Northern Highlands

Introduction

WHY THE EMPTY LANDS? Why not A Guide to Wester Ross and Sutherland? Or Highland Delights or some such title? I may say that choosing a title for a book is by no means the easiest part of writing it. And then the marketing people have their say. Is it eye-catching? Will it sell?

To me, a book title must be both evocative and true, and so far as possible, encapsulate the whole book. This is so with The Empty Lands, for the area covered by this book is indeed empty. Of course, there are towns and villages by the score, but the essence of Scotland's far north and west is its emptiness. Emptiness of people, that is, but of nothing else that brings delight to any tired soul. As a matter of fact, a better title would have been The Emptied Lands, but that is trying to fit too much into a small measure.

Mountains and moors, lochs and lochans, burns and cliffs, beaches and islands - northern Scotland has them all, and has them in a plenty that seems prodigal. But the people have gone, leaving that emptiness which today we love, but in which love is tinged always with a sadness that seems inseparable from the soul of the Gael.

In this book you will find much of the Clearances, for an understanding of that episode in Scottish history is a vital foundation for better appreciating what delights you today. There is bitterness, and little effort to disguise it, and why should there be? But I have also tried to convey something of the sheer magic of the Highlands, something of the joy that comes from such a cornucopia of loveliness, for the Highlands are lovely beyond words.

This is an ancient country, and its beauty comes from age. The land has been planed and honed by glaciers and by water and wind over many centuries. It has suffered wars and invasions and clan battles beyond number. Its few natural resources have been plundered again and again - that is still happening and the only one who has not grown rich from the Highlands is the Highlander. Here are some of the oldest mountains in the world, once higher than those young upstarts the Alps.

Land of the Mountain and the Flood

Perhaps because these mountains are so old, there is a strange, and even weird quality about them, something unexpected. There is also a strange violence in the contrast between the stark barrenness of the harsh scree slopes, the great sea-scourged cliffs and the quiet secret places, sweet and serene, with gentle clear streams running through green valleys, and idyllic bays where a wonderfully translucent sea swells green above white or red sand. The Highlands are a succession of natural dramas, some comic, most tragic.

It is of course a land of warriors, and whenever warriors are needed the Highlander is cherished. Then he goes back to being forgotten and derided and exploited until the next time he is needed.

But who, and what, is the Highlander? Perhaps no other group of people in these islands has been so romanticised and caricatured. Sir Walter Scott, whose romantic and misty ideas of Scottish history still distort understanding, depicted them as fierce warriors, bearded and tartan-clad, and with a fervent, unthinking loyalty to clan and principles. These were the Rob Roys, and although of course they existed, they were surely not the norm. The massacre of Culloden and the appalling genocide which followed ended whatever truth there had ever been in that caricature.

George IV, ludicrous and be-tartaned, and with the assistance again of Sir Walter Scott, resurrected the Highlander, but this time as another myth. That new myth was perpetuated by Queen Victoria, whose infatuation with all things Highland knew neither bounds nor propriety. She was responsible for the 'Highland Gathering Highlander' and for what followed, the funny-postcard Highlander.

The Scots themselves are quite capable of caricaturing their own, and it was Harry Lauder who created the whisky-swilling Highlander. Like all caricatures, these all have a touch of truth in them, and yet every one is as untrue as the Welsh Taffy, the Irish Paddy and the English Hodge.

In fact, the Highlander of today is little different from the rest of the people in these islands, but what differences there are have been forged over the centuries of a tragic history. Perhaps it is in having memories of such a history that the Highlander differs most.

This is a time of transition, just possibly of recovery, for the Highlands and the Highlanders, after having gone through a period of travail such as few other people have endured, and certainly none in these islands.

Today we cannot define the Highlander solely in terms of language, for that language has suffered a long eclipse, one which might be passing, but which still casts the deepest of shadows. The language was Gaelic, a Celtic language, and thus the people could be called Gaels. The Gaels first appeared out of the mists of history in 498 AD, when they came to what is now Argyll from what is now Ireland. Why they came is by no means sure, but perhaps it was simply because it was new land to be colonised, new horizons to survey, for there is no reason to suppose that the spirit of adventure is a modern phenomenon.

Although Scotland was by no means empty of people when the Gaels arrived, those who inhabited the land could not withstand (and maybe they did not even try) the superior organisation and culture of the Gaels, who rapidly spread over the whole country.

Centuries later, the Anglo-Saxon language, the precursor of English, took root in the south, and a cultural division appeared, one which still plagues the country. The Gaels became isolated, but their society was still strong, still organised in families or 'clans', and with their own rulers, who were often powerful rivals to the Kings of Scotland, who had become feudal or at least semi-feudal in their ideas of statehood.

As rulers always do, the kings sought to exert their control by a policy of divide and rule. It was this which led to so much of the bloodshed in the Highlands, as the kings favoured first one clan then another, and encouraged the favourite of today to eliminate the favourite of yesterday.

During many centuries, the Crown of England sought to rule Scotland, and warfare between the two States was almost incessant. It was under the blows of Edward I of England, 'The Hammer of the Scots', that Scotland was forged into a nation-state led by Robert Bruce.

In 1320 the remarkable Declaration of Arbroath was written, a document in which all the nobles of Scotland expressed their ideals:

So long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never, under any conditions, submit to English domination. It is not for glory, riches, nor honours that we fight, but for Liberty alone, which no good man gives up except with his life...

That national unity did not long endure, for to a large extent it was based on the strength and personality of Bruce. With his death it began to crumble, and the division between the Highlands and the rest of the country was found to be as deep as ever. The clans began, or in some cases resumed, the practice of rivalries and feuds, suspicion and fear, bloodshed and warfare, with each chief and chieftain seeking power and wealth at the expense of his neighbours.

That is the reality behind the misty romanticism of Highland history - it is a bloodstained record of petty rivalries and major horrors, with the chiefs intent on ensuring that no breath of modernity crept into their fiefdoms, where the value of a chief was measured not by wealth and culture but by the number and ferocity of his fighting men.

It was not a time of romance and Arcadian delight. It was a time of torment, and the clan chiefs were perhaps the most bloodthirsty, evil and grasping ruling clique in all of European history.

Of course, life went on for the common people. They lived in a system of mutual support in a close community, bound together by ties of blood or loyalty to the chief. They had rights to their land, and they farmed. Their wealth was in animals: cattle, goats, sheep and horses. There were crops to be grown, fish to be caught and game to be hunted. There was a strong culture, and that culture is almost all that now remains, in a very emaciated form, to distinguish the Highlanders of today. Story-telling, poetry, songs, pipe and harp music - that was a powerful cement, and it bound together chief and clansmen. Certainly the old Highlander was illiterate, but was well educated in an oral culture and his own history.

So, in essence, what identified the Highlander of old was a language, a culture, a history and a society. In fact, just about everything except a different blood strain!

As it transpired, the one thing that finally shattered the old social contract in the Highlands, and thus most affected the Highlander, was something that is much more difficult to identify, but what was in effect no more than patriotism - Jacobitism, or faith to the Stuart line of kings. This was no simple romantic longing, but a complex of political, economic, social and even religious aspirations. The most important constituent of that complexity was probably the desire to have a state and nation of Scotland again, for Scotland had been swallowed up in the Union, first of Crowns, and then of Parliaments, and was increasingly being treated as no more than a province, even a colony, of England.

Three times in thirty years the Jacobites rose in arms against the English crown, and three times they went down to defeat. Finally, after the 1745 Rising, led by the gallant, romantic, stupid, pig-headed Prince Charles Edward, Bonnie...