TRAVEL
33
Making your soul or your escape
The heroic virtues of the Hebridean archipelago
I
n Love of Country, Madeleine Bunting, formerly a columnist for the Guardian, plots
an escape from her crowded London life and
sets out on a journey to the Hebrides to discover
that particular corner of her home country and
let her eye wander “over the hundreds of islands
which speckled the blue spaces”. Having spent
every holiday as a child travelling in the family
van in Scotland, and scrambling over the ruins
of old crofts, she is imbued with a strong sense
of the land, and is keen to probe its history from
the Act of Union in 1707 to the Scottish referendum of September 2014. She is intrigued not
only by the British uncertainty about belonging
but also by the romanticized appeal of isolation.
“Islands”, she writes, “can be places of delightful retreat and of maddening frustration.”
Grief-stricken at the end of her marriage, she
takes refuge in every mile; she moves further
and further west into an emptied wilderness of
ancient forest “dotted by fir and birch where the
timber of old trees has been whitened by sun and
rain”, and, on top of a mountain on Holy Isle,
she meets another pilgrim whom she knows she
will end up marrying.
Bunting is at her best when she is tracing the
literary associations of each island. Dr Johnson
was enchanted by the island of Raasay, east of
Skye (“without is the rough ocean and the rocky
land, the beating billows and the howling storm;
within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the song and the dance”). Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse is set on Skye, and Robert
Louis Stevenson, who spent time as a boy on the
FANI PAPAGEORGIOU
Madeleine Bunting
LOVE OF COUNTRY
A Hebridean journey
351pp. Granta. £18.99.
978 1 84708 517 7
island of Erraid, wrote of “the inimitable seaside brightness of the air”. W. H. Auden was
also enchanted by this Atlantic edge of Britain.
George Orwell, who wrote Nineteen EightyFour (1949) on the island of Jura, one of the
least-populated islands on the west coast of
Scotland, spent his spare time crafting, hunting
and fishing there. Gavin Maxwell wrote Ring
of Bright Water (1960) using the coastline of
northwest Scotland as a symbol of freedom,
whereas Louis MacNeice, who was commissioned to write a travel book on the Western
Isles, failed to find the escape from London he
had hoped for: “I went to the Hebrides partly
hoping to find that blood was thicker than ink –
that the Celt in me would be drawn to the surface
by the magnetism of his fellows”, he wrote in I
Crossed the Minch (1938). “This was a sentimental and futile hope.” MacNeice reportedly
caused offence by sharing a bedroom with his
then girlfriend, a married woman.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Bunting
tells us, mansions and grand estates were built
in the Hebrides by industrialists and financiers,
but the plans they had for them were sabotaged
Village Bay, Hirta, St Kilda
by the fickle weather. The most famous Hebridean ruin of all remains the archipelago of St
Kilda (“This is the edge of the edge”). In 1930,
by which time the population of St Kilda had
dwindled to thirty-six, the islanders petitioned
the government to evacuate them; and the
street of abandoned houses in Village Bay has
become one of Scotland’s most recognizable
images. Bunting juxtaposes this reality with
Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime –
isolation in the vast ocean (“an object of no
small terror”, he wrote) – and the dramatic
topography. Room is also made here for a dis-
TLS FEBRUARY 24 2017
cussion of the Highland Clearances, and their
lingering echoes in Scottish nationalism.
Love of Country is divided between Bunting’s visceral engagement with nature and its
elements (“The Hebrides is one of the windiest
places in Europe, with gales gathering enormous fetch across the ocean, arriving on the
islands laden with sea salt”) and her broad
historical and intellectual exploration. Into the
latter category fall the Lewis chessmen, one of
the finest examples of Gaelic culture in the
North Atlantic seaboard, which still present a
puzzle because of their disputed origin. Bunting
reminds us here that when, in 2007, the director
of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, was
asked to return the pieces, he said that it was
Norway that was entitled to ask them “back”,
not Scotland.
Bunting occasionally repeats herself and
states the obvious (it’s unnecessary to point out,
for example, that an hour-long journey between
islands would have taken much longer a hundred years ago). Her writing on her personal life
is hesitant, giving away only generic contours
without nuance or depth. But this is not an
account of finding a husband on the top of a
Scottish mountain; Bunting is more interested
in scrutinizing the heroic virtue projected onto
the Hebridean archipelago, and expounding it.
A perceptive comment made by John Buchan
resonates throughout her journey: “The North
was where a man can make his soul or where
the man who knows too many secrets can make
his escape”.