Literature of the Gaelic Landscape. John Murray
of the Gaels, were placed near where mountain pastures flourished anew each spring. Where there was freshwater for washing cheese. Where there were peats for fuel, and freestone and rushes to repair the walls and thatch to roof the huts, after winter gales. Sometimes there was a slab, leac a’ mhuidhe, for the butter churn.
Many songs and poems were composed about life spent amongst the summer sheilings. Many testify to the carefree times and courtship that could be enjoyed on the sunlit, upland pastures after the privations of the dark months, an Dùbhlachd is an Gearran – a’ mhìos mharbh - the Black Month and the Short Month or dead month, spent in the hollow of the glen, where winter sun does not shine. The sheiling would have heard the telling and retelling of the great stories of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna, the legendary ancestors, the role-models and protectors of the Gael in Ireland and Scotland. Landscape character and toponymy could play a symbolic and yet tangible role in orchestrating the narration of these stories: a sounding box of hill and dale, beinn is gleann. Events, fiction and myth were written into landscape form (Potteiger & Purinton 1998).
The Western Apache of Arizona live in a narrated world (Basso 1996). Every mention of a place-name, however unwitting, involves the quoting of ancestral speech. What matters is not so much when something happened but where it happened. The past is continually present. The pastness of the past has been stripped away (ibid 33). It is a well-worn trail first traced by the founding peoples and then by generations to follow, passing along the same route. Every place possesses a story, which has given it a name. But place-names can also be the origin of stories. They can, in themselves, be abbreviated narratives, each carrying a trace of their own inception. The named place becomes a storied place, so that the use of place-names is essential for the narration of tales. Stories open with a named place and conclude with another. Storytellers speak as if witnessing the past. The toponyms they use present images of past worlds for contemplation. Knowledge of place-names deepens an awareness of the present by rooting it in a continual past.
The Walbiri people of Northern Australia believe the world was made by the movements of their ancestors. Their song poetry and rock pictures record the ancient trails. Songs are linked by lines or tracks. Singing reveals the temporal and spatial relationships between places. The Walbiri follow the old ways but as they must live as hunter gatherers they sometimes need to make new trails. The totality of an individual’s life is mapped by tracks followed in the past, and forged in the present. Life is a summation of a person’s movement marked on the ground. Sequences of connected songs infuse both daily and ritual life, because every act involves a dialogue between ancestors and those alive in the here and now (Wagner 1986).
In Òran do Ghunna dh’an Ainm Nic Còiseim – Song to a Gun named Nic Coiseim, Donnchadh Bàn Macintyre maps his whole life as a gamekeeper with 21 place-names in three hunting territories in Argyll and Highland Perthshire. Places are not cited in a linear sequence. They are dropped like pins over his familiar landscape and identify the quality of habitat and the quarry it supports. Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn – Donald MacKinlay of the Verses – does the same in Òran na Comhachaig – Song of the Owl, set in Lochaber, citing 30 place-names ranging over his hunting domain. Places are linked to events and the practice of the chase. Donald’s ancestral past is symbolised by an ancient owl he meets and with whom he converses about old age and heroic figures and their exploits in the past. Neil Gunn’s protagonists in The Silver Darlings and Highland River map their hunting territories with place-names on land and at sea. They encounter other worldly characters from history at the Broch and Chapelhill in the Strath of Dunbeath and on the Flannan Isles. Kenn’s quest upriver, Finn’s repeated visits to Chapelhill and Young Art’s to the former settlement of the Clash connect the Highlanders of the past with boyhood.
In the legends of the Fianna, once current throughout the Scottish Highlands, the use of place-names would have enabled listeners to position themselves imaginatively within the setting of these ancestral tales. Recognisable landmarks acted as placeholders for character and plot. Landscape features served as ‘mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of history’ (Basso 1996, 62). Sometimes, like the topo-mnemonic Gaelic riddles described later, the narrative can consist almost wholly of place-names. As two 18th century soldiers from Glen Dochart use a brief rhyme to prove their provenance to one another, knowledge of place for the Western Apache is bound up with knowledge of one’s self and a wider sense of the individual within the community. Like Kenn in Highland River, whose character deepens and dilates as he explores the river’s course, for native Americans in Arizona, selfhood and placehood are completely intertwined (ibid 146).
The blurring of temporality is made possible by the characteristics of singing and spoken poetry of indigenous peoples. The oral culture of the Western Apache, the Walbiri of Northern Australia and the Foi of Papua New Guinea is songbased. Their ancestral songs exist in acoustic space rather than the dimensioned, optical space of goal oriented behavior. Singing, like classical pìobaireachd, is repetitive and non-linear, especially when it accompanies dancing. Such practice helps to create the feeling that the temporal world has been suspended.
History becomes constant. Its mark is continually present. When Neil MacGregor was collecting oral material near Tomintoul in the 1990s, he talked to a man called Alasdair Grant. Pointing out a cave used by the Jacobite poet John Roy Stuart, he said, ‘John Roy’s idea’s right – guerilla warfare – not like Bonnie Prince Charlie – he’s a fool’. Grant made the remark as if these figures are still present. Between Lurg and Abernethy, Neil talked to another man called Donald Smith, whose farm was on the edge of the moor. During the conversation, Donald spotted some walkers on the hill and said, ‘They’re about 50 yards off the path, but of course you can’t see it now’. Though the path had become overgrown with heather, it still occupied a place in Donald’s mind map of his domain (MacGregor 2016 – personal communication).
MacGregor’s anecdote is very like Dorothy Eggan’s experience amongst native Americans in Colorado in the 1960s. Looking over the Grand Canyon, a Hopi man asks her what she sees? She describes the colours of the rock and a trail that appears and reappears as it winds from the mesa over the edge of the Canyon. The man replies: ‘The trail is still there even when you do not see it, because I can see all of it’. He asks Eggan another question: ‘Did you go to the Grand Canyon when you described it?’ which she denies. The Hopi man concludes: ‘Part of you was there or part of it was here’. Then smiling: ‘it is easier for me to move you than to move any part of the Grand Canyon’ (Eggan 1966, 253).
In the three works which form the core of this book, we will explore how selected authors, using different and yet comparable methods, attempt to suspend time and serial vison with a constant temporal and spatial state of mind. This is most evident in Sorley MacLean’s poem Hallaig, where time is the explicit subject of a poetic assassination. In this work, he employs a surreal iteration and reiteration of journeys between named places to suspend the pastness of the past. His ancestors in Raasay are continually present. They cannot be extinguished. The dead have been seen alive.
2: Places, Mapping and Wayfinding
White men need paper maps … We have maps in our minds.
(Nick Thompson in Basso 1996, 43)
Cognitive maps, the maps we make and retain in our minds, are not the same as those we buy in bookshops, displayed in numbered ranks of orange and pink. Cognitive maps cannot be bought. They are unique to ourselves, our family and our community. The interior landscapes they represent have not been surveyed or drawn by distant outsiders. Cognitive maps may not be true to scale or comply with cartographic conventions. But even maps which result from physical survey, and which purport to portray an objective and official reality, innocently include their own distortions and omissions. They represent the preferences of those who made and commissioned them. If the true dimension of a motorway on a roadmap is scaled, the tarmacadam is hundreds of metres wide. Why is it blue, whilst a trunk road is red and a C road yellow? Admiralty charts do not map landform unless it lies beneath the sea. Unless it is used as a reference point for sighting, land is irrelevant to marine navigation. Contours showing landform are invisible in any case. They do not exist. They