2014, 72)
Landscape is like a book. It is many books. They can be open, closed or lost. Pages may be missing. Text may be blotted or utterly erased. Memories may be partial. Or they may be lost entirely and cannot be retrieved. How can we find traces of what remains? How can we read the remnants? Who can tell us what has happened, and where? Who can tell us what events real or imagined have played themselves out upon the land? What songs and stories have been staged? What journeys have been made between places we pass through today. Places we hurry past in heedless haste? Miles accumulate. Sometimes we are not mindful of much. How can we reveal these hidden landscapes; the forgotten vantage points, the cloistered valleys, the overgrown wells, the remote springs, the abandoned plots and the secret groves, where hazelnuts ripen over deep, dark salmon pools? How can we uncover such places? How can we see them as they might have been, or how they might have been imagined? How can we find our way? How can land make us wise?
If hidden worlds are revealed, our reading of a landscape will change. Things can be seen through a window of knowing what has happened, or what has been imagined in a place (Basso 1996). We cannot look at Loch Bràigh na h-Aibhne (plate 61 and front cover) in the same way, once we know that this is where Kenn in Highland River discovered the source, discovered his source. At an unlikely spot in the wilderness, he completed his quest (Gunn 1937). We cannot look at Ais an t-Sìdhein, in the same way, once we know that this is where Donnchadh Bàn Macintyre composed Praise of Ben Dòbhrain. Perhaps going barefoot like Frank Fraser Darling following the deer, would raise our threshold of awareness (Darling 1941). We might feel the tread of the bards and songsmiths who passed the same way; once upon a time – latha a bha suid. The day that was yonder.
Our deer hunt is metaphorical. We will track down where some well-known Gaelic legends, poems, songs and stories have been situated and how an awareness of setting extends their appreciation. We will trace how precedents, both recent and ancient, relate to the landscape of the Scottish Highlands and to ideas of place-naming, wayfinding and mapping. There is a concentration on literature, which makes active use of place-naming in the description of landscape and the development of character and plot.
We will begin by exploring some general ideas about place, mapping and place-naming, and how some other indigenous cultures use toponymy in poetry and song. Then we will concentrate on three well-known Scottish authors: Duncan Bàn MacIntyre - Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir, Sorley MacLean – Somhairle MacGill-Eain and Neil Gunn. After an overview of how their work relates to the Gaelic landscape, there will be a closer focus on three key pieces, which have a strong relationship with place and journeys, narrated in the landscape.
They are: a song, Praise of Beinn Dorain - Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain by Duncan Bàn MacIntyre, composed in Gaelic in the middle of the 18th century; a poem, Hallaig by Sorley MacLean written in Gaelic in 1954; and a novel, Highland River written in English by Neil Gunn in 1937. Before looking at these works, some older and sometimes anonymous Gaelic poetry and Fenian legend will be examined to see how themes from earlier times have influenced the work of the selected authors. Song of the Owl – Òran na Comhachaig by Donald Mackinlay of the Verses – Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn, which immediately predates Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain, will be looked at in detail as a precursor to Macintyre’s great song of praise.
The inclusion of Neil Gunn, who wrote in a tongue historically alien to the Highlands, may surprise some readers. The aim is to connect his work in English with older lyrical and poetic traditions in Gaelic literature. His writing was almost wholly concerned with the history and culture of the Highlands. Like Sorley MacLean, some of his work dwells on the inescapable tragedy of the Highland clearances and their aftermath. It is also clear that the characters of many of Gunn’s novels are speaking Gaelic, even though their speech is recorded in English. Sometimes like Lewis Grassic Gibbon with Scots in a Scots Quair, Gunn attempts to represent its rhythms, vocabulary and idioms in his style. At other times, he discusses the distinct means of viewing, perceiving and understanding the world intrinsic to Gaelic, which its grammar allows, and indeed sometimes requires. Critics have claimed Gunn was influenced by Wordsworth, Joyce and Jung, but very few have analysed his work in the context of Gaelic literary tradition (Curtis 1995); the literature of his ancestors. Indeed, with some exceptions most critics of Scottish literature appear to inhabit different realms to critics of Scottish Gaelic literature. In this sense, the Highland / Lowland divide still seems to exist.
Like all languages, Gaelic has a view of landscape to which it has responded, and to which its own vocabulary, grammar and idiom have evolved to describe. The land is often perceived through a prism of animism, which can assume the massive proportions of mythical beasts and giants. Landform is frequently described in anthropomorphic and biomorphic terms. Like a carving that can scroll upwards as a plant and terminate as a bird’s beak, art and life in Gaelic is fluid and volatile. People can become animals or plants, in part or entirely. In Hallaig, trees can move through the landscape. Conciousness can be shared. There is a longing for a golden age of heroes and hunters, often elaborated in tales of the Fianna. There is a longing for a time of innocence untarnished by modernity.
By connecting the selected works with earlier worlds of myth and legend, which situate songs, poems and tales in specific and named places, common cultural connections in the work of Macintyre, Maclean and Gunn can be found and followed. The settings of several songs, poems and a novel will be mapped, explored and illustrated in various ways. Recurring themes include: defining a preferred territory through journeys and place-naming; nostalgia for beloved places and pleasant things; the portrayal of nature; hunters, hunting and the hunted; and the relationship humanity and the individual self have with nature.
1: Places, Place-naming and Stories
Wisdom sits in places.
(Dudley Patterson in Basso, 121)
What is a place? The idea of placemaking has become a panacea for town and country planners. But since the earliest times and without the well-intended paternalism of the planning profession, people have made settlements and spaces, to which, they know they belong. Beautifully explored in Gunn’s Highland River attachment to place is part of a child’s development into adulthood. For young Kenn in the novel ‘His own personality rose out of the river within him’ (Gunn, N 1991, 100). He is: ‘… grounded in a relationship to his river that is fundamental and that nothing can ever quite destroy’ (ibid 182).
We become imprinted on our early landscapes. Kenn shows his love of place or topophilia for the Strath of Dunbeath. The idea of loving place defines all our affective ties with the environment. Attachment can be aesthetic, tactile or functional. Home may hold a repository of memory. Homeland may provide a livelihood (Tuan 1990). In the Strath, Kenn often experiences moments of delight, one of Gunn’s favourite words. Here he catches salmon, gathers hazelnuts and traps rabbits. It is where he smells the primrose in spring and scents the reek of distant muirburn from the hill. The valley is invested with stories both old and new. He hears tales of sheiling life, illicit distilling and the poaching forays of his brother. Until he leaves school his preference is for the enclosed, hidden landscape of the Strath. Only in adulthood will he embrace the wider, open and more challenging horizons of uncultivated moorland and Morven. This mountain becomes his lodestone.
Places are unique. The influence of the earth’s rocks, the shape of the land. What grows, what gains nourishment from the land, what plants and animals it supports. How the wind blows and where the rain falls or the snow descends. How the tide runs and the seas surge. All these combine to make anywhere at all, somewhere here, somewhere now; somebody’s somewhere. A place precious and personal to those born and raised there. A place beyond compare, because it is personal. Somewhere, where people can see themselves, and others, living in the same, shared space.
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