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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2025
Consider the following quotations:
From the green saucer of Glenaladale, dipping down to Loch Shiel, Alexander Macdonald had taken one hundred and fifty men to serve in Clanranald's regiment. Within a century there was nothing there but the lone shieling of the song.
[T]his is Glencoe, the village at the foot of that most dramatic of glens, where the waters run down the precipitous black rock-faces like tears of pain and shame at what happened 300 years ago.
In Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed.
I’m tied to Uig Sands. I don't know why […] Balnakiel just represents sort of the centre of the historical universe for me, and it is a particularly beautiful setting, and for me, if I were to picture my historic home, then it's going to be some place on Uig Sands, whether it's Carnish that sits on one side or Crowlista on the other side. That bay is a sort of ‘ground zero’ for me. It's strange that it didn't turn out to be Aird, but Aird to me is always a sort of removal place, some place that we went after we left the homeland.
The first quotation is from the deracinated Canadian writer John Prebble (1915–2001)'s Culloden (1961), the second from indigenous Scots journalist Brian Pendreigh's 1992 newspaper account of the 300th anniversary of the 1692 massacre of Glencoe, the third from a 1935 essay by the Scots novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973) and the fourth is a statement by a transatlantic Scot on her recent return to Scotland. Speaking generally, the four quotes illustrate the extent to which ‘[Cultural] identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’. More specifically, a related factor worthy of investigation is the extent to which all four quotations, despite being produced at diverse moments and by both indigenous Scots and North Americans, sound the same elegiac note and/or display the same rhetorical trope of running, mantra-like, the names of people and places off the tongue.
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