Literature of the Gaelic Landscape. John Murray
magnificent military sketch of Scotland made after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion only shows places, which might be of value to an army on campaign.
All maps, whether drawn or not, are the products of priorities and preferences, individual and societal. But cognitive maps confirm how patterns of relative importance and patterns of movement are understood and used by those who conceive them. Although official maps purport to portray the world as it is, they show deserted landscapes devoid of life, where nothing is happening, like a theatre whose actors have departed the stage (Ingold 2000). Unlike a story, poem or song or indeed someone giving directions with gestures and a description, once made, the topographic map does not grow or develop with use. Social anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that the professed rectitude of modern maps, claiming to spring from the structure of the world, is a cartographic illusion (ibid 2000). The making of maps has parted company with the experience of moving through the world. As in the history of writing, the act of remembering has been slowly superseded by acts of physical representation or inscription. Knowledge of the landscape has progressively parted company with experience of landscape. Though the endpoint of western exploration is to produce a map, purporting to be a total spatial representation, it hides the temporal qualities and stories that perhaps prompted exploration in the first instance (Potteiger and Purinton 1998).
Medieval writers did not separate words from pictures. They were equivalent and interchangeable. The picture was no more visual than the word and the word no more textual than the picture. Travelling missionaries who spread the gospel, assembled their evangelising orations as they travelled from place to place, drawing on their experiences of places visited along the way. The Latin word tractare, meaning to draw out or pull, gives us the English word tract, usually denoting a religious message. Later pilgrimages resembled a moving liturgy processing through the landscape. Pilgrims visiting holy sites walked through scripture. Stories told along the way would cite past characters as if they were still alive and able to impart wisdom to those journeying in the present (Ingold 2011).
The pattern of places we make in our minds, their spatial array, show how we travel and behave in the landscape without recourse to conventional maps. They help us explain the distribution of points and spaces to those unfamiliar with our territory (Kitchen et al 2000). Finding our way is a task which we may undertake every day. It is essential to survival. Spatial understanding makes sense of the natural world upon which we rely (Tvensky et al 2000). Our mind maps can share common general elements. They may be composed of paths, landmarks, junctions, boundaries and territories (Lynch 1960). Each category may have a different emphasis relative to other categories. Sometimes paths may be more important than boundaries, but research suggests that landmarks may be the most important element for wayfinding purposes (Tvensky et al 2000). The image of our landscape has its own hierarchy of paths, landmarks, junctions, boundaries and territories. Some are more important than others, irrespective of dimension and cartographic emphasis.
In Neil Gunn’s Highland River, the Water of Dunbeath is a path to be followed to its source, Loch Bràigh na h-Aibhne (plate 61 and front cover). The watercourse is punctuated by pools, which serve as recurrent landmarks encountered along the way. In Macintyre’s Song to a Ewe, his path begins and ends at home and is marked by clachans, which the poet calls upon to beg for wool. In Praise of Beinn Dòbhrain, the journey of the deer is marked by corries and passes, acting as boundaries, and hills acting as landmarks. It ends at a holy mountain stream, where the herd slakes its thirst. When Kenn in Highland River journeys, man and boy, further and further upstream, the enclosure of the Strath diminishes. As his horizons widen the importance of river pools lessen and the prospect of a broader domain gains greater sway, dominated by the ineluctable landmark of Mòr-bheinn, which gathers most of Caithness into its visual envelope. His explorations are guided by images of the pools, and as for other indigenous people, by what has happened in these places. They are recalled in his mind’s eye rather than through map reading. His sporadic and recurring movements through the Strath are essential to his growing ability to find his way; ultimately to the source; ultimately to his source.
Cognitive maps can grow more complex as an individual becomes more and more familiar with an area. Or they can evolve, as they do for Kenn in Highland River, whilst he grows to adulthood. In this novel, the environment is seen at first from a single point of view, sometimes an entrance or a threshold. In terms of prospect / refuge theory (Appleton 1996), landmarks are viewed as prospects, in retrospect or in parallel. Later Kenn sees the open moorland beyond the craggy threshold of Hawk’s Hol as a daunting prospect beyond the familiar refuge of his sheltered Strath, where his home lies. The gaunt cliffs act as a boundary to his childhood experience and image of the valley. He will not cross this craggy limit until his schooldays are behind him.
A series of viewpoints can be connected to make a description of a route, which unrolls like a narrative over an environment more complex than the single view. In the Glen Etive of Macintyre’s Song to a Ewe, as Donnchadh Bàn follows his route, he becomes a moving point of reference for encounters and action. His vision is sequential and results from the motion of walking and twice wading the River Etive, along a continuous pathway of observation and expectation. As for Kenn, the environment is not seen as one moment or from one point. It is perceived in the round, and all of one piece.
Routes can be broken down into shorter sequences with individual beginning and end points. These are usually landmarks encountered along the way, or points at which orientation takes place, at intersections or junctions. Both can serve as a means of measuring progress. Such features typify and order the developing text of Highland River (figures 12, 13 & 14). They enable Kenn, his brothers and his friend Beel to read the country as they pursue their hunting forays. Their experience can be compared to the way Aboriginal people narrate their travels in the Western Australian desert (Connell et al. 2000). Theirs, like those of the Yolugu in Nothern Australia, are not written traditions. Paintings are inhabited and can be read as stories. They provide a way of walking the first walk of the ancestors. To walk is to paint, and to paint is to walk. Like storytelling for the Western Apache, the visual tales of the aborigines bring the past into the present and give purpose to everyday life (Ingold 2011). Kenn and Young Art, in their respective journeys to the source at Loch Bràigh na h-Aibhne, and to the Clash, are trying to trace the footsteps of their forebears.
Cognitive maps do not have to be maps. This is an isomorphic assumption (Ingold 2000). Kenn’s way is not simply cartographic. He is mapping rather than mapmaking. His Strath provides scenes of action and reflection rather than inscription. The stories Old Hector tells Young Art about places in his youth have yet to be supplanted by any lifeless chart. Kenn comes to know his way, and to know more about himself, as he goes. The further he goes, the more he knows. Answers to where he is and where he might go, are to be found in the stories of his past progress. He is finding his way - wayfinding in contemporary parlance. Every place he passes holds memories of past arrivals and leavetakings as well as anticipations of future entrées. Places wrap the passage of time within them (ibid 2000). They are positioned neither in the past, the present nor the future. They are rolled into one, emerging without end, from the coming and going of man and boy, young and old: ‘… the world of experience is a world suspended in movement that is continually coming into being as we … contribute to its formation’. (ibid 242)
The retelling of stories is to retrace one’s steps in a journey or to retrace the steps of our ancestors who made the same journey at some time in the past. Sorley MacLean invokes life on the east coast of Raasay by resurrecting the ghostly journeys of past peoples, who travel hither and thither between one place and another, over most of the island. MacLean’s ghost band repossess the island through place-naming. Does the Gaelic language lend itself to place-naming because the word for a noun is ainmear, literally a namer?
The most complex cognitive map is the survey view (Tvensky et al 2000). It is landscape imagined from the air. Landmarks, even though they may not be intervisible at ground level, are seen relative to one another. In this type of mind map, the frame of reference is absolute. This is how Donald Mackinlay of the Verses sees Lochaber in Song of the Owl, and how Duncan Bàn Macintyre mind-maps his hunting territory