looking east I saw the Haar closing in on Thurso, so there was no point hanging around here.
I drove west into a lowering, increasingly dazzling sun, getting increasingly desperate to find a place to stay before darkness. I arrived, half blinded, in Tongue at dusk. I found a bed and breakfast as the last light of the day was fading and stayed two nights. Tongue, incidentally, in the far north is a fantastic area for scenery, wildlife, and the winter light is sublime for photography, shadows and light fantastic. I spent a very active two days there, and as I drove and walked around I saw the sheep somewhat differently now. I saw them now as the ghosts of the Gaels.
That was as far as I got in Tongue. I travelled west as far as I could go and then turned south to drive down the west coast. I stopped in Lochinver, and then I began to drive to Ullapool. To get there, I had to travel back inland, east, and then turn south. Easy enough until, out of the blue cometh the opaque; fog had descended on me with a vengeance. I knew I’d missed my turn; I’d travelled too far, so I turned around and drove back west, looking left to the south, found a road, and off we go, but I was still in fog, for a long time, and doubt began to creep in; where the hell is this road taking me?
I drove over a hill and straight back into sunlight. Next stop Ullapool, lunch, then down to Gairloch, back in familiar territory. I was only stopping in Gairloch for one night so I decided to stay in the hotel thereby having everything necessary in-house as it were. I was, to all intents and purposes heading home, but, I wanted to get to Applecross before that. Applecross: what a name; Applecross, from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane in two words. How can a two syllable name, that sounds so good, hold so much pain and loss? The name reeks of expulsion. This was somewhere I simply had to get to. My going to Applecross emerged in conversation in the bar that night and three separate people suggested I go to Plockton as well, and stay in the Plockton Hotel.
It was a grey, overcast day when I set off south-west past Torridon on my way to Applecross, but even in these conditions there were still views that demanded stopping for, photographs still worth taking. Driving up a long curving hill I glanced right to see a stunning view back down the valley. There was a lay-by at the top in which was parked a brown Volkswagen camper beside which stood one man and two women. I could see there was plenty of room to slide the car in beside them which I did. I stopped, turned the engine off and threw the door open then swung out trailing the camera off of the passenger seat behind me. The three figures all turned round and the taller of the two women said, ‘We were just looking at the wonderful view.’
There was something in the way she said it though, a kind of timidity, almost fearful, as if I was some kind of authority figure, which I’m not, though I had arrived, I guess, as if I owned the place. At the same time my subconscious opened up with all the thoughts and ideas it had been playing about with over the previous week and I realised that I’d just heard the voice of a Gael. ‘As you would,’ I replied, puncturing the authority illusion to put us on an equal footing. After all, isn’t all authority, to a certain extent at least, illusory? We settled into brief conversation and it turned out that they were going to the Applecross Inn for lunch, upon which I said that I was headed that way myself and lunch was probably about due by the time I got there. We parted shortly after that as we made our respective ways to Applecross. My mind was swimming with thoughts and ideas; indeed I had to drive to catch up with myself!
The voice of a Gael: did she really have the voice of a Gael or was it my imagination that created that voice for me? It didn’t really matter, however it worked; it was the voice of a Gael that I heard. So what was that voice? What did it tell me? Timidity and fearfulness I’ve already mentioned, almost as if the feudal history has been carried genetically down the generations, the crofters vulnerability to the whims of the powerful still strong in that voice, but there was a strong, almost sensual, attachment to that land to be heard in that ever so slightly tremulous voice.
If you look at the Gaelic language, place names and suchlike, there is an attachment to geographical features like as in no other language, at least as far as I know, but, more than this, is the utter absence of any kind of grandness, no hint of so-called high, or grandiose, language at all. It’s just so incredibly earthbound. The social system of the Gaels was the Scottish clan system which was partly hierarchical and partly proto-democratic, the emphasis most definitely on the pre-hyphenated part. The hierarchical, or patriarchal, chiefs would settle disputes and accept fealty in exchange for protection and general upkeep of the system. When, however there was a dispute between contenders for the chief position then the clansmen would decide who was to rule them. The clansmen, as the clan names would suggest, were all related which made for fairly close knit societies. In essence the clan system is an extended family system, systems that are always prevalent in vulnerable, insecure, precarious, times and places. The clans of course were subject to the same problems as all family systems are prone to: intermarriage, allies, feuds, pecking order, social standing and so on.
The Gaels were in fact the main players in the formation of Scotland, whose power only started to wane after the Reformation and the rise of the Stewarts who sucked them in, drew in the nutritious fruit, and then cast out Scotland’s seed bearers on to Highland ground which by the eighteenth century had become stony indeed. The Gaels found themselves on the wrong side of the Reformation, the wrong side of politics, the wrong side of language, the wrong side of Capital, and, finally, the wrong side of the Highland line. The word fault, by the way, in the geological sense, as in Highland fault, wasn’t used until around 1796. So by 1796 they were on the wrong side of the Highland Fault, a grievous error indeed. It is, of course, one would like to think, just coincidence, that the word fault, with all of its’ negative connotations, which just happened to be the word chosen to describe major geological cracks in the Earth’s crust, was chosen at this time that just happens to be the very place and time that separates the Gaels from the Scots: the Fault that splits the future from the past.You can’t get much more wrong than being on the wrong side of a fault.
The Scots Literati, as the enlightenment’s not quite brightest were wont to call themselves, were themselves a kind of extended family for not wildly dissimilar reasons as it turns out, to those of the Gaels beyond the Highland Fault. The Literati had a project in mind, and one part of that project was to write in English. So they thought in Scots, they spoke, by and large, in Scots, but they would write in English. The literati had their very own fault line, emotionally and bodily on one side of that line, but intellectually seeking to get to the other side, where the rear lights of the intellects they hoped for would lead them from the sunshine on the one side, through the fog on the other side to the unseen sunshine thought to be waiting once the fog cleared.
