In ‘Return to Scalpay’ written in 1972 when the poet was sixtyone, Norman MacCaig declares his ancestry, not just physical but also psychological. Scalpay is a small island off the east coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. When the poem was written, the island's main occupation was fishing, the inhabitants were Gaelic-speaking and severely Presbyterian. Both of MacCaig's maternal grandparents were natives of Scalpay, and his mother, who came to Edinburgh to work in domestic service, was a Gaelic speaker to whom English remained a foreign and awkwardly learned language. His paternal grandfather came from Argyll on the west coast of the Scottish mainland, again a Gaelic-speaking area. Although MacCaig was not a Gaelic speaker, he did know a considerable amount of Gaelic and identified very closely with its culture, particularly in music and song. About the time that he first visited the island in his early teens, a novel in Gaelic was published by his mother's brother; in Gaelic, poetry was the main literary form, and this novel was one of the earliest experiments in fiction in the language. The novelist relative is described in the poem ‘Uncle Seamus'.

Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. His father owned a pharmacy and chemist's shop in the city and it was there that, with his three sisters, he grew up. In his poem ‘Inward bound’ (published in The White Bird, 1973), he recalls items from his boyhood in Edinburgh: