The Magic of the Scottish Landscapes…

“I was sitting one evening with a well-known London bookseller in the palatial smoke-room of a great cruise liner, making its way down the rugged West Coast of Scotland. Our conversation had been general, but as the evening wore on we discussed Scotland and its characteristics, and ultimately ended by the bookseller addressing the following questions to me – “What is the explanation of the charm of Scotland, and the allure it casts on the visitor? What is the secret of Scotland’s unfailing power to command that sincere and wonderful love of the Scots themselves.

At the time of this conversation I endeavoured, so far as possible, to furnish briefly an explanation, but on the conclusion of the cruise, the seeking of a more definite answer to this question so intrigued me that I set out on this Scottish Quest.

The Quest was to be a longer journey than I had anticipated. It was to take longer time than I had expected.

Now follow my notes. I wonder if the impressions they contain will help to furnish, if not a complete answer to the queries, at least something towards a better understanding of what the answers may be.”

(Scottish Quest Iain F. Anderson – Herbert Jenkins 1935)

A never ending Scottish Quest…

Scotland from the air © 2003 Scotiana

We had our first sight of Scotland from the plane before landing at the airport of Paisley, in the spring of 2000. The view of the country from the air is stunning.

We couldn’t take our eyes off this strange landscape, so different from what we were used to in France, a typically Scottish landscape with its solitary green hills and dark valleys (“bens” and “glens”), lochs, rivers, villages and  towns. The above picture must have been taken when we were flying above the Southern Uplands.

When the flight ends at Edinburgh the landscape seen from the air is quite different. If the weather is fine, you can have a glimpse of the three magnificent bridges crossing the Firth of Forth: the iconic Forth Bridge (1890), the Forth Road Bridge (1964), the Queensferry Crossing (2017).

Letters from Scotland

Our daily correspondence with Iain and Margaret and their very interesting “Letters from Scotland“ and comments published in Scotiana regularly make us love their country more and more every day ;-).

Siccar Point Scotland

“Siccar Point .. not a blade of grass to be found here !”  Iain. 🙂

Very recently Iain sent us, with his usual touch of humour ;-), a very interesting BBC article dated October 25th 2022, informing its readers that two Scottish sites have just been classified on the list of 100 “internationally important geological locations”: Siccar Point situated in the Scottish Borders, on the east coast of Scotland which is often considered as the birthplace of the science of geology and The Moine Thrust in the Highlands, a huge fault formed 430 millions years ago”

Scotland is a true paradise for geologists and, indeed, their research on many places of geological interest have contributed to make us understand the specificity of the Scottish landscapes and how these landscapes have become what they are…

Scottish scientist James Hutton‘s studies of the area’s two sets of rocks of different ages in 1788 revolutionised ideas about the Earth’s origin and age.
The Scottish Geology Trust said Siccar Point provided the first glimpse of “deep time” and great geological cycles in Earth’s history.
The Moine Thrust Zone is a major tract of ancient tectonic faulting where rocks have been moved sideways for more than 62 miles (100km).
It can be traced from Cape Wrath on the north Sutherland coast south to the Isle of Skye.
The feature is the centrepiece of the North West Highlands Unesco Geopark.

Books, books, books…

In my library, a fan of Scotland could sit for hours, deeply immersed in one of the many volumes I’ve collected over the years. I could not do without them. They make me feel that our Scottish journey goes on and on long after we’ve come back home. They keep horizons open…

Indeed, what better companion than a book to help plan a trip or for the nostalgic traveller who has just come back home, the eyes still full of images of the land he has just left.  My library is crowded not only with books of poetry and fiction, essays and travel stories, Scottish history and biographies, but also with very useful Scottish guides and magnificent books illustrated with gorgeous photographies, the kind of books to offer for Christmas, each one being “une invitation au voyage“…

Scotland’s Landscape is the first book of my too short selection. It’s truly a fascinating book which allows the reader to discover what Scotland looks like from above. A trip in itself! The book offers the reader and traveller a very different point of view of the country. I never get tired of turning the pages, trying to recognize places that have become familiar to us au fil des voyages…

Scotland’s Landscapes James Crawford RCAHMS

“This book is absolutely spectacular. It’s a whole new way to see Scotland – from above. The aerial photos are in large format and extremely sharp. They show things you’ve never seen before (unless you spend your days crisscrossing Scotland in a Cessna), helped by knowledgable captions. If you love the Scottish landscape, this is the book for you. I’ve seen and bought many books about Scotland but this is in a league of its own. Congrats to the authors, pilots and photographers! Rush to buy it!” ( Herbert Frei-Schindler – Amazon –2012)

“The landscape of Scotland is a rich and beautiful tapestry of mountains, lochs, glens, islands, moors. From an eye in the sky, by aerial or satellite photography, an observer can see the contours and colours, the infinitely complex shape of the land. This eye traces, too, how the landscape has been used and altered over the years: the thick fleece of forestry plantations, the clean lines of farming, the different beauty of towns and cities with their spires and blocks and strings of lights.”

Land Lines is based on literary quotes and poems and that is why the book is so fascinating. No people are better placed than writers, poets and artists to describe the beauty of a place and Scotland seems to have given birth to a particularly great number of inspired people, endowed with a deep sense of their native place (Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Nan Shepherd, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Neil Gunn George Mackay Brown, Iain Crichton Smith, Neil Munro, Hugh Miller…).

Land Lines is one of my favourite books about Scotland and, so far, the best book I’ve found to help me understand the specifity of the Scottish landscape and why we feel so enthusiastic, not to say euphoric, when we travel there.

Just have a look at the very suggestive contents of the book :

I – The Natural Landscape

• The Cool High Bens
• People of this Glen
• The Great Wood of Caledon
• Water music
• The Ultimate Island
• The Might of the Sea

II – Landscape and Community

• Stone and Spire
• The Life of the Land
• The Big House
• Small Town Blues
• Shrieking Steam
• Cityscape

III – The Other Landscape

• Fingalian Places
• On the Road
• A Cold Ceilidh
• In the Heather
• Between Worlds
• The Skinklan Stars

Bibliography (a very rich and extremely useful bibliography)

Sources of Quotes

The Photograph and the Photographers

Index of Places

Index of Names

The Living Mountain Nan Shepherd 2019

The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain’ – Guardian

In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape.

Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the ‘essential nature’ of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

The book which contains a very detailed map of the Cairngorm Plateau is wonderfully introduced by Robert Macfarlane. Robert Macfarlane is one of the greatest contemporary British travel writers. He himself knows very well the Cairngorms and is a great admirer of Nan Shepherd.

“The Cairgorms were my first mountain range, and they are still the hills I know best. My grandparents lived in a converted forestry cottage on a rare limestone upsurge on the north-eastern slopes of the massif, and the field of rough pasture which they owned ran down to the banks of the River Avon. From a young age, I visited them with my family, usually in the summers. On a wall of the house hung a vast laminated Ordnance Survey map of the whole range, on which we would finger-trace walks done and walks planned.” 😉

“I knew the Cairngorms long before I knew The Living Mountain, which I first read only in 2003 (..) I read it, and was changed. I had thought that I knew the Cairngorms well, but Shepherd showed me my complacency. Her writing re-made my vision of these familiar hills. It taught me to see them, rather than just to look at them.”

(Robert Macfarlane – from the introduction of The Living Mountain)

“The Cairngorm Mountains of north-east Scotland are Britain’s Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the upper shires of the range, avalanches scour its slopes and northern lights flare green and red above the summits”.

How we would like to see northern lights in Scotland !!!

There is, at the end of the book, a very interesting and quite moving afterword by Jeanette Winterson. It’s called “A Bed. A Book. A Mountain” 😉

It begins :

“I am lying in bed reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. This is a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms – a mountain range in north-east Scotland. The book was written in the 1940s, and lay unpublished until the 1970s. Now it has been reissued by Canongate.

Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else.

There is no substitute for reading.”

  Nan Shepherd features on the Royal Bank of Scotland’s £5 note since 2016.

Five Pounds Scottish banknote featuring Nan Shepherd on the front

---

I discovered the great Scottish poet Norman MacCaig while reading “Lumières du Nord”, an essay written by Michel Le Bris and published in a very interesting issue of la revue Autrement devoted to Scotland and entitled Pierre Vent et Lumière. This issue was edited by Kenneth White, a great Scottish-French poet and philosopher. The name of Kenneth White may ring a bell for some readers of Scotiana. 😉

Michel Le Bris was a great French travel writer and a specialist on Robert Louis Stevenson. He was also the organizer of the Saint-Malo literary festival “Astonishing Voyageurs” which he started in 1990.

In his crystal-clear essay so aptly called “Lumières du Nord”, Michel Le Bris quotes several extracts (translated into French) of Norman MacCaig’s poem A Man in Assynt. I immediately fell under the spell…

Norman MacCaig wrote:

Glaciers, grinding West, gouged out
these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone,
and left, on the hard rock below –
the ruffled foreland –
this frieze of mountains, filed
on the blue air –
Stac Polly,
Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven,
Canisp –
a frieze and
a litany.

(..)

Who owns this landscape? –
The millionaire who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape? –
The man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it?

False questions, for
this landscape is
masterless
and intractable in any terms
that are human.

Norman MacCaig

from The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon, 2005)

Between Mountain and Sea Norman MacCaig

‘Two Men at Once’ is one of Norman MacCaig best known poems. He was indeed two men at once: Edinburgh, the city where he was born and lived as a teacher and poet, was his home, but no other place shaped his poetry more than Assynt in Sutherland. It is here that he would spend many a summer on family holidays, walking the hills and fishing the lochs. MacCaig’s fresh eye saw remarkable newness even in the everyday and each poem is a tiny revelation, a new look at an old friend. This collection celebrates, renews, and rediscovers Norman MacCaig’s Assynt.

The wild landscape of Assynt © 2015 Scotiana

Books about the Scottish Islands

Hamish Haswell-Smith’s The Scottish Islands is by far my favourite book about the Scottish Islands. Below is its last edition published in 2015…

The Scottish Islands Hamish Haswell-Smith Canongate Books 2015

“The acknowledged Rosetta Stone of island hopping” Sunday Times

An Island Odyssey by Hamish Haswell-Smith – Canongate 2014

“In An Island Odyssey Hamish Haswell-Smith casts off in his forty-one-foot sloop Jandara, armed with his sketch pad and a route map of a journey first taken by Martin Martin in 1703. Haswell-Smith sets sail on a voyage that will take him to fifty-two different islands around the Scottish Coast, from Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde to St. Kilda, Fair Isle and Bass Rock.

Filled with natural history, local legend and landscapes and accompanied by the author’s own distinctive sketches and watercolours An Island Odyssey is a delightful way to discover or rediscover the romance, beauty and inescapable magnetism of the Scottish Islands.”

---